Published Information


There are many kinds of published analysis for you to choose from. Even if something doesn't exactly apply to your problem, maybe it's useful enough for you to base a decision on. Maybe it gives you some information about where to start looking for problems or who your audience isn't. Or maybe it just gives you a better perspective on how to approach your own research.

Keep in mind that published information is not the same as research done in-house. It's broader and shallower than research that you would do, and it doesn't have the quality controls that you would put into your research. It may turn out to be more rigid than is necessary for your purposes or, alternatively, too unfocused. However, buying others' research is often much faster than doing it yourself, which means that, in the long run, it can be cheaper.

Independent Analysis

The business model for most research companies is pretty simple: they do independent in-depth analysis on a specific topic or a specific industry, and then they sell reports to companies from the industry they just analyzed. These reports are not cheap, but they often represent a lot of comprehensive thinking by a group of industry experts (or, at least, research experts).

As an outgrowth of the marketing research industry, these companies tend to focus on the financial health of specific markets, industries, or companies. As part of this, however, they often research the needs and desires of those markets' target audiences. Much of the knowledge necessary to sell to a target audience is the same as what is necessary to give that audience a good experience, and such marketing-focused information can be immediately valuable when creating user profiles or setting expectations for contextual inquiry.

Some companies that specialize in this kind of research include

  • Jupiter Communications, www.jup.com

  • Forrester Research, www.forrester.com

  • Zona Research (a subsidiary of Intelliquest), www.zonaresearch.com

  • IDC, www.idc.com

  • The Gartner Group, www.gartner.com

Additionally, some other firms create research that's focused on evaluating the user experience presented by companies or industries rather than just their business metrics. These companies include

  • Nielsen Norman Group, www.nngroup.com

  • User Interface Engineering, www.uie.com

Although these reports present a ready-made trove of potentially useful knowledge, it's important to read them closely. The researchers who write them will often not know the industry as well as insiders; they may misjudge the behaviors of users and the motivations of companies. A careful reading of the research methodology is important.

Traffic/Demographic

By knowing who is using your competitors' products, how much they use them, and what they use them for, you can avoid your competitors' mistakes and capitalize on their strengths. Unfortunately, as great as it would be to have access to your competition's log files and survey data, this is rarely a legal option. Fortunately, services exist that collect some of these data independently, reporting the conglomerate information and selling access to specific slices of the data. By using these services' data and tools, it's possible to gain insight into the makeup and behavior of your competition's users.

Some companies that provide this kind of research include

  • ComScore, www.comscore.com

  • Nielsen/Netratings (a subsidiary of AC Nielsen), www.netratings.com

  • NUA, www.nua.com

  • WebSideStory, www.websidestory.com

Interpreting these results and how they apply to your product is more difficult than reading an analyst's report, and the sheer amount of data received from one of these services can be daunting. There are typically two kinds of data in one of these reports: the participants' behavior, as it was tracked by the company, and the participants' profile, as it was reported to the company. Linking these produces a powerful set of measurements. For example, you can (hypothetically, not all services allow you to do this directly) get data about the most popular sites in a given market and then get a profile of the people who use those sites.

Of all the data that's possible to extract, often the most immediately interesting information is the demographic makeup of your competition (or of companies in a parallel industry) and their technological and Web usage profile. You can immediately see how old, how experienced, and how affluent their audience is (among many other variables). These are, of course, aspects that you probably considered when creating your own audience profile, but a set of independent data can confirm your assumptions or cast them in doubt.

Like all research, the process by which the data were collected needs to be carefully examined since that aspect is least under your control. Sometimes the data collection methods can introduce subtle biases, which need to be taken into account. For example, Comscore Media Metrix requires its participants to install a piece of software on their computer; the software tracks what sites they visit and when they visit them. Although they can get a mostly representative sample of users this way, this approach misses a key group of people: those who are unable to install this software on their work computers because it violates their company's software installation rules. This means that the data collected by the service is skewed toward home-based computers and companies with lax internal security standards. For many situations, this bias does not affect the applicability of the final data; for instance, the data would be insufficiently representative for a B2B sales site targeted toward Fortune 100 companies. It would be important to track B2B users at work, but it would be impossible under the MIS security rules of most of the target audience.

Marketing Research

As is obvious from many of these descriptions, the tools of marketing research can be used for user experience research. The marketing department of your company is interested in what will make people want to go to your site and use your product. The reasons that they will want to go to your site and will be able to use your product are directly related to the user experience.

