13 Helpful UX Research Tools

The landscape of UX research tools has been growing to cover everything from recruiting participants, logistics, capturing remote or in person sessions, usability tests, generating reports and more.

While not inclusive of all the tools that are out there, here are some helpful tools you can check out whether you’re a seasoned pro or a beginner:

Airtable

A spreadsheet/database like tool that has UX research templates to help you search and categorize participants and session insights.

Calendly

A free tool to help you schedule meetings.

Dscout

Recruit, plan and analyze diary studies.

Evolt

A flexible canvas creation for collaboration, with templates for storyboards, user journeys and more

Lookback

A real time or remote user research sessions with the ability to record, and take notes during session in a collaborative dashboard. Use the “Live” feature to broadcast your research to your team.

#tools #ux #ux-research #design

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

13 Helpful UX Research Tools

The landscape of UX research tools has been growing to cover everything from recruiting participants, logistics, capturing remote or in person sessions, usability tests, generating reports and more.

While not inclusive of all the tools that are out there, here are some helpful tools you can check out whether you’re a seasoned pro or a beginner:

Airtable

A spreadsheet/database like tool that has UX research templates to help you search and categorize participants and session insights.

Calendly

A free tool to help you schedule meetings.

Dscout

Recruit, plan and analyze diary studies.

Evolt

A flexible canvas creation for collaboration, with templates for storyboards, user journeys and more

Lookback

A real time or remote user research sessions with the ability to record, and take notes during session in a collaborative dashboard. Use the “Live” feature to broadcast your research to your team.

#tools #ux #ux-research #design

How the Findings of Your UX Research Remain Valuable.

You might recognize this problem: you have invested time, money and energy in user research but throughout the course of the of the project, you discover that nobody remembers the valuable findings. Well, here are some suggestions on how to make your UX research results more memorable and sustainable for you and your team.

By Sydney Luca-Lion, UX research intern

If you’re in the business of making things for people, you may have already come across the terms “human-centered design” or “user-centered design”. This essentially means keeping the end user in mind at every step of the design and development process. To achieve this, you need to know your users, understand their goals, know how they think and act. Research helps you make better decisions, and better decisions lead to more successful products. If you are not convinced or don’t know where to start, this article(in German) might interest you.

If you have already conducted UX research and collected results, an important step in the user-centered project process has already been taken. But this does not mean that the research phase is over — it is now important to get the most out of your findings and to make them more useful for everyone on the team who’s involved in the project. Here are three things you should keep in mind:

1. See the wood for the trees

In UX research you are often confronted with a lot of data in many different forms, and some of the information is really useful and informative, and some less so. As you prepare to share your results with the team, you as an observer/researcher need to think carefully about how you can interpret and summarize the information — so that you end up presenting only what is worth sharing.

Valuable research results are those that are truly relevant to the project, and are accessible for the whole team. You and your team want to “see the wood for the trees”, which means not getting caught up in too many details and losing sight of the big picture. Try to stay focused on the scope of the project and don’t get caught up in insights that are not really relevant to the project. If you want memorable and valuable research results, you have to clarify to find the most meaningful points. Make an effort to be clear, comprehensive and straightforward so that the results of your research are understood and remembered by everyone involved in the project.

#ux #user-research #ux-design #ux-research

UX Design 101: User research — Everything you need to know to get started

What is this?

This session is part of a learning curriculum that I designed to incrementally skill up and empower a team of Designers and Researchers whose skillset and ways of working needed to evolve to keep up with changes in the way we think about and execute design.

Each session in the curriculum aims to simplify the complexities of human-centered interaction design using real-life examples from my own professional experience alongside established theory from industry experts.

The sessions are intentionally structured as short, achievable hands-on learning workshops that balance technique (hands-on, doing) with theory (readout, presentation).

**For more info about this curriculum, please read: **👇👇🏼👇🏾

_Why am I sharing this? _I have open-sourced this content to help others understand the fundamentals of human-centered interaction design and the multi-dimensional skillset needed to be successful in complex, collaborative environments.

What is the focus of this session?

Context — An understanding of how to approach the work

_Craft _— An understanding of how to do the work

_Communication _— An understanding of how to interact and collaborate

What are the goals of this session?

