Understanding users
Qualitative Research
From: About Face 3: Essentials of Interaction Design
How do we gather info?
Interviews
 Focus Groups (not covered)
 User Observation
 Literature Review/Market Research
 Product and Competitive Audits

Who do we interview?
Subject Matter Experts
Who else do we interview?
Customers
What are their goals?
What frustrates them?
What is the decision process for purchasing/using?
What do we ask?

Goal-oriented questions
◦ What activities currently waste your time?
◦ What is most important to you?
◦ What helps you make decisions?

System-oriented questions
◦ What are the most common things you do with
the product?
◦ What parts of the product do you use most?
◦ What are your favorite aspects of the product?
◦ How do you work around problems?
◦ What shortcuts do you employ?
How do we interview?
Interview where the interaction happens
 Avoid a fixed set of questions
 Focus on goals first, tasks second
 Ask for show and tell

I want to collect money owed me.
I want a list of people with open balances.
More interview tips
Avoid making the user a designer.
 Avoid discussion of technology
 Guide the interviewee towards examining
problems and away from expressing
solutions (e.g., not “Would this feature be
useful…”)
 Encourage storytelling about experiences
with a product.
 Encourage both typical cases and
exceptional ones.

Example Interview Questions:
EECS Website
Why do you come to the website?
 What do you primarily use the site for?
 Is there anything on the site that prevents you from
doing what you need to do quickly and efficiently?
 Is what you need present?
 What sort of information do you expect when
searching for a school?
 Did anything on our EECS website convince you to do
your graduate work here?
 Is the current color theme of the EECS page appealing?

Identifying Users to Interview

Persona Hypothesis.
◦ What different sorts of people might use the
product?
◦ How might their needs and behaviors vary?
◦ What ranges of behaviors and environments
need to be explored?

May also identify behavioral and
demographic variables.
Example Persona Hypothesis:
EECS Website

Students
◦ Potential Students
 High School students
 Transfer
 International
 Continuing Education
 Graduate
◦ Current Undergraduate
Students
 Non-EECS
 EECS
◦ Current Graduate
Students
 EECS
Parents
◦ Potential students
◦ Existing students
 Faculty
◦ CSM Faculty
◦ Collaborators
 Job Candidates
 Prospective Employers

Example Behavioral Variables:
EECS Website

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


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education level (high school, undergrad, grad,
faculty, etc)
aesthetic preference (simple-> pictures ->
flash/more dynamic)
level of interest (quick browsing, casual search,
focused search, detailed reading)
persistence (easily frustrated, tolerant)
skills (basic website navigation, comfortable,
expert navigator)
familiarity with department (no knowledge,
alumni, current major, current non-major, parent)
frequency of use (never, seldom, occasional,
frequent)
User Observation
Most people are incapable of accurately
assessing their own behaviors.
 You can talk to users about how they
think they behave, or you can observe it
first-hand.
 The latter route provides superior
results.
 Technological aids such as audio or video
recorders may be used, but should not be
too obtrusive.

Example Ethnography/Usability:
EECS Website

Task: Find out what classes are
going to be offered next semester.

Observation: First went to course home
pages but couldn't find the info there.
Then went to course descriptions and
found it, but took two minutes or so of
looking around the page to find the
information. It is hidden at the bottom of
the page kind of out of the way.
Example Ethnography:
Programming IDE


Lots of sitting and staring at screen.
Frequent switch to explanation of assignment
◦ Looking for specific details as opposed to rereading
assignment
◦ Lot of time reading lab description for insight.
Frequent switching between .h and .cpp without
adding code to either. Lot of confusion about what
goes in each section.
 No textbooks in sight
 Lots of warnings, errors that won’t go away. Compile,
receive error, remove line, recompile, still have error.
Rely on error messages from IDE, but often don’t
understand the message.
 Lots of looking at neighbor’s code.

Continued Observations

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No one googled errors
Students not making much use of resources
like chapter notes.
Many students have difficult time typing,
which slows them down significantly
Users seem to spend more time navigating
around code that actually writing code.
Some students who appeared to be lost
spent time messing around with Visual
Studio interface.
Market Research*
Identify and analyze the market need,
market size and competition
 Not Marketing Research (how to market
a product effectively)

* from Wikipedia
Competitor Analysis – Why?
“Competitor analysis is an essential component of
corporate strategy. It is argued that most firms do
not conduct this type of analysis systematically
enough. Instead, many enterprises operate on
what is called “informal impressions, conjectures,
and intuition gained through the tidbits of
information about competitors every manager
continually receives.” As a result, traditional
environmental scanning places many firms at risk
of dangerous competitive blindspots due to a lack
of robust competitor analysis.”*
* Fleisher & Bensoussan, 2007
How? Competitor Array
Define your industry - scope and nature of the industry
 Determine who your competitors are
 Determine who your customers are and what benefits they
expect
 Determine what are the key success factors in your
industry
 Rank the key success factors by giving each one a
weighting - The sum of all the weightings must add up to
one.
 Rate each competitor on each of the key success factors
 Multiply each cell in the matrix by the factor weighting.

