Goals


Before you begin writing a research plan, you need to know two things: why you're doing the research and how your results will be implemented. Together, you use these two things to figure out which questions should be asked in order to have the most impact on the product.

The first involves determining corporate priorities and setting research goals that can meet them. The second involves an understanding of the development process so that the research can make the greatest impact on the final product.

Every product interacts with every department in your company, and every department has a different method of measuring its success. For development, success could be measured as meeting the schedule or the number of bugs per thousand lines of code. For marketing, it could be the number of positive reviews and increased site traffic. For identity design, it could be the ease with which the product is integrated into the corporate brand. For customer support, it could be a low number of questions they have to field. For sales, it's how much revenue it brings in. Each of these represents a different perspective on the final product, and each demands something different from the user experience.

Research can go on in any direction. To get the most benefit from it, it needs to be focused on the most important features of the product. But a product's "features" include much more than just the screen layout. Its most important features are those that affect the business goals of the company. Thus, the first step is to make a list of issues of how the product's user experience affects the goals of the company. Each issue represents a goal for the research program; it focuses the research plan and helps uncover how the product can be improved for the greatest benefit to the company. Collected and organized from the perspective of the company, these issues will not (and should not) be solely focused on the user's ability to efficiently use the product. There may be goals for advertising effectiveness, customer support load, brand recognition, and so forth.

In other words, since the user experience affects every facet of the product, every facet needs to be considered. The process consists of the following three steps:

  1. Collecting issues and presenting them as goals

  2. Prioritizing the goals

  3. Rewriting the goals as questions to be answered

1. Collect Issues and Present Them As Goals

Ideally, before any project is begun, everyone in the company knows why it's being created, what it will do for its customers, and how it will help the business. It will have clear, specific, and measurable goals, which everyone knows.

Unfortunately, life is never ideal. Thus, the process of determining the important issues can be a research project in itself.

Begin by identifying the stakeholders. Every department will own some piece of every product, but some will own more than others (or will care more). The product manager—who is probably the most important person to talk to, anyway—can help start the list since he or she will know which groups and individuals have the biggest stake in the project. These will almost certainly consist of engineering, design, marketing, and advertising sales, but it can include any other department that has a stake, or say, in the product's success. There could also be a significant managerial presence in a product that's a major moneymaker (or loser) or if it's brand-new.

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SAMPLE SPORT-i.COM STAKEHOLDER LIST

Alison, VP of Product Development

Erik, Interaction Design

Michel, Marketing

Sun, Frontend Development

Janet, Sales

Ed, Customer Support

Leif, QA

Joan, Identity Design

Maya, Rob, frequent users

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If there isn't a single person who's responsible for the product in a given department, find the person who dealt with it most recently. Odds are that this person regularly deals with it or can tell you who does. Once you have your list of stakeholders, find out what they consider to be the most important issues. You can do this either by getting all the stakeholders together and spending an afternoon setting companywide priorities for the product or by speaking to each person independently (often a necessity with executives and other busy people). The key questions each person (or department) should answer are as follows:

  1. In terms of what you do on a day-to-day basis, what are the goals of the product?

  2. Are there ways that it's not meeting those goals? If so, what are they?

  3. Are there questions you want to have answered about it? If so, what are they?

Once you've talked to all the departmental representatives, make a list of the goals and issues.

Note

What if stakeholders have conflicting goals? An advertising sales manager may want to increase revenue by introducing additional ad units at the same time that the vice president of content wants to add more news stories to the front door. Since there's a limited amount of real estate on the interface, these goals may appear to be at odds with each other. At this stage, it's too early to attempt to resolve them, but investigating the relationship between them may be an important nearterm goal for the project.

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USER EXPERIENCE GOALS AND QUESTIONS FOR SPORT-i.COM

Who

Goals and Questions

Alison, VP Product Development

Better conversion of viewers to shoppers

More stickiness: people coming back more often

Erik, Interaction Design

To help people use the search engine better and more often

Why are so many people starting and then abandoning the shopping cart?

Michel, Marketing

For people to know that we'll give them the latest information about their favorite local sports throughout the year, no matter where they live

Sun, Frontend Development

Is the dynamic map useful enough to wait for the Java applet to load?

Janet, Sales

Increase revenue by 30% by fiscal year-end

Ed, Customer Support

Reduce support calls about expired promotions

Shift more support from the phone to email

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After you've talked to everyone in-house, you should talk to a couple of users for their perspective. That may seem like a catch-22: why research the user's needs before you even have a plan to research their needs? Because getting their voice into the research plan gets the research focused on them early and sets a precedent that can prove important in selling your research efforts within the company. See Chapter 6 for some hints on how to find users to talk to. Add this information to the list.

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Who

Goals and Questions

Maya, Rob, frequent users

Would like Sport-e.com to remember what brands they prefer for each sport they're interested in

Want to know what the best values are based on the performance of the items

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As part of this process, you should try to collect the other user experience knowledge that may be floating around the company, answering research questions without doing any original research. This can include surveys done by marketing, customer support feedback summaries, interviews by the development group, and unused reports from usability consultants. The user experience researcher can play the role of information collector and integrator, and, becoming the repository of all user-related information, spread information about the value of user experience research and build stakeholder trust in the process. More information sources are described in Chapter 15.

