08-May-2023
This is an excerpt from a presentation I gave in January to the enthusiastic team at Jupiter Money, on how to plan, conduct, and analyze a research project.
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Hi everyone!
My name is Shalini Mookerjee, and I will be taking you through the process of finding direction with design research. But before we dive into it, let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I began my design journey at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, where I majored in Human-Centered Design. The course focused on learning methods to study human beings and designing solutions that are tailored for their ease of use.
After college, I joined a B2B startup called Crux Intelligence, which is part of Fractal Analytics. Here, I worked with the product and design team, including Aayush (who asked me to give this presentation today). At Crux, my work involved understanding how ordinary users, like you and me, read and perceive data on a daily basis.
After spending a few great years at Crux, I joined Urban Company, where I am currently helping the team study customer buying behaviors, understand their motivations, and design solutions that meet their expectations.
Over the past three years, I have helped answer 64 research questions and successfully completed 40 research projects. In this presentation, I will explain how I/we at Urban Company use user research to find answers to our problems.
Defining user research
What is user research, anyway?
According to the official definition of user research by the Interaction Design Foundation, UX research is the study of target users and their requirements to add realistic contexts to the design process.
However, I feel this definition is somewhat limited and does not fully depict what user research really means. I usually prefer to define it somewhat simply, like this: user research involves three steps. First, asking the right question (to solve a problem at hand); second, finding the answer (from users); and third, using the answer to aid decision making.
This definition also reflects the process that follows in a research project, i.e., planning, conducting, and analyzing. This blog post focuses only on the first part: how to break down problems and find a direction on how to solve them using user research.
Asking the right questions
As all of you know, Urban Company is a platform that provides services such as beauty, spa, electrical, cleaning, and plumbing at home. Let me take an example of a problem we faced at Urban Company last year.
We have a feature called "packages." Packages are a construct designed to increase the average order value of a booking by engaging the user with discounts. However, packages were a UX nightmare. It was basically the entire catalog of beauty services inside a bottom sheet without pictures or descriptions.
Despite this, people were using it. About 40% of all our bookings in the salon category were happening via packages. We did not know why, but because people were using it so intensively, we needed to fix it.
To fix this UX nightmare, multiple folks on the team proposed ideas, such as adding richer content, adding view details inside the packages bottom sheet, aiding packages with ratings, or even more radical ideas, such as removing it altogether.
Hence, the team needed to decide a few things: Should packages exist in the beauty cart? If yes, how should we optimize it for a better experience, and what needs to change?
To make these decisions, we needed knowledge about the user. This knowledge forms the basis for the research questions. Let's break it down:
Should we include packages in the beauty cart? To make an informed decision, we needed to understand how removing packages would impact the cart's average order value and conversion rate.
How can we optimize for a better user experience? To answer this, we needed to consider user expectations and preferences. Our research question then became: Who is using packages and what are they using them for?
It's possible that users are only using packages because they offer discounts. We needed to validate this hypothesis as well.
What needs to change? We needed to identify the problems users were experiencing and why.
With the research questions in mind, we can use Erika Hall's "Just Enough Research" diagram to choose the appropriate research methods. This diagram is not exhaustive, but it includes only those methods that I have found useful in my own projects.
Therefore the methodologies for each item would be as you see on the table below. Once we have selected our research methods, we can create an interview guide by breaking down each research question and identifying the questions we need to ask users. Sorting these questions in a cohesive order will result in a comprehensive interview guide.
By following this process, we can go from identifying a problem to making informed decisions by conducting user research and collecting the necessary information from our users.