A beginner's guide to UX research. How an interface designer sees the world. Next steps: which method to choose for your research

When it comes to visualizing research results, most marketers automatically think of a graph or chart. You also imagined something similar, didn’t you?

Indeed, this format clearly demonstrates existing trends and observed deviations.

However, this mainly concerns quantitative research. Often the graphs are not the best way presentation of application results, such as surveys or observations. Often the number of participants in these types of studies is too small to create meaningful graphs. Additionally, sometimes the ideas you want to convey to your team cannot be expressed in purely quantitative terms.

In this article, we'll show you how you can visualize the more subjective and vague data obtained from qualitative marketing research methods.

A little about visualization

“The purpose of visualization is understanding, not pictures.”
— Ben Shneiderman, famous American computer scientist.

When you create a qualitative research report, your goal is likely to develop an understanding of your target audience and the tasks they need to complete to get what they want. Particularly relevant this type surveys at the beginning of the design (to know what to design) and at the end (to understand how well your project is meeting its goals).

Depending on who exactly you're delivering your report to (for example, developers or clients) and its depth (in other words, whether you need a deep understanding of users, or more of a sense of the context in which the product will be used), you will need to determine , what type of visualization is best suited to display the results of the study.

Imagine that you conducted several surveys of people from your target group: informal caregivers who care for older relatives with early signs of dementia.

Respondents shared with you some important information about the fears they have about their situation to help you develop a product that will help them be more independent in caring for their loved ones (assuming this mobile app, acting as an online consultant).

You used a thematic analysis technique using sticky notes and discovered four categories of fears that would be appropriate to consider when developing a new product:

change in relationships
constant feeling of anxiety,
lack of competence,
lack of personal time.

By what methods would you prefer to disseminate your findings? Would you simply provide clients with a short list of four fears? Or pie chart, showing how often a particular fear category was mentioned in a survey? However, we can argue that the above methods of conveying information do not lead to the deep understanding that you are seeking to achieve. A list by itself is not a compelling enough presentation to generate any empathy.

Below we'll show you three ways to visualize quality results that work much more effectively than regular lists or diagrams.

Affinity diagram

The moment you used the post-it notes to apply thematic analysis to identify the top four fears facing your target group, you have already used one of the visualization techniques: affinity diagram(Affinity Diagram).

You recorded each of the user comments received during the surveys on a separate sticky note, then grouped them according to the degree of similarity, creating processes as you went along categories. As a result, the diagram that you created as an analysis tool showed great amount information.

Now you need to “clean up” this chart so that it better represents the information you want to convey in your report.

You may decide that the categories you create should reflect the four main fears you discovered in your surveys. Then you need to ask yourself what pieces of information will help your fellow developers and your clients understand what these concerns entail.

What impact do these fears have on the lives of your users?
When is this particular concern most pronounced?
What causes it?
Do you have any idea how it can be reduced?

All this information will already be in the survey data, which you have sorted into separate categories. Now you just need to filter out the most important ones and present them in a clear and visually appealing way, taking into account the preferences of the people you want to reach with your message. You can use quotes or keywords, and also, if desired, illustrate them with drawings. The image below shows what an affinity diagram from the example described might look like:

Affinity diagram showing quotes from user research are grouped around the four most common fears you've discovered. An image placed in the background of this affinity diagram, showing the user in the context of the study, would help bring the review to life and inspire empathy.

Empathy Map

The Empathy Map is excellent way create a clear understanding of the four main areas that developers will need to focus on in order to empathize with the target group: what people said, did, thought And felt(see picture below). This is also very important for your client - the healthcare organization - regarding informal carers, as they may have some biases based on normal interactions with the target group. can provoke discussion within the client's team and force them to admit that they will have to adjust their point of view. In healthcare (but this is true in many other contexts as well), medical workers believe that they can speak instead of the patient or his family, while tending to forget that they have limited understanding of the lives of those being cared for and therefore may not understand all the needs of the latter.