Example
Key Industry
Success
Weighting
Factors
Competitor
#1 rating
Competitor
#1 weighted
Competitor
#2 rating
Competitor
#2 weighted
1 - Extensive
distribution
.4
6
2.4
3
1.2
2 - Customer
focus
.3
4
1.2
5
1.5
3 - Economies
of scale
.2
3
.6
3
.6
4 - Product
innovation
.1
7
.7
4
.4
Totals
1.0
20
4.9
15
3.7
Literature Review
White papers
 Journal articles
 Web searches

Product & Competitive Audits
Examine competitor products
 Usability analysis (more later….)
 Useful features
 What’s missing

Example Literature Review:
CONNECT
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Poken
Poken is used for social networking, personal identification
communication. It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to
exchange social data between two keychains. An individual is
identified with a ‘poken’, a keychain. The primary data exchanged is
a ‘social business card’. Which the digital mirror of your business
card. Contact information on a ‘poken’ their website.
Crowd Vine
This product creates profiles for people that contain their contact
information. There doesn’t seem to be a way to exchange contact
information with people other than sharing your email address or
profile name. A profile contains the user’s social networking profile
information. The site is like a social business card for finding ways
to interact with people. The basic functionality is very similar to
LinkedIn.
Handling the Interview Data
Identify expectations
 Map behavioral variables to interview
subjects
 Create personas

Example Expectations:
EECS Website
Primary persona (current undergraduate) expectations…
I expect that the website will:
 Help me plan my schedule for next semester
 Help me contact my professor(s)
 Help me decide whether to continue for a master’s degree
 Help me find job opportunities in CS/in the department
Secondary persona (prospective student) expectations…
I expect that the website will:
 Help me decide whether to attend CSM
 Help me figure out how much it will cost
 Help me determine if the research relates to my interests
Example: Map Subjects to BV
EECS Website
Frustration Tolerance Level
Low frustration tolerance
High frustration tolerance
User1
User2
User3
User5
User4
Exploring/bored
Specific task
Reason for visiting site
User2
User5
User3
User1
Amount of time spent on site
Barely any time spent on site
User3
K-12
User2
User4
Spent lots of time on site
User1
User5
Student Status
User3
User4
User4
Non-student (or graduate)
User1
User2
User5
Personas
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Based on real interview subjects (not
stereotypes) – but not one exact subject
Given a name for reference, easier for
designers to relate to
Resolve 3 user-centered design issues:
◦ Elastic user - generic “user” bends and stretches
the design
◦ Self-referential - developers project their own
goals, motivations, skills and mental models onto
a product’s design.
◦ Design edge cases must be programmed for, but
they should never be the design focus.
Example Persona:
EECS Website
Persona: Alex (Non-Macs major)
 Doesn't want to spend a lot of time on the site -- in and out
mentality
 Not very experienced with the site -- infrequent visits
 Wants to find either course home page and bookmark it or
professor contact info -- probably won't come back till next
semester
 Would like an easy to navigate site, overcomplicated is bad.
 Familiar with mines, knows that EECS classes generally have
course home pages.
 Not particularly interested in non class or professor related
information.
Example Persona:
EECS Website
Persona: Laura (transfer student)
 New to Mines, in need of EECS related information
 Visited the site just a couple times, not sure where
everything is yet
 Critically needs EECS degree information to decide
on a major at mines
 Needs info like flowcharts and course descriptions
 Would like to see current and up-to-date information
on the site so she can get a feel for the department
 Hopes to be able to find the desired information
without issue.
Example Persona:
EECS Website
Persona: Robert (Computer Science Major)
(Primary Persona)
 Familiar with the site -- visits it once or twice a
month
 Wants easy access to course homepages and
professor contact information
 Would like to see frequent updates on upcoming
important events (such as group advising for
registration)
 Needs course flowcharts, course descriptions
 Needs graduate school info
Persona Expectations
Expectations for a product and its
context of use are informed by the
persona’s mental model of the product.
 Identify behaviors expected or desired
from the product
 Think about: what do subjects mention
first, what action words do they use, and
what intermediate tasks they don’t
mention.

Persona Expectation: EECS Website
Website will help me plan my schedule
 Website will allow me to contact my
instructor
 Website will tell me what I need to know
to become a CS major at Mines
 Website will help me be part of the Mines
CS community
