Building a new website requires creativity, insight, and a little bit of foresight. Nobody wants to face the disappointment of putting time and energy into a web experience that’s obsolete from day one.

Elementor, one of the most recognizable WordPress website builders out there, polled thousands of its users and identified the trends set to define the web creation space. The survey was sent through dedicated mail, included in the brand’s magazine, and posted throughout the community. We wanted to discover the trends that touch and concern web creators and UX professionals on a wide scale.

The result: Over 5000 valid responses filled with demographic data, common pain points, and web creation trends.

These responses represent some of the latest insights into the WordPress industry. Use this data to inform your web creation and UX design strategy and position your brand for success.

WordPress Web Creators: Demographic Insights

Our survey started by asking WordPress web designers their age.
Here’s a breakdown:

It’s easy to see that the largest age group of web creators is between 35 and 44 years old. There are significant numbers of web creators on both sides of this range. We see more users on the younger end of this group (25-34) than the older end (45-54).

Keep in mind that the WordPress community continues to grow every year. 

The variance between the second and third-largest user age groups might indicate that new WordPress web creators are getting slightly younger overall. Ideally, we’d have to collect the same data for several years to find out for sure.

Next, we asked survey recipients to identify their gender:

It looks like WordPress website creators largely identify as male.
However, a full quarter of responders identify as female, representing a significant user group. This percentage is in-line with the broader IT sector – women make up 25% of the technical workforce in large technology companies.

What Are UX Designers Most Worried About When Creating a Website?

We asked UX designers, marketers, and developers to rate the concerns that inform their web creation processes. We identified 11 different concerns that reflect today’s web creators’ challenges:

Let’s cover the top three:

1. Performance 

Maintaining good performance remains the top concern for WordPress website creators, and for a good reason. Google has made its Core Web Vitals Score integral to SEO success, which has led to reputable, top-ranking websites to prioritize reliable high-speed web performance. 

The world’s top websites are cracking down on web page loading times. As a result, web users now expect all websites to run as smoothly as Robin J.E. Scott’s Fastest Website in the World. 

See for yourself:
Copy that link into PageSpeed Insights and hit Analyze. You’ll see a perfect 100 for desktop site performance and 90+ for mobile performance. But there’s more – this hyper-optimized web experience is built on WordPress!

WordPress creators know they can achieve web page load speeds measured in milliseconds. However, they don’t always know how to balance their clients’ and website vistors’ needs while still achieving best-in-class performance. Marketers will insist on at least 80+ for desktop and 40+ for mobile.

There are a few things you can do to guarantee better website performance:

• Use an efficient website builder that doesn’t weigh down your website with unnecessary JavaScript and complex loading logic.
• Upgrade your hosting service to a top-rated managed hosting provider who can dedicate more resources to your website. Alternatively, you can opt for a website builder with built-in hosting services. Elementor, for example, now offers best in-class cloud hosting for WordPress
• Cut down on plugins. Prioritize lean plugins that do one thing very well, and get rid of feature-stuffed general plugins that try to do everything.
• Try implementing a caching solution, or invest in a global Content Delivery Network. Ideally, your web host should offer these services. That way you don’t have to weigh down your website with caching or CDN plugins.

2. Design Inspiration

It can be hard to find the right design inspiration for a particular website. This is especially true if you don’t have reams of data about its potential users, their preferences, or the site’s market position. Many WordPress creators have to start with a blank slate.

At the same time, WordPress creators want their websites to be unique. It’s important for websites to express their creators’ individuality. But it’s also easy for a cool idea to seem unwieldy a few months later after the website is finalized. 

It may be comforting to know that almost all web creators face this challenge sooner or later. Many of them look to their colleagues and competitors to find inspiration based on current design trends.

Understanding that even the most grizzled web creator can sometimes hit a creative wall, Elementor introduced Full Site Kits this past year. Designer-ready, complete websites, Kits can be quickly customized and launched within minutes. Web creators can always count on these when they’re in a pinch.

Some of the trends that are beginning to define the web creation space include:

• Scrollytelling- Also known as “narrative visualization”, this approach uses a sequence of visual images and animations to tell a story. If most websites are like books, think of yours as a graphic novel. Website visitorscan click or scroll through at their own pace, exploring highly visual content that reinforces your brand message.. 
• Nostalgia- The past always conjures powerful emotions. Web creators are increasingly turning towards analog typography and imagery, making their websites wistful and relatable. Classic images, retro filters, and blur effects can heighten this sensation and create a familiar, comforting web experience. 
• Delight- It’s easy to see the value of unexpectedly delivering positive feedback. Small animations, gestures, and microcopy can help you put character into an otherwise sterile web environment. When done right, it shows an attention to detail that carries over to your brand and the products or services it provides to website visitors.