There is often research that marketing has done that can be immediately applied to understanding your user population. For example, the following is a portion of an audience profile developed as part of researching the primary market for a service targeted at 20- and 30-something-year-old women:

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PARTIAL TARGET AUDIENCE PROFILE

Demographic


Women, aged 24–34

Education: college educated

Income: $30,000–$70,000

78% are online

Motivation


Socializing with household members and family

Visiting with friends

Keeping up with current events

Priorities

Puts relationships before work and career

Households


Mid- to late 20s: typically share a household with one other individual

Early-to-mid 30s: most likely have kids

Internet Behavior


Women 25–34 make up highest percentage of new Internet users

Spend 3–10 hours online per week

Don't surf the Web, but rely on others for Web site pointers

Primary motivations in life are same as those of women without Internet access

Approximately 50% go online via AOL

Email is the primary online tool

Email Usage


Use email to stay in touch with the most important people in their lives

91% primarily use email when using the Internet

78% get excited about opening their emails

Use email like a telephone to communicate with family and friends

Favorite Web Activities


  • Seeking health information

  • Playing games

  • Hunting for spiritual or religious information

  • Looking for job information

  • Also like fun Web activities, such as chat rooms and hobby sites

Top Web and Digital Media Properties (for Women 18)

  • AOL networks

  • Microsoft sites

  • Yahoo! sites

  • Google

  • About.com sites

  • Amazon

  • NBC Internet


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Of course not all this research is equally useful. The income doesn't really tell us how people are going to be using it, though it hints at what kind of computer system they may be using. Likewise, the favorite sites may be interesting as models of the kinds of architecture and interaction the users are accustomed to, but it's not critical information. And what exactly does "use email like a telephone" mean? For a marketer that may be enough to define the site's market positioning (say, for an advertisement), but it doesn't say much about the experience that the product is supposed to provide. Does it mean that the interaction should resemble a telephone or that it should be instantly available like a telephone? Maybe there should be a mobile phone interface option. The marketing document doesn't answer this, but it is an important question that can be investigated from an experience standpoint.

Other information, however, is immediately useful. Because these women are the fastest-growing Internet audience, a large percentage are likely to be relatively new to the Internet, which implies certain things about experience, expertise, and expectations. Similarly, their favorite Web activities can influence the information architecture, emphasizing the aspects of the site that fall in line with what we already know this group prefers.

Publications

Familiarizing yourself with the publications that affect your field is probably a good first step in any kind of user research. Time spent at the library (or with a search engine) is rarely wasted and often reveals sources of information that would otherwise take a lot of work to replicate. Books and trade magazines are obvious candidates for perusal, but there are also some unexpected sources of potentially valuable information: you may want to consider the decidedly old-fashioned method of hiring a newspaper clipping (also known as "media monitoring") service to find periodical articles that analyze your competitors' products or your audience and then mail them to you.

White papers are essentially analyst reports, but from a biased source. They're often written to justify a particular company's perspective and explain their technology, but that doesn't mean that they're not useful. In defending their perspective, they often contain valuable information, though it should always be examined with attention to the bias inherent in its source.

Finally, a number of user experience pundits maintain daily diaries called weblogs, or blogs. Although there's often a lot of fluff in these sites, they can contain important (although unedited) insights into user experience design and research long before it formally appears in any publication.

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Some Free Internet Resources

General

Usable Web (Keith Instone's usability directory), www.usableweb.com

Usability.gov (the National Cancer Institute's site focused on Web site usability), usability.gov

Information Architecture Resources (Jesse James Garrett's information architecture directory), www.jjg.net/ia/

Boxes and Arrows Journal, www.boxesandarrows.com

Nielsen Norman Group (includes links to frequent essays by Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, and others), www.nngroup.com

IBM ResearchDeveloperWorks usability research papers and essays, www.106.ibm.com/developerworks/usability/

Microsoft Usability Research publications, www.microsoft.com/usability/

CyberAtlas (a compilation of Web use statistics run by internet.com), cyberatlas.internet.com/

Adaptive Path's publications, www.adaptivepath.com

Usability Blogs

WebWord, www.webword.com

Louis Rosenfeld, louisrosenfeld.com

Challis Hodge, www.challishodge.com

Gleanings (Christina Wodtke's blog), www.eleganthack.com/blog/iaslash, www.iaslash.org

Black Belt Jones (Matt Jones' blog), www.blackbeltjones.com/work/

Some of these links are likely to be obsolete by the time this book is published. The Open Directory Project's Web usability category should have mostly up-to-date links.

dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Web_Usability/

Mailing Lists

<sigia-l@asis.org>, an information architecture mailing list. Subscription information and archives available on mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l

<CHI-WEB@acm.org>, a Web-specific mailing list for the ACM SIG CHI community, but open to everyone. Subscription information and archives available on sigchi.org/web/

UTEST, a usability testing mailing list maintained by Dr. Tharon Howard. Subscription information is available by contacting Dr. Tharon Howard at <tharon@hubcap.clemson.edu>

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Warning

Full disclosure: I am a partner in a user experience consulting company, Adaptive Path (www.adaptivepath.com).




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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