Background

As a junior UX designer, I haven't had opportunities to conduct user tests yet except for personal projects. So I participate in user testing sessions as a user whenever I got chances for the sake of personal improvement. And through those experiences, I got more sure how to run user research for the next time!

PicCollage is a company that mainly carries lots of picture-related mobile products. I've got interviewed for the product designer role here. Ended up, I didn't get an offer tho, they invited me as a user for their user test session. They walked me through their workplaces while preparing the session.

Preparation & Set up

At the very beginning of the research, they clarified the purpose of this research, the policy about confidentiality, and explained that I will be recorded throughout the research.

As for set up, there was a laptop recording me in front of me. One smartphone that filming my behavior on screen. Plus another smartphone for using an app downloaded there.

Process of the research

Each team had different numbers of interviewers. In total, I got interviewed with 5 teams and projects. Their products are mainly mobile applications that help people to share pictures, videos, and many different platforms. They got me through different products and projects they are currently working on. Some of the products have already been launched and some of the projects are at the planning phase.

I was given time to use their products and competitors' products most of the time. I got asked to deal with the same task using both of them to make comparisons. They asked me to speak out about what I was feeling while doing the task. And if there is something hard to handle, they asked me what would I suggest, why.

as I said, they are a company working on digital products that can help people to edit and share pics, vids, cards, memories with people, I got also asked how I use tools to keep my memories, how to connect with my friends, how to organize things that are memorable. I think asking users about their lifestyles and habits can be useful to broaden ideas.

One of the teams let me navigate and play with an app that was not their product. In this case, seemed that they were planning to develop a new product, and before starting designing, trying to gather information about users' needs from existing products.

What I learnt

"Use different research methods on different purposes and phases of the process."

• Scenario #1: Brainstorming & Ideation

  to generate new ideas for new products, I would take an in-depth interview approach to get an insight into prospective opportunities. For instance, if we want to build a photo-related product, we could interview people to figure out how pictures perform in their daily life? what context do they use photos in? when do they need to take a picture? how they interact with their friends or people using photos? so on.

• Scenario #2: Validate assumption, users' need

  Once we got initial insight from brainstorming, we should validate our assumption whether if it's what people want or if it's on-demand in the market. Based on the result, we can decide what to build and what features can be provided.

  * In this case, I would rather take a quantitative survey first to see if there is demand out there. After it, I would conduct an in-depth interview with the prototype model if it's possible. The important part is to pick the right group of subjects. The reason that I felt like that is that while the user research, I got asked to share my opinion about an app that is for helping ppl to celebrate others' birthdays. But the thing is I'm not the type of person who cares about others' birthdays. So it was hard to respond to their questions.

• Scenario #3: Testing usability

  Figuring out WHAT to fix: Most powerful method would be observation. By observing how users behave with a product, we can notice what causes problems. And we can have users deal with a specific task to see how easily they achieve it.

  Figuring out HOW to fix: After narrowing down problems, we can take methods such as A/B testing, Eye tracking.