The Handbook of Global User Research has just been written by companies within the UX Alliance, an association of user experience agencies, who provide clients with a global service.
From the table of contents and a sample chapter, the book seems comprehensive in scope, covering traditional research techniques as well as eye tracking, unmoderated testing, and web analytics. This is reassuring and will be very interesting. A couple of people have posted positive reviews on Amazon.com
If you do global research yourself, you might find a host of tips and lessons. If you commission global research, you’ll have a better idea of what to expect (and ask for) from your agency.
Buy if for £34.19 from Amazon in the UK.
Diary studies are a useful way for understanding customers’ needs, motivations, and behaviors.
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Recently I developed a set of user journeys (scenarios) for the design of a new government service.
I have just been to a workshop where we did something very interesting - identifying risks to the user and to the service by walking through the user journeys. We did it very informally, simply sticking red sticky notes on the user journeys where things could go wrong…
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One thing you want to do with your scenarios is to check that they’re representative of what users will want to do and how they behave. Scenarios well-grounded in contextual data collected directly from users is therefore critical.
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A good set of scenarios should cover a range of user needs and situations. Data from user research ought to uncover a whole host of contexts of use.
Identifying the salient points of each of these scenarios will help you come up with a small, managable but representative scenarios for driving design.
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Scenarios are stories that describe users’ tasks and their needs. They have people in a setting, who have goals and desires. They have plots and objects with which users interact. They highlight users’ concerns and frustrations.
Ask yourself: are my scenarios believable? That’s the acid test that others will judge them by.
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There’s three types of visitors to your web site and you need to target all of them.
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Poorly presented copy is a barrier to customer conversion. Your text needs to propel visitors through your site, answer their questions, and persuade them to act.
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Most visitors leave your site after landing on the homepage. Conversion rates are notoriously poor. Why?
Your homepage needs to be persuasive, not just usable. It needs to compel visitors to dig deeper, to taste the honey.
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