Creating a feeling of connectedness to others is one of the elements of a positive user experience. Here I’m talking about creating a user experience in the true sense: stimulating positive mental states in the minds of your users.
A sense of belonging - how we feel and interact with those around us - is important to feeling safe and our well-being. We have evolved to attend and think about being with others who are like us. We seek out others with shared values, ideas and interests to feel this sense of connectedness.
Sharing and wanting to share is fundamental to the very nature of being human. This is one reason the internet is such a major development in human communications - because we are passionate sharers, seeking others like us.
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.
While they are cheaper than observing users over a long period of time, paper diaries tend to have problems:
- Typically filled out once a day only (so subject to recall inaccuracy)
- Rich detail may be forgotten or edited out by customers
- Self-referential - talked about through a time of day the customer thinks is important
I’m investigating software for running online diary studies to overcome these problems. A simple blogging or chatting tool such as tumblr may work well for online diary studies. I would set up a blog for each of my customers and they will fill them out.
Advantages of online diaries appear to be:
- Customers may be more likely to record their on-going activities throughout the day with a web-based tool - especially for web-based research.
- On-going recording is likely to give a more accurate account of their day, i.e. less self-referential.
- Allows researchers to monitor customers’ contributions and encourage diary-keeping.
- Facilitates quicker data logging and aggregation
If you have any experiences of using something such as Tumblr (or Twitter) as a diary or cultural probe, I’d be interested to hear your experiences.
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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