Hi Oliver, I think it's rare not to have limited time to do user research. First, and this may be obvious, use what resources you have to you. If you are designing for an end customer then people who deal with end customers on a regular basis will have a lot of the information you need already distilled.
If you're looking to do some ethnographic studies then providing you have some idea of the user base and someway to set up meetings (two big things) then I would focus on one to one interviews lasting about an hour each with as many as you can get really. Whilst user testing stops being much use after about six folks the correct approach to one to one interviews keeps on yeilding results much much longer. On one project I was still finding useful information on interview number 30 (squeezed into a week and a half interviewing). In terms of technique I find the key is not to 'rush to solution' - that is don't go in there and ask 'so what do you want to see?'. For example if you're developing a banking site then I would structure each interview roughly like this. Start off by finding out about the person, their rough background, age, what they do, a quick portrait of who they are (this can be used later to replace composite personas). Then you then explore the things they do with their bank - I stress it's important to get the tasks that the users carry out and not focus on what you're going to build. If they talk about online banking as part of what they do that's great but think user tasks not tasks related to the online bank. Now what should happen is the user will have told you about who they are and what they do. In a natural way you start to introduce questions about such as what sources of information they use to make decisions, what are the things that drive them crazy etc. - again within the overall area of banking. Finaly and I usualy do this in the last 15-10 minutes if the user hasnt already lead upto it you talk about online banking - if they use it (I'll talk more about that later), how they use it and towards the end get their suggestions. Now I've seen a lot of other folks do these kinds of interviews and to start talking about features and functionality towards the final part of an interview to some will appear crazy. I can assure you it's the opposite. By the time you've got to details you will have a good portrait of the user, have a picture of how the product fits into their world, the tasks they carry out and how they already use the product (if they do) and most of the time because they are thinking about something that is part of their life will have already have started talking about ways to make it better for them without prompting. If you go in there and ask them to carry out a task on a site and tell you what you think (even with a five minute 'who are you' session') in my view it feels more like a test of the user and less an exchange of thoughts - this is the reason that given limited time I would always go for the one to one interviews and would probably never see the need for user testing! Also I have seen user research where part of the recruitment criteria is 'must have used the system'. Why? You're doing user research not systems testing! It's the task you're interested in not what path they use through an arbitrary solution. >From these sessions you can then create real human profiles (I really do recommend people avoid composites as they tend towards stereotypes and are often just a bunch of assumptions rather than about real users). You can also create user stories if people what those, I personaly prefer more detailed task disagrams that can then be used to create user journies relating to the final solution. There's much more to my approach than I can fit in a short email but it's based upon the problems I've seen with more traditional approaches which are often take a lot of time, money and often colour results or produce user research documents where it's impossible to determine what is 'real' and what is just an assumption someone has made up - the reason why I suggest not using personas if you don't have real people. In my view if you've made up a name and put a picture from google onto a persona it's already coloured and can be misleading. Cheers Stewart Dean On 16/02/2008, oliver green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi All, > > We are in the discovery phase of the project, where we have absolutely no > idea what the user needs are. There is limited time and resources this we > cant conduct ethnographic studies. What would be the best set of "agile" > methodologies that can be used to start the process? > > Thanks, > Oliver > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > -- Stewart Dean ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