2. Prioritize the Goals

Based on your interviews, you will have some idea of the corporate priorities with respect to the goals you've defined. Some things may be important because they're seen as preventing people from using a key feature of the product. Others may be important because they differentiate the product from its competitors. Still others might be less important because they may create a big drain on resources or are currently a hot topic of debate within the company.

To get an idea of the order in which to tackle the research, you should prioritize the questions. If the prioritization is unclear, you can try the following exercise (which uses the same technique as in Chapter 10, where it applies to choosing specific features):

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A PRIORITIZATION EXERCISE

Make a column next to your list of questions and label it "Importance." Go down the list and rate each item on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 means the feature affected is a "must have," critical to the success of the product, and 1 means it's a "nice to have," but not essential.

Next, make a second column and label it "Severity." This will reflect how bad the problem is. Write a number on a 1 to 5 scale here, too. Five represents bad problems (generally ones that are directly affecting the bottom line right now), and 1 refers to problems that are annoyances or information that would be good to know.

Now multiply the two entries in the two columns, and write the result next to them in a third column called "Priority." This combines and amplifies the two factors in deciding which problems should be investigated when. Ordering the list by the third column gives you a starting order in which to investigate the product's user experience.

Goal

Importance

Severity

Priority

To help people use the search engine better and more often

3

4

12

Increase revenue by 30% by fiscal year-end

4

5

20

Better conversion of viewers to shoppers

5

3

15

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You should now have a prioritized list of what the company as a whole considers to be important user experience questions. There shouldn't be more than half a dozen or so "big" questions and a dozen or so smaller, more specific ones. These, taken together and coupled with a schedule, a budget, and some more fleshed-out goals, will be the heart of your research plan.

3. Rewrite the Goals as Questions To Be Answered

With the product goals in hand, start rewriting the goals raised during your interviews as user-specific questions or information to be gathered. Broaden narrow questions into general topics to get at the root causes of the problems. If there's a concern voiced about a specific feature, for example, you may need to broaden the focus to include the underlying reasons for that feature's existence.

The questions should be simple so that they give the most bang for the buck. Every problem presents a host of questions and issues, many of which are complicated and interrelated. But this is "easy pickin's time." Pick one or two questions for each goal that, when answered, will address the goal. When you later research and revise the plan, you'll be able to tease out the more subtle questions and important interactions.

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GOALS FOR SPORT-i.COM REWRITTEN AS RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Issues

Research Questions

Better conversion of viewers to shoppers

Why don't some visitors become shoppers?

More stickiness: people coming back more often

What are the reasons why people come back? What determines how often they return?

What is the demographic makeup of the user population and how they use the Web?

Help people use the search engine better and more often

How do people navigate the site, especially when they're looking for something specific?

Why are so many people starting and then abandoning the shopping cart?

How do people expect the shopping cart to function? Where is it failing them?

For people to know that we'll give them the latest information about their favorite local sports throughout the year, no matter where they live

What services do people value? What services are they aware of?

What on-screen information do they pay attention to (and are they paying attention to the feature promo sections)?

Is the dynamic map useful enough to wait for the Java applet to load?

How do people navigate the site, especially when it comes to lateral movement (as facilitated by the dynamic map)?

Would like Sport-e.com to remember what brands they prefer for each sport they're interested in

How important is customization? Which things are most useful to customize?

Want to know what the best values are based on the performance of the items

How do people shop with Sporte.com? Is it based on sport, brand, tools, price, or something else?

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Expand General Questions with Specific Ones

In the final step, flesh the larger, more abstract questions into specific ones that can be answered by research.

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General Question

Specific Questions

Why are so many people abandoning the shopping cart?

What is the ratio of people who abandon the shopping cart to those who complete a transaction?

On what pages do people abandon it?

What pages do people open a shopping cart from most frequently?

Do people understand the instructions on the cart pages?

Do they know they're abandoning the cart?

Do they know what a shopping cart is?

Under what circumstances do they open the cart?

How do they use the cart?

How do they shop on the site?

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Of course not all these questions can be answered in a single research project or by a single technique, but having a big list of questions from which to draw can help you when you're putting together your research schedule. Moreover, the process of making the list often helps define the boundaries for the larger issues, reveals relationships between the larger issues, and sometimes reveals new questions and assumptions.

Tips

  • Never go into user research to prove a point, and never create goals that seek to justify a position or reinforce a perspective. The process should aim to uncover what people really want and how they really are, not whether an opinion (whether yours or a stakeholder's) is correct.

  • Learn the product thoroughly. Research goals can be framed more precisely if you can understand how the software currently works. Do what you can to become a user: read the documentation, take a training course, and talk with tech support.

  • Be prepared to deal with fundamental questions about the product. If a question comes up during research—even if it's "should we be in this business at all?"—then there should be a way to deal with it and create research that will answer it (or at least escalate it to a senior stakeholder who can address it).

Note

The mantra for determining which questions to ask is simple. Test what's testable. Don't ask questions whose answers won't be actionable or test things that you can't change. For example, it's generally of little use to inquire about the identity design of a product before the feature set has been determined since the feature set will greatly shape the product's identity. Likewise, it's fairly useless to be researching feature desirability after you've already committed to an interaction design since the design assumes that people want what it's showing them.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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