To create an empathy map based on your survey results, you review the notes and other materials you collected from your qualitative user research. For each quadrant—or each area of focus—you either select relevant quotes and images or summarize relevant findings from the data. As you can see in the image below, the resulting empathy map draws on the same data as the affinity diagram created earlier, but conveys different, different information. In this example, both visualizations can be important for successful design:

An example of an empathy map that might emerge from research on a specific user category: informal caregivers of patients with dementia. The image in the middle of the card should represent your user to increase the opportunity to empathize with her or him. You can apply an image from a user persona you created.

User journey map

So you create New Product to help lay carers of older people with mild symptoms of dementia to be more independent in caring for their patients. Your client is the management team of a healthcare organization that cares for these older adults.

One of the issues you likely should have focused on during your user research is the context in which informal caregivers provide support to their care recipients. You may have asked yourself questions such as:

What tasks do caregivers perform?
When do they perform these tasks?
What other actions do they take before and after completing these tasks?
How do they feel providing care to their loved ones?

What matters in your study is not only the direct answers to the above questions, but also the task flow they create throughout the lifespan (i.e., period of performance of a given activity) of informal caregivers. For example, it is important to know whether the care they provide can be planned in advance or whether planned activities will be interrupted by other activities.

To the highest degree effective way mapping this stream relative to a certain period of time is the creation user journey maps(User Journey Map).

Which you see in the image below, displays a period lasting one day. You can choose this period according to the time unit that makes sense for your project—sometimes a week or a month may be more appropriate. You can mark the steps involved in caring for your caregivers throughout a typical day, creating separate pathways for the actions, thoughts, and feelings you used to create your empathy map. In addition, you must identify any points of contact with existing health care services provided by the health care organization or any other entity involved. Focus on showing movement user through different touchpoints throughout the day and how the user experiences each interaction in that journey. Subsequently, you should be able to communicate with your team and the client to jointly decide which interactions on the map should be changed, removed, or added.

The development of user interfaces, with a competent approach, is structured in such a way as to create it as attractive and convenient as possible to optimize its interaction with the user.

In any project, web interface developers are faced with the task of creating a user-friendly interface. However, this is not always the case simple task, as it may seem at first glance, and sometimes requires quite a bit of design experience. The main requirements here are convenience, practicality and intuitive clarity. It is at this point that concepts such as UX and UI design come into play, which are often confused. Let's look at each of them separately and identify their key points.

UX design

User Experience Design translated means "interaction experience" and includes various UX components: information architecture, interaction design, graphic design and content.

In general, UX design involves A complex approach to user interaction with the interface, be it a website, mobile application or any other program. The person who does this work is UX designer(V Lately more and more often you can hear the names of UX architect, UX engineer or strategist, since the word “design” in this context is more of a common noun than what we are actually accustomed to understand by the meaning of this word) - when developing an interface, one should, as much as possible, take into account all the little things, starting from the user’s environment and type electronic device and ending with methods of entering and displaying information.

Simple example: Let's say you invested an impressive amount of money to promote your resource to the top positions search engines, however, its convenience leaves much to be desired. In this case, an impressive number of users will simply leave the site and the effect will be minimal. That is why it is necessary to constantly analyze the actions of resource visitors, improve your website and follow modern trends.

The main issues addressed by UX design:

Setting goals and objectives - what do we ultimately need to achieve?
Selecting suitable UX tools to achieve your goals
Development of a product that is as convenient and easy to understand as possible for the target audience
Analysis final result- Does the product meet customer expectations and how high is the level of user satisfaction?

It is the competent thought out of all the details at these stages that will allow you to create an army of fans of your product. A striking example here is Apple company, which followed this path and won the hearts of thousands and millions.

UI design

User Interface Design or user interface is a narrower concept that includes specific set graphically designed technical elements (buttons, checkboxes, selectors and other fields). Its task is to help the user organize interaction with the program/site. Currently there are some UI design rules:

Organization of interface elements. This means that they must be logically structured and interconnected.
Grouping of interface elements. It involves combining logically related elements (menus, forms) into groups.
Aligning Interface Elements. It's hard to imagine that a poorly aligned interface could be convenient for anyone!
Single style interface elements. Styling plays an important role, because it is what is retained in the user’s memory.
Availability of free space. This allows you to differentiate information blocks, focusing attention on one thing.

A user interface developed according to all the rules significantly increases the efficiency of the resource and gives it a competitive advantage.

Information Architecture (IA)

Separately, I would like to say a few words about Information Architecture (IA). Its work focuses on data organization, that is, the extent to which information is structured from the point of view of the user, rather than technical or system rules. It determines the placement of elements on the page, the connection of the pages themselves. The competence of IA is rather menus and navigation and their competent implementation.

To summarize, I would like to note that in different sources UX design means different things, but in general they all mean the work on the product described in the article. What does UX mean to you?

When determining the value of property, three approaches are used:

Cost-effective approach.

Cost-effective approach- a set of methods for assessing the value of an appraisal object, based on determining the costs necessary for the reproduction or replacement of an appraisal object, taking into account wear and obsolescence. Reproduction costs of the valuation object are the costs necessary to create an exact copy of the valuation object using the materials and technologies used to create the valuation object. Replacement costs valuation object are the costs necessary to create a similar object using materials and technologies used at the valuation date.

The cost approach is used when it is possible to replace the valued object with another object that is either an exact copy of the valued object or has similar useful properties. If the object of assessment is characterized by a decrease in value due to physical condition, functional or economic obsolescence, when applying the cost approach it is necessary to take into account wear and tear and all types of obsolescence.

Comparative approach.

Comparative approach- a set of methods for assessing the value of a valuation object, based on a comparison of the valuation object with analogous objects of the valuation object, for which information on prices is available. Analogue object of the valuation object, for the purposes of valuation, an object is recognized that is similar to the valuation object in terms of the main economic, material, technical and other characteristics that determine its value.

The comparative approach is used when there is reliable and accessible for analysis information about the prices and characteristics of analogous objects. When applying a comparative approach to valuation, the appraiser must:

a) select units of comparison and conduct a comparative analysis of the object of assessment and each analogue object for all elements of comparison. For each analogue object, several units of comparison can be selected. The choice of units of comparison must be justified by the appraiser. The appraiser must justify the refusal to use other units of comparison adopted during the assessment and related to factors of supply and demand;

b) adjust the values of the comparison unit for analogue objects for each element of comparison, depending on the ratio of the characteristics of the object of evaluation and the analogue object for this element of comparison. When making adjustments, the appraiser must enter and justify the scale of adjustments and provide an explanation of under what conditions the values of the adjustments made will be different. The scale and procedure for adjusting the unit of comparison should not change from one analogue object to another;

c) agree on the results of adjusting the values of units of comparison for selected analogue objects. The appraiser must justify the scheme for reconciling the adjusted values of units of comparison and the adjusted prices of analogous objects.

Income approach.

Income approach- a set of methods for assessing the value of the valuation object, based on determining the expected income from the use of the valuation object.

The income approach is applied when there is reliable information that allows one to predict the future income that the valuation object is capable of generating, as well as the costs associated with the valuation object. When applying the income approach, the appraiser determines the amount of future income and expenses and the moments of their receipt.

When applying the income approach to valuation, the appraiser must:

a) set the forecast period. The forecasting period is understood as a period in the future for which, from the date of assessment, the quantitative characteristics of factors influencing the amount of future income are predicted;

b) examine the ability of the valuation object to generate an income stream during the forecasting period, and also make a conclusion about the ability of the object to generate an income stream in the period after the forecasting period;

c) determine the discount rate reflecting the return on investments in investment objects comparable to the object of assessment in terms of risk level, used to bring future income streams to the date of assessment;

d) carry out the procedure for bringing the flow of expected income during the forecasting period, as well as income after the forecasting period, into value on the valuation date.

To obtain the final value of the valuation object, the appraiser coordinates (summarizes) the results of calculating the value of the valuation object using various approaches to valuation and valuation methods. If, as part of the application of any approach, the appraiser used more than one valuation method, the results of applying the valuation methods must be agreed upon in order to determine the value of the valuation object established as a result of applying the approach.

When agreeing on the results of calculating the value of the valuation object, the type of value established in the valuation assignment, as well as the appraiser’s judgments about the quality of the results obtained within the framework of the applied approaches, must be taken into account. The reconciliation method chosen by the appraiser, as well as all judgments, assumptions and information used by the appraiser when reconciling the results, must be justified. If a weighing procedure is used for approval, the appraiser must justify the choice of scales used.

Translation of the article How To Conduct User Experience Research Like A Professional

Translation: Ksenia Kuzminykh

Introduction

“UX research allows you to understand how a product or service will work in real world For real people. You discover new user needs (or confirm your hypotheses). They should be the basis of your product design."

Chris Maars, UXr

Large informational portal for designers and developers, Designmodo calls UX research “the process of studying how a user behaves, what their needs are, and how they feel about a product. To do this, they use the observation method and various tools to collect feedback.”

One of the benefits of UX research is that it allows you to understand how people live and how to respond to their needs with design solutions.

Amateurs vs professionals

In UX design, it is very easy to distinguish between an amateur and a professional: the amateur excludes the end user from the design process. Early in my career, I thought I could test an app, website, or product on my own, and passed up the opportunity to interact with the end user.

Over time I learned more professional approach: When designing a study, you need to start by getting to know the opinions of users. UX research allows us to get rid of narrow-mindedness, and the users of our products are still different from us.

"Insights taken directly from user experience, are like muscle memory: the more you do research, the more effectively you improve your competencies. But just like muscle memory, it takes a lot of work to enjoy the results. It is so tempting to outsource research to a special research group (and sometimes this is simply unavoidable). But try to immerse yourself at least a little in the research process: then you will gain the insights you receive yourself, and not just appropriate what someone else has gained later.”

UX designer Ali Rushdan Tariq, ARTariq

5 stages of UX research

Erin Sanders proposed a 5-step research model called the Research Learning Spiral. In the first two stages you form questions and hypotheses, and in the next two stages you collect information using specific methods:

Goals. What don't we know about users?
Hypotheses. What do we seem to know?
Methods. What methods will we use given the time and resources we have?
Data collection. We collect information using the selected methods.
Synthesis. We fill knowledge gaps, confirm or refute our hypotheses, and open up opportunities for design work.

Also read: "»
Are you planning major renovation your website? Read on for tips from an experienced practitioner to help you get around underwater rocks restart.

The Role of Research in UX Design

UX research is the starting point for any project. It helps you understand users, their behavior, goals, needs and motivations. It also shows how people navigate the site, where they have problems and, most importantly, what their feelings are from interacting with the product.

When creating a design, start with UX research, otherwise all the work will be based only on your personal experience and subjective assumptions.

The Value of UX Research

UX research is truly valuable because it reduces uncertainty about what users want and need. This benefits both the product itself, the business, and the users.

Product Benefits

UX research gives you data about end user how and when the user will use the product, and what problems the product can solve. It is also useful when the team is unable to choose between several design options.

Business benefits

UX research is very important for business. Understanding the end user and taking design requirements into account at the initial stage allows you to speed up product development, reduce redesign costs and increase user satisfaction.

User benefits

One of the main features of UX research is its direct appeal to users' opinions. Simply put, it voices the thoughts of users without any influence from external authorities, and also serves link between manufacturer and user.

UX Research Methods

To choose correct method research, it is necessary to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. In total, there are 5 types of UX research: focus groups, usability testing, interviews, online surveys and persona creation. While each can be used independently, it is usually more effective to combine them. Next we will analyze each method in more detail.

UX research method: focus groups

Focus groups are a series of structured interviews with a target audience that are conducted quickly and without extra costs will reveal desires, opinions and experience of using the product. Quite a useful method if a company needs large quantities insights in a short time. It is best to conduct focus groups at the very beginning of the study.

Why are focus groups needed?

Focus groups can help your company better understand:

How do users perceive the product?
What are the main features of the product according to users?
What problems do people face when using the product?
Where does the product fall short of their expectations?

Group interviews can also be used to generate ideas about the future of a product.

What people say doesn't always correspond to what they do, so focus group results don't always accurately characterize user behavior. And the influence of participants on each other’s opinions and preferences causes data inaccuracy.

Ask only quality questions. Make sure your question is simply worded, leads to a comprehensive answer, and is focused on the topic at hand.
Choose several topics. Plan a discussion of 3-5 topics in 90 minutes.
Invite a certain number of people to participate. A good focus group has 3 to 6 respondents. This quantity is quite enough to discuss several points of view and give everyone the opportunity to speak.

How to Conduct Research Using the Focus Group Method

The research process can be divided into several stages:

According to usabiliy.gov, usability testing means “evaluation through testing by typical users of a product or service.”

During the test, participants are asked various tasks while one or more observers watch, listen, and take notes of what is happening. The main goal of this method is to find usability problems, collect qualitative data and determine the overall level of participant satisfaction with the product/service.

Why do we need usability testing?

This method allows problems to be identified before they are written into code. When product development problems are identified early, they are less expensive to fix.

Usability testing also shows how satisfied users are with the product and what changes need to be made to improve their rating.

This method also has disadvantages. For example, usability testing does not 100% reflect scenarios of interaction with the product in real life. And also, qualitative (not quantitative) data does not allow covering a large sample of respondents, unlike a survey. The benefits are that qualitative data can be more accurate and useful for generating insights.

Run a test on five users. This is enough to understand the main problems of your design.
Involve your team in testing. Anyone interested in quickly and efficiently solving problems should attend the sessions. The team will include managers, as well as leading developers and designers.
Make the report concise and get rid of the unimportant, leaving only the key comments of the respondents. Include the top 3 positive and top 3 negative comments in your report. Therefore, a full report should contain up to 50 comments and be less than 30 pages in length.

How to Conduct Research Using Usability Testing Method

Usability testing can be divided into several stages:

Determine what exactly needs to be tested and why ( new project, new part in the project, etc.)
Define target audience(or users you would like to receive).
Create a list of tasks for participants.
Find respondents to test.
Involve people from your team who are interested in the results in testing.
Apply what you learn from respondents to your design.

UX research method: interviews

Another popular UX research method is interviews. It is designed to reveal the user's attitude towards the product, his beliefs, as well as the past experiences of current and potential users. This method assumes that 1 interviewer talks with 1 respondent for 30 to 60 minutes. Interviews can be conducted live, over the phone or via webcam.

Why are interviews needed?

Of all UX research methods, interviews are usually conducted at the very beginning of the development cycle, when identifying product goals. Since interviews are conducted one-on-one, any problems that arise can be quickly addressed and resolved.

Personal interviews also allow you to “capture” the respondent’s verbal and nonverbal signals: facial and body language, emotional reactions that may reflect interest in a product or dissatisfaction with an issue.

When choosing a methodology for UX research, keep in mind that interviews are a great complement to online surveys. A “reconnaissance” interview will help you clarify the wording of future questions in the questionnaire. And conducting an interview after the survey allows you to get more detailed explanations of the answers in the questionnaire.

However, this method has several disadvantages. First, interviews require a team of interviewers, which requires considerable expense.

Secondly, the sample in this method is also limited and depends on the number of interviewers.

Hire an experienced interviewer. Good specialist always asks questions in neutral terms, listens carefully, defuses the situation and knows where and when to dig deeper.
Create a guide. Set up an interview script for each interviewer. It should consist of the questions to be asked, their order and structure.
Obtain consent to record. Before conducting an interview, it is necessary to confirm that the respondent agrees to have the conversation recorded. It's also a good idea to have a pad or two on hand for notes.

How to Conduct Research Using the Interview Method

The interview can be divided into several stages.

The survey includes a series of questions to understand users' preferences and opinions on given topics. Today, surveys are typically conducted online and vary in format and length. Online survey data is collected automatically, and the survey tool (platform) itself already involves primary analytics, the data of which can be used to further development product.

“It is very important to avoid leading questions. This is a common mistake. For example, the wording of the question: “What don’t you like about Uber?” suggests that the user has a negative attitude. An example of a more neutral wording: “Tell me more about your experience moving around the city.” This question elicits a more natural response from the user."

Note from the UX Beginner website

Why do we need online surveys?

Unlike traditional surveys, online surveys allow companies to quickly collect data from a wide and sometimes hard-to-reach audience for free or at a low cost. Surveys also help you understand who your users are, what their goals are, and what information they're looking for.

Unfortunately, as with focus groups, what users say sometimes doesn't mean what they do, so surveys can produce inaccurate results. Respondents' responses can also be negatively affected by poorly worded questions. Survey length can also be an issue—many people hate long surveys. That's why it's important to create short surveys so that users are more likely to complete them and be willing to participate in future studies.

Keep the survey short. Especially if remuneration for participants is minimal or not provided at all. Focus only on what really matters.
Simplify the survey. Make sure your questions are easy to understand: ambiguity or complex wording can harm the quality of the data collected.
Make the survey interesting. Include closed ones (with given options answers) and open questions.

How to Conduct Research Using Online Survey Method

You can conduct an online survey in several stages:

Determine the goals and objectives of the study.
Formulate questions in the questionnaire. Note: Try to collect information about how satisfied the user is with your product, what the user likes/dislikes, and what changes he might suggest.
Select a survey tool (for example, Survey Monkey, Qualtrics, etc.)
Find respondents
Conduct a survey
Analyze the results and prepare a report

UX Research Method: Creating Personas

A persona is a fictional image of an ideal client. A persona is typically based on background research and has goals, needs, and observable behaviors as a representative of your target audience.

Why are characters needed?

If you are creating a mobile application or website with adaptive layout, you will need to understand who will use the product. Understanding your audience can influence certain design elements and features to make your product more useful. The persona refines the profile of your audience by answering the following questions:

Who's mine ideal client?
What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
What are the needs and goals of my users?

Understanding user needs is vital when developing a product. A well-defined persona will allow you to identify and interact with the user's needs.

Unfortunately, creating personas can be very expensive, depending on how much user research you're willing to do. The character creation method is also not scientific, which makes some doubt it.

Create a character. It should consist of 4 elements: name, demographic characteristics, goals and behavior scenario.
Describe the character briefly and succinctly. Don't overuse unnecessary details, which will not affect the final design.
Make the character realistic. Avoid caricatured images, collect enough details so that the image is not divorced from real life.

How to Do Research Using Character Creation

Character creation can be broken down into several steps:

As a result of conversations with stakeholders (UX designers, marketing department, product manager), identify your target audience.
Conduct a survey and/or interview on real users to collect demographic information, « pain points » and preferences.
Summarize the research results and identify target audience groups.
Convert the resulting target groups into characters.
Test your characters.

Next steps: Which method should you choose for your research?

Now that you know more about UX research methods, it's time to choose the most suitable one for your purposes.

Behavioral Research vs. Attitude Research

As mentioned earlier, there is a big difference between what people say and what people do. Attitudinal research aims to measure opinions, while behavioral research aims to study how people behave. For example, usability testing is a study of behavior. Focus groups, surveys, interviews and personas are used to study people's attitudes towards a product.

Quality vs. Quantitative Research

Qualitative methods (usability testing, focus groups, interviews) are more suitable for answering questions that begin with the words “why” and “how”. Quantitative methods(online surveys) are suitable for answering questions starting with “how much”.

Conclusion

To summarize, the goal of UX research is simple: discover patterns of behavior, preferences, and insights from the people who use your product. These things provide the basis for your product design. Research also helps us combat the practice of designing for ourselves or for interested company employees, and allows the user to return to focus.

Expert opinion

Ksenia Kuzminykh
Web Analyst
i-Media

A UX designer, psychologist and sociologist have a lot in common. The goal for all three is to understand the opinions, motives and preferences of different categories of people. They achieve this goal using the same methods.

The author of this article is Raven Veal, a behavioral psychologist and mentor for an online UX design course on CareerFoundry. She brings her knowledge of conducting research from academia to business and explains how this research benefits the product, customer and user.

The article introduces UX research methods. It covers both “classical” social science methods (survey, interview, and focus group) and specific UX methods (persona creation, usability testing).

Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. The task of a professional is to choose the appropriate method for specific purposes and “squeeze” the maximum useful information out of it.

Raven Veal talks about the benefits of addressing the user at the interface design stage. As a sociologist working in web analytics, I advocate for the general “humanization” of data in the digital environment. Users are not just numbers about sessions and page views, not just blots on a click map. These are living people who have opinions.

That is why now at i-Media we have begun to use online surveys as an important source of information to increase website conversion. Most often we turn to surveys when we need to understand how users evaluate the usability of the site now and what needs to be changed/added. This is information that cannot be extracted from Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrics. It is an excellent living addition to generalized behavioral data.

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In the beginning there was Donald Norman, and he formulated the idea of user interface design.

I came up with this term because I thought that Human Interface and usability were too narrow concepts. I wanted to cover all aspects of the human experience in the system, including industrial design graphics, interface, physical interaction, and guidance. Since then, the term has become widespread, so much so that it is beginning to lose its meaning.
Donald Norman

By 2016, Don Norman emphatically stated that the term was completely misunderstood. He says this in short video on YouTube. Now he claims that he designer for people(sorry, I didn't find a link to the interview with this statement), but he doesn't agree with the title.

It's hard to find a better reason to start understanding the strange and confusing world of modern UX design: Even the creator of our industry doesn’t know what to call himself.

Modern UX requires an understanding of the history of design and development since the 1990s. They are inextricably linked.

Classic user experience design

In its purest form, UX Design is based on the waterfall development model.

A product team that uses the waterfall development model learns everything it can before creating even the simplest prototype. Research can take months or even years; and their results dictate the work of the design team. Fixing requirements before launching the design and fixing the design before starting development. Everything will remain unchanged until version 2.0. This is how the waterfall model works.

The classic UX process that is typically taught to college students looks like this:

Conduct research to identify problems
Categorize the issues you uncover.
Create personas and travel maps
Generate ideas
Create and test a prototype
Pass it on final version prototype to developers
Launch the product
Return to the first point based on user reviews

This is essentially a waterfall model. Classic UX elements (Jesse James Garrett) also follow this model, providing bottom-up execution based on well-defined requirements.

The problem is that classicalUXis fundamentally incompatible with agile development (also known asagile) .

Agile

For a long time, innovation in Silicon Valley was driven by Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Layer a waterfall development model on top of this and you'll notice that it fits nicely into a 24-month period. Business, design and development cycles worked like a mechanism swiss watches, perfectly tuned for the release of the new Intel chipset.

Then one daySony, ToshibaAndIBM(AllianceSTI) decided that Moore's Law was too slow.

However, Lean UX was not perfect. While UX could now harmonize with the rhythm of agile development methodology, lean UX faltered if the product was vaguely defined.

Designers found themselves under enormous pressure to fill the sprint backlog (the body of work that needs to be completed) before they really understood what they were creating. As a result, many development cycles were spent on features that never made it into the final product. Among project management, the Lean UX / Agile pair was famous big amount expenses and rework.

A mature product has a lot of user feedback that does a great job of driving the iterative cycle that Lean UX provides. This is why Lean UX is the industry standard for almost any product group.

The problem of cost and rework in this environment was so severe that it often prevented the adoption of Lean UX. This presented a real conundrum for startups that wanted to provide a strong UX component without reverting back to the waterfall development model.

Jake Knapp and Google Ventures, like a bolt from the blue, solved the problem with . The dark days of UX are finally over.