This session provides participants with an introduction to User Research and what it takes to get started — including an understanding of what user research is (and isn’t), where it fits into the product development process, when it should (and shouldn’t) be used, and an overview of common methodologies and tools.

Additionally, it provides a step-by-step framework and techniques for planning and executing effective user research activities, individually, or within an organization.

The participatory exercises in this session help attendees apply the concepts presented to a project they are working on (or have worked on in the past). Each exercise is incremental, building upon the previous one, to help participants understand how the principles of user research can be applied to the design challenges they face in their day-to-day.

Why is this topic important?

User insights are a fundamental element of human-centered design and help to facilitate impactful product design and development.

If a product or design solution is not rooted in an understanding of user needs and behavior, it does not account for how real people will interact with it, and its chance of delivering value and impact are relegated to luck.

User insights are fundamental to the product design and development process — they help us understand a problem, before we try to solve it.

#user-experience-research #interaction-design #ux-research #ux #user-research #design

UX Design 101: Value vs. effort — Choosing a user research methodology

What is this?

This session is part of a learning curriculum that I designed to incrementally skill up and empower a team of Designers and Researchers whose skillset and ways of working needed to evolve to keep up with changes in the way we think about and execute design.

Each session in the curriculum aims to simplify the complexities of human-centered interaction design using real-life examples from my own professional experience alongside established theory from industry experts.

The sessions are intentionally structured as short, achievable hands-on learning workshops that balance technique (hands-on, doing) with theory (readout, presentation).

**For more info about this curriculum, please read: **👇👇🏼👇🏾

_Why am I sharing this? _I have open-sourced this content to help others understand the fundamentals of human-centered interaction design and the multi-dimensional skillset needed to be successful in complex, collaborative environments.

What is the focus of this session?

Context — An understanding of how to approach the work

What are the goals of this session?

This session provides participants with techniques for establishing _context_around their research by assessing the value and efficiency of answering a question via UX Research at the onset of a project, before they get started.

Additionally, the step-by-step framework and hands-on exercises in the session internalizethe value of _Context _by challenging each participant to answer a series of up-front questions that establish the _Who, What, Where, When, and Why _around a question they (or their team) feel could be best answered via UX Research.

#ux #user-research #user-experience-research #ux-research #interaction-design

Tone of Voice and UX Design

When thinking about the UX design of your project, there are so many elements to keep in mind that the actual written content is often left on the back burner. We’re told “Users don’t read!” so we Lorem ipsum our way out until we absolutely _have _to write something. However, we must keep in mind — whenever users do read, they pay attention. And that is why establishing your tone of voice is a critical part of the UX design process.

But what is this so-called “tone” exactly? According to this excerpt from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,

Traditionally, tone has denoted an intangible quality, frequently an affective one, which is metaphorically predicate of a literary work or of some part of it such as its style. It is said to pervade and “color” the whole, like a mood in a human being, and in various ways to contribute to the aesthetic excellence of the work…. In Practical Criticism, I. A. Richards compared tone to social manners and defined it as the reflection in a discourse of the author’s attitude towards his audience.

Sounds complicated? Essentially, the tone of voice indicates how the speaker _feels _towards the reader. While the term was originally coined to talk about literature, nowadays it applies heavily to UX design. It’s seen in everything from buttons to calls to action, and even in error pages. How your product speaks to your users is integral to their experience and has a noticeable impact: the right tone could be the difference between a one-time visitor and a convert.

And this is not an exaggeration — in a study by Nielsen Norman Group, users were shown two versions of four product websites (insurance company, bank, hospital, home security system), and asked to give their opinions. Even though the two different versions of each website were identical except for the tone of voice, respondents had very clear preferences. For example, the casual version of the hospital website was unanimously preferred over its formal counterpart. It was perceived to be more friendly and even more trustworthy, despite the fact that we would usually associate confidence and trustworthiness with the formality of the second version. However, that version was seen as “businesslike” and not very reassuring for a prospective hospital patient. The tone of voice was ill-suited to the product in the minds of the users, so that version of the website did not have the desired impact.

The inspirations behind the casual and formal hospital website versions — notice the introductory paragraphs and their supporting images. Source

#ux-writing #ux-research #design #ux-design #ux