Hello, and welcome to the second week of the "Mobile Interaction Design" course. The first thing I would like to mention, is not to expect a deep immersion into research methodology this week. My goal here, and the purpose of this week, is to give an overview of applied research, and its role in the design process. This week, we will look at ethnographic interviews in some detail only because it's necessary to carry out your practical assignment. The ability to ask questions is widely applicable. You will need it for the usability evaluation of the application you'll choose. If you want to dive deeper into research methods, I'd recommend you to take the course, "Qualitative Research Methods" taught by Dr Gerben Moerman, which is a part of the "Methods and Statistics in Social Sciences Specialization" here on Coursera. Before I show you the next slide, I want you to know that I love my job as an interaction designer, I love user research, and most importantly, I love people, but you can not just walk up to a person from the target audience, ask her, "How can I help you?" and receive from her a detailed description of her needs. It does not work that way. Yes, there are user-innovators who come sometimes with elegant solution to their problems, but how they came to these solutions, that is, the process and their needs, are hidden from them. People do not know what they want. If a person knows what she wants, probably it isn't what she needs. Many times in my career, users of different products have asked me to fix something in these products. In most cases, the solution they offered was too local and did not consider all factors. Implementation of this solution would bring more harm than good. If you ask a person how many times she used an application over the past week, you get a rough estimate, which for some people may be far from reality. People have imperfect memory. Moreover, when you need detailed information on how people perform a task, just asking them, you'll get a very abstract description of its structure. People do not know how they do things. Presenting the user some approximation of a future product prototype, do not expect that their response will exactly match their response to the real product. People have problems predicting. I say all these not to undermine your faith in humanity, but in order to emphasize that the design process cannot exist without user research. To work on the product, you need tools - user research methods - which would help you to draw out necessary information from users. There are a myriad of such methods. You know many of them: Interviews, surveys, usability testing, focus groups, etc.. Some of the methods may not be familiar to you: Diary studies, tree testing, card sorting, numerous participatory design techniques, etc.. Generally, all that people hear about user research is the discussion of methods. Despite the fact that the methods are very important, I want to draw your attention to the following. The methods are only tools in your hands. Just as a hammer can be used to hang a bookshelf by driving a nail into the wall, break the stone to extract fossil in archaeological excavation and even beat off meat to make it softer before roasting, a survey can be used to measure customer loyalty, search for participants for qualitative study and perhaps to understand what mobile device users visit a particular website with. The way you apply the methods depend on the goals you have. Goals of a study are written down in the form of research questions - explicit statements of what you do not know and need to know. Research questions help you firstly, to understand what you want to achieve by conducting the study and secondly, to plan the study. But how? The fact is that each method can be used to answer only certain kinds of questions. Take a look at this slide. It presents three methods and three research questions to which these methods can give an answer. A couple of words about the methods. Qualitative research interview is usually a one-on-one conversation aimed at eliciting information in which the researcher is interested. In a pure interview, the conversation does not include an interaction with a product, in opposite to the two other methods. A field visit, as its name implies, takes place where the interaction with the product happens. Formative usability testing is aimed at discovering interaction problems. The most prominent difference between the last two is that field visits are conducted in the user's real life context while in usability tests, the context is simulated by a researcher. The interview does not allow you to answer two of the three questions on this slide. Of course, you can simply talk with someone who just stopped using your service and ask her why she did it. But as I said at the beginning of the lecture, this approach will not give you anything. People are not as reflective, and even if they were, they do not need to dig into themselves to find out their reasons for leaving. That's your problem, not theirs. Field visits seem versatile enough and this is true. But you should understand that firstly, it is the most labor-intensive method listed here. And secondly, in a single session, you can not answer at once, for example, the second and third questions. The research should have a focus and research questions provide that focus. And the last thing I would like to mention, while a method may be used to answer a particular research question, it does not always do it in the most effective manner. For example, usability testing can be used to answer the question, "Why did the number of active users of our app start to fall?" It is possible that the app's usability was the reason for users leaving, and perhaps, not. The focus of this method is limited and using it, you won't be able to determine other causes. Due to the fact that all methods have their own focus, each study often includes several methods organized so as to most effectively answer all research questions posed. You should not think of user research methods as something monolithic[indivisible]. In fact, the methods are flexible, they can be combined and mixed together. A simple example. We are accustomed to think of surveys as a list of closed questions which are aimed at determining some quantitative characteristics of the audience, segmenting it, investigating its perceptions and priorities. However, if the research question is, "Will users comprehend what actions these icons imply?", we can include in a survey the question shown on this slide. This example, is fairly simple. But I'm bringing it up to emphasize that research questions must lead the way. Research questions that you face when you're starting to design a new product are quite general, for example, "Who are the people involved in activity A? What are the barriers with the current way of doing things?" That is because you do not have enough knowledge about the usage context to ask more specific questions. However, the answers to these generic questions are aimed to inspire you, to bring new ideas. In the course of the project, research questions become more specific. They can appear at any point from any member of the team. For example, a designer may eventually realize that she does not have enough knowledge about the typical sequence of steps of some user task in order to design some part of the app's user interface. Some questions like, "What are the usability problems that interferes with the performance of the most common tasks?" and "How do users ranks these product concepts?" are related to the evaluation of design decisions. Answers to these questions are aimed at continually improving the design direction that you have chosen. Research is a support activity that accompanies design activities during the course of the whole process. To sum up, knowledge about the context of use that informs design decisions on all levels is not a low hanging fruit. The knowledge can only be acquired using special tools - user research methods. Research questions are the "whys" of user research. They represent the study goals and should be written down first. Their explicit representation allows you to plan the whole study and fine-tune each individual method in the study. Working on the new product or service, you begin with generic research questions. With the growth of your knowledge about the context of use, your questions will become more specific. Research activities support design activities during the course of the whole process. Thank you!
