2nd Edition

Think Like a UX Researcher How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy

By David Travis, Philip Hodgson Copyright 2023
    352 Pages 46 B/W Illustrations
    by CRC Press

    352 Pages 46 B/W Illustrations
    by CRC Press

    Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft.

    In this newly revised Second Edition, the authors have added six new essays that look at how UX research methods have changed in the last few years, why remote methods should not be the only tools you use, what to do about difficult test participants, how to improve your survey questions, how to identify user goals when you can’t directly observe users and how understanding your own epistemological bias will help you become a more persuasive UX researcher.

    Key Features

      • Provides a dive-in-anywhere book that offers practical advice and topical examples.

      • Includes thought triggers, exercises and scenarios to test your knowledge of UX research.

      • Features workshop ideas to build a development team’s UX maturity.

      • Discusses war stories from seasoned researchers to show you how UX research methods can be tailored to your own organization.

      Preface to the Second Edition

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      1 Setting the Stage

      - The Seven Deadly Sins of UX Research

      - Think Like a Detective

      - The Two Questions We Answer with UX Research

      - Anatomy of a Research Question

      - Applying Psychology to UX Research

      - Why Iterative Design Isn’t Enough to Create Innovative Products

      - Does Your Company Deliver a Superior Customer Experience?

      - The Future of UX Research Is Automated, and That’s a Problem

      - Endnotes

      2 Planning User Experience Research

      - Defining Your UX Research Problem

      - How to Approach Desk Research

      - Conducting an Effective Stakeholder Interview

      - Identifying the User Groups for Your UX Research

      - Writing the Perfect Participant Screener

      - Arguments against a Representative Sample

      - How to Find More Usability Problems with Fewer Participants

      - Deciding on Your First Research Activity with Users

      - Using the Cognitive Interview to Improve Your Survey Questions

      - My Place or Yours? How to Decide Where to Run Your Next Usability Test

      - Endnotes

      3 Conducting User Experience Research

      - Gaining Informed Consent from Your Research Participants

      - What Is Design Ethnography?

      - Structuring the Ethnographic Interview

      - Writing Effective Usability Test Tasks

      - The Five Mistakes You’ll Make as a Usability Test Moderator

      - Avoiding Personal Opinions in Usability Expert Reviews

      - Toward a Lean UX

      - Controlling Researcher Effects

      - Dealing with Difficult Usability Test Participants

      - Uncovering User Goals with the Episodic Interview

      - Endnotes

      4 Analyzing User Experience Research

      - Sharpening Your Thinking Tools

      - UX Research and Strength of Evidence

      - Agile Personas

      - How to Prioritize Usability Problems

      - Creating Insights, Hypotheses and Testable Design Ideas

      - How to Manage Design Projects with User Experience Metrics

      - Two Measures That Will Justify Any Design Change

      - Your Web Survey Is a Lot Less Reliable Than You Think

      - Endnotes

      5 Persuading People to Take Action on the Results of User Experience Research

      - Evangelizing UX Research

      - How to Create a User Journey Map

      - Generating Solutions to Usability Problems

      - Building UX Research into the Design Studio Methodology

      - Dealing with Common Objections to UX Research

      - The User Experience Debrief Meeting

      - Creating a User Experience Dashboard

      - Achieving Boardroom Influence

      - Endnotes

      6 Building a Career in User Experience

      - Hiring a User Experience Leader

      - A Tool for Assessing and Developing the Technical Skills of User Experience Practitioners

      - Going Beyond Technical Skills: What Makes a Great UX Researcher?

      - How to Wow People with Your UX Research Portfolio

      - A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Month in a UX Research Role

      - The Reflective UX Researcher

      - Are You a Positivist or an Interpretivist UX Researcher?

      - Endnotes

      Index

      Biography

      David Travis has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on UX, and over 30,000 students have taken his face-to-face and online training courses. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology.

      Philip Hodgson has been a UX researcher for over 25 years. His UX work has influenced design for the US, European and Asian markets for products ranging from banking software to medical devices, store displays to product packaging and police radios to baby diapers. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology.