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There are numerous ways to gather data about users: usability testing, A/B testing, quantitative surveys, Web analytics, interviewing, focus groups, and so on. For the closest thing to a “Grand Unified Field Theory of User Research,” see these examples by Elizabeth B. N. Sanders (see Figure 1.3) and Steve Mulder (see Figure 1.4). Both do a nice job of creating an organizing structure around the surfeit of research techniques we are blessed with.

ELIZABETH B. N. SANDERS, MAKE TOOLS, LLC 2012

FIGURE 1.3 A framework for different research techniques, factoring in different philosophical approaches toward the design process and the user’s role in that process.

STEVE MULDER

FIGURE 1.4 Different research techniques, organized by what is being examined and which style of research objective we’re addressing.

NOTE EXAMPLES OF USER RESEARCH APPROACHES

• Usability testing: Typically done in a controlled environment such as a lab, users interact with a product (or a simulation of a product) and various factors (time to complete a task, error rate, preference for alternate solutions) are measured.

• A/B testing: Comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same design (e.g., advertisement, website landing page) by launching them both under similar circumstances.

• Quantitative survey: A questionnaire, primarily using closedended questions, distributed to a larger sample in order to obtain statistically significant results.

• Web analytics: Measurement and analysis of various data points obtained from Web servers, tracking cookies, and so on. Aggregated over a large number of users, Web analytics can highlight patterns in navigation, user types, the impact of day and time on usage, and so on.

• Focus group: A moderated discussion with 4 to 12 participants in a research facility, often used to explore preferences (and the reasons for those preferences) among different solutions.

• Central location test: In a market research facility, groups of 15 to 50 people watch a demo and complete a survey to measure their grasp of the concept, the appeal of various features, the desirability of the product, and so on.

Interviewing isn’t the right approach for every problem. Because it favors depth over sample size, it’s not a source for statistically significant data. Being semi-structured, each interview will be unique, making it hard to objectively tally data points across the sample. Although we are typically interviewing in context, it’s not fully naturalistic. A tool that intercepts and observes users who visit a website is capturing their actual behavior, but sitting with users and having them show you how they use a website is an artifice.

Interviews are not good at predicting future behavior, especially future purchase intent or uncovering price expectations. Asking those questions in an interview will reveal mental models that exist today, which can be insightful, but won’t necessarily be accurate.

But interviewing can be used in combination with other techniques. In a note earlier in this chapter, I described how a quantitative study helped focus our contextual interviewing and observations. In other situations, we’ve used an exploratory interviewing study to identify topics for a global quantitative segmentation study. We’ve combined a Central Location Test (where larger groups watched a demo in a single location such as a research facility and filled out a survey) with in-home interviews simultaneously and used the results of both studies to get a deeper understanding of the potential for the product. It can be valuable to combine a set of approaches and get the advantages of each.

Is interviewing considered to be user research? Is it market research? Is it design research? I can’t answer those questions any better than you can! The answer is: it depends. Whether or not you ally yourself or your methods with any one of those areas, you can still do great work uncovering new meaning and bringing it into the organization to drive improvement and growth. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we care about? I’ll let someone else argue about the overarching definition matrix.