Design sprint fromGoogle Ventures

If you looked at a design sprint and said, “Wait, this is just really fast classic UX,” you wouldn't be far from the truth. The difference (and genius) is that it classical UXwith incredibly low accuracy. It's the difference between an artistic masterpiece and a napkin sketch, but it works.

The goal of a design sprint is to take all the existing research on a problem, uncover its essence, and then generate ideas at breakneck speed. Ideas are then evaluated from a human-centered design perspective. The team votes on suitable ideas. Designers then create a low-fidelity prototype (usually in one day) that hardly good enough for testing potential users. The test results, if positive, form goals for designers to achieve high precision; thus fueling the Lean UX/Agile cycle.

Magic.

Dual Trackdesign

IMPORTANT: dual– track agileoftenrefers to the split between research and design in the environmentLean UX . I have updated this article to link todual– track design in hopes of reducing confusion.

So now we come to modern UX methodology.

As you might expect, there are two ways to go with a dual track design. (Sherlock Holmes level of deduction):

Design Thinking / Research Design Sprint
Iterative experimentation The Lean UX / Agile

The production team usually works on the second path, if the backlog is poorly formulated. If this happens, the problem will be assessed and the team will conduct a design sprint. Problem solved.

But where does this assessment come from if the production team is busy practicing Lean UX?

The most effective answer is to allocate to it special team. The research team is examining the results more comprehensively in background. Since this research group is not tied to the Agile sprint pace, they still have the opportunity to take 3 months to come to a conclusion.

Every few months, production teams come up with a fresh idea, adding new ideas to experiment with in their backlog. One of the companies I work with now has an entire data science team that feeds data into multiple creative departments. New ideas rarely arise, since researchers have a longer delivery cycle, but when it comes to developments for the future, this is great.

Sometimes an idea is big enough to warrant a design sprint that significantly develops the product vision. However, most of the time, ideas simply drive Lean UX experimentation.

Therefore, dual track design works best when a dedicated research team is working outside of the active group products. You probably guessed that this is an expensive undertaking. You are not mistaken.

I can tell you that it is cheaper than the existing alternatives: working without UX or dealing with the cost and rework of pure Lean UX.

conclusions

In the beginning there was Don Norman and he formulated the concept of UX.
Other innovators such as Jesse James Garrett expanded on Don Norman's ideas and the classic UX process was born.
Classic UX worked well with the standard cadence of the waterfall development model, and everyone was happy. UX was still a niche practice.
Innovation ignored Moore's Law and the waterfall development model no longer worked.
Therefore, classic UX was incompatible with modern agile development methodology.
UI/UX designers have moved towards user-centered design. It is critical to the growth of UX in the design field, but is limited in scope. His bias towards digital and graphic design has greatly distorted the business world's perception of the role of UX. This remains a problem today.
Lean UX was conceived by Jeff Gothelf in 2013 and brought us interface design in harmony with product development. Suddenly, researchers, interaction designers, information designers, and all sorts of specialized UX specialists were in demand.
Unfortunately, Lean UX was ineffective when the product roadmap was not clearly defined, resulting in significant costs and rework.
Google Ventures came up with the design sprint, which allowed teams to quickly define and test low-fidelity prototypes. This started the Lean UX cycle for new product groups and effectively eliminated the problem of cost and rework.
Dual Track design combines Google Ventures' design sprint model with Jeff Gothelf's Lean UX methodology. This is already a developing discipline since the beginning of 2018.

So what is itUXdesigner in the world dual– track?

The UX designer is a leader, a generator of insight and creative ideas, context provider. UX design doesn't really have any outcomes other than value.

Most of us are not UX designers unless we lead a team, rather we we are working in area UXdesign.

This is enough to confuse anyone.

It's enough to annoy even Donald A. Norman.

At the time of writing, the author held the positionPrincipal UX Designer VDell EMC’ s Digital Marketing Studio in San Francisco. He started studyingHTML in 1997 and created his first website in 1999. Professional designers and entrepreneurs can contact him at LinkedIn or