Do people want to create new habits and have control of their life? My second date with UX research
By: Erica Sosa
Tags: Study, Productivity, UX Research, Hyper Island, Behavior Change

Do people want to create new habits and have control of their life? My second date with UX research Erica Sosa Oct 25, 2020·8 min read

The last 4 years of my life has been all about personal development and searching for ways of improving my life and behaviors, so it wasn’t a surprise that when Martina Tranström, my teacher for the Fieldwork module of the UX Design Up Skills program from Hyper Island gives us the option of choosing from this four different challenges :

I felt genuinely connected with challenge number 3(Create a behavior-changing app that delivers control), after all, searching for ways to improve my life, manage my time, and keep myself out of procrastination is all I’m about these days.

I think that made all the process easier for me, because as a UX designer or UX researcher, not every day you receive an idea for a product that appeals to your emotions, values, and goals, but I better start telling you about the project because if I get depth into the topic you won’t be able to finish this article.

I had 4 weeks to do the user tested the target audience for this amazing fictional product and company, in this post, I will share with you my process, insights, learnings, findings, and recommendations for the company.

Goal

With this project, I’m looking to Identifying opportunities and find information for a behavior-changing product by conducting qualitative and quantitive research on the target audience. At the end of these four weeks, I will deliver the insights, guiding principles, and recommendations for the next steps based on the research.

Being honest I would say that my main goal is to learn the fundamentals of fieldwork and be able to manage and like this step of the UX Design process to apply the practices in a better way for future real-world studies.

This is my second date with UX research (I spent 2 years working as a UX researcher for one of the biggest banks in the Dominican Republic) and I hope we can get to know and like each other this time.

Challenge

How might we create a behavior-changing app that delivers control?

As part of the challenge, I have one persona assigned, and as a first impression, I have to say…I don’t like this guy, no offense Ben, Is just that I don’t know where the data that make you be you came from, and I want to know if there are people like you out there.

But Ben was so helpful during my session of the Kick-off board I was able to use him as a guide to capturing the vision and product strategy.

Kick-off board

In this step, I made a lot of assumptions about my target group and the product to start the project, I didn’t have data to rely on, so the only way out was to try to prove my assumptions.

What I learned from this: I understood the importance of all the information behind the personas and how it can affect the way that you see the started point of the investigation. I will always ask for the data that confirms the personas characteristic if I wasn’t part of their conception.

“If everything is important, then nothing is.” ― Patrick Lencioni.

As I told you I made a lot of assumptions but I have to accept that not all of them have the same priority for the project. The Prioritization Board was an important step for my process

allowing me to put some order in the mess of ideas I had and classify them as important, less important, know and unknown.

But… Where are the questions coming from?

Now that I have an overview of the needs and wants of my users is time to create the hypothesis, that will allow me to build questions to put them on a test and that hopefully will show me what’s it that the users think, for this, I used The Experiment Canvas it was a helpful tool to organize the beliefs and formulate the open-ended questions.

The Experiment Canvas

It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible. -Thomas Huxley

These are the top three of the hypotheses I will be testing for this research.

1- Users want to spend less time on social media.

2- Users struggle with time management.

3- Users have a stressful life and don’t know how to manage it.

What do I learn from this:

This board is one of my favorites, gave me a structure to follow to have good hypotheses. For me, it was like a test for my hypotheses because maybe you can formulate an invalid one, but when you have to specify when will you know if this hypothesis is true and create the questions that will answer it, is really hard to not see the gaps.

Screener Surveys

To find the right participants for your interviews you need to search for them, and there is where the screener surveys play their role. I designed this survey to be really short and simple just know if I really want to talk more about this topic with the person. https://lnkd.in/ew6fZMU

I made a post on all my social media accounts asking all my contacts to fill the survey to find my participants. It was a slow process, but in the end, I get to have more than 30 surveys filled out.

What I learned from this: Give the people an estimated time to fill the surveys it will increase your chances to get participants. My survey was anonymous and the participants just need to give me their emails if they want to talk whit me again, for the next time I will be more specific about that because was complicated to contact some of them. For this survey I didn’t want to add an age question for the demographics just because at the moment I didn’t think it will be important for the product and I decided to try to understand more in what stage of their life my participants were, but now I think an age question is always a good idea for the quantitive data.

One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say. - Bryant H. McGill

My favorite part of the process

I have always love to do interviews as an introvert it can be a draining job but as a passionate listener, they have always been really interesting and pedagogical for me. It was a good experience where I was able to use new tools like Calendly to make them possible.

I made 4 of my 5 interviews through a Zoom conference and with the orientation of the lectures from Martina and Radina Doneva, I was able to have a useful interview guide where I had all the questions that will answer my hypotheses.

At the end of the interviews, I had a space for card sorting where the users classified differents attributes as I love it, nice to have, and No, was interesting see how they react to this exercise

My less favorite part of the process.

The transcriptions and translations were extremely time-consuming, now I understand why there are so many tools for the transcriptions but I wasn’t able to use none of them because my user’s native language was Spanish, well Dominican Spanish that is like Spanish with 2.0 speed, so I don’t blame the tools for not be able to keep up.

What I learned from this:

People will talk if you are willing to listen, and they will use more than their words to express themselves, so pay attention, especially when doing the interviews virtually, I realized how much information you can get from the environment and body language. I was not clear about the use of the card sorting exercise at first, so my attributes weren’t as helpful for my next steps and recommendations as they could be, next time I’ll make sure they are more accurate to product ideation.

What did I find

The time has come to put all the puzzles together, now is the time to go through my notes, records, and memories to synthesize my findings and create insights. I started to organize the user quotes with the different hypotheses, then it was easier for me to connect the dots to offer insights.