3. Work Process and Communication

Managing remote web design and creation teams can be demanding. Agencies have shifted to a remote working model, putting stress on their time-tested creation methods. This can leave website creators feeling disoriented.

Almost every web creator can recall a situation where they worked for hours on some feature or web page element, only to have the client reject it at the last minute. Sometimes clients and teams will change the scope, add new requests, or lose track of things in the middle of production.

Today’s web creators need to invest in project management tools that address some of the communication challenges unique to a remote environment. It’s important for creators, agency teams, and clients to access live updates and separate channels for different iterations or projects. Tools like monday.com and Clickup can dramatically improve project efficiency and communication.

Top 10 Web Creation Trends Web Creators Would Like to Learn About

We asked web creators what web design trends they would like to learn about most. These ten issues represent the future of website creation and digital marketing in general.

Let’s take a brief look at each one:

1. Website Load Time and Page Speed Improvement reflect the fact that performance issues are web creators’ number-one priority. PageSpeed Insight scores reflect how closely websites adhere to Google’s Core Web Vitals. Fast, reliable website performance on desktop and mobile ensure high PageSpeed rankings and improve the user experience.
2. Smart Content Loading refers to content on the website being displayed dynamically based on the user’s profile. This means that two different people will be presented with different content on the same page that will better fit their needs. You can show or hide different elements based on different attributes like date/time, device, browser, if the user is logged in, language or URL. 

For example, this can be achieved with different plugins. Plugins such as Dynamic.ooo allow web creators to decide what will be visible to each person (for every widget, column, and entire section. 

3. Automation helps simplify complex workflows. It enables small web agencies to compete with larger marketing firms by reducing the amount of time spent on low-value, high-volume tasks. Tools like Zapier allow web creators to automate almost any task and free up time for more important ones.
4. Progressive Web Apps allow web browsers to act like native platform-specific apps. This technology crosses the bridge between native apps and purely hosted web apps, allowing capable, reliable service directly through the Internet. Learn more about how these apps work here.
5. Micro Animations are small functional animations that support the user experience. Often, they display visual feedback that encourages vistors and lets them know they’re on the right track. Discover how to use micro animations to create an intuitive interface and clarify the context on your website.
6. Headless WordPress sites use WordPress as a content management system (CMS) but rely on a different frontend stack to display content to website visitors. This decouples your content editing and development teams, allowing them to work independently of one another, which can have unique advantages. 
7. Webhooks are lightweight APIs that power data sharing in one direction. Website events (like publishing content with a certain keyphrase) can immediately trigger a data request without the need to develop and integrate a full-blown API. Learn more about the differences between webhooks and APIs.
8. Accessibility is as important for websites as it is for brick-and-mortar stores. People with physical, auditory, or visual disabilities should be able to navigate, use, and contribute to the web experience like anyone else. Web disability goes further than that, as well. Learn more about accessibility guidelines here.
9. Chatbots have become the ideal automated customer service solution for many web creators and brands. The ability to automate interactions with customers in natural language is a key value that ensures scalable growth in every industry. Learn more about how chatbots work.
10. Micro Interactions refer to small, meaningful animations and displays that enhance the user experience. They help guide visitors and show them they’re on the right track. Incorporating micro interactions can improve the usability of your website significantly. Discover some of the ways web creators are using micro interactions on today’s websites here.

WordPress in 2022: Clients’ perspective

Enough with just focusing on web creators .

We also asked the clients to rate the qualities and elements they look for in web creators they ultimately choose to build their site.

This data shows a few things clearly. First, web creators need to be upfront about their rates and prices to attract customers. This doesn’t mean that web creation pricing has to be a “race to the bottom,” though. Upmarket customers will prioritize premium web creators who charge accordingly high rates.

It’s telling that budgetary concerns are tied with aesthetics. It could mean that upmarket customers are willing to pay a premium for designers who share their aesthetic tastes and principles. Customers with low budgets are likely looking for the same shared interest and may be willing to spend more time qualifying web design contracts before committing.

The desire for common technology can indicate interest in:

1. Vast documentation and ability to consult with other creators.
2. Reliability and stability of a product that is well established
3. Integration and collaboration options within the ecosystem (no need to reinvent the wheel).

In theory, customers can build APIs and implement automation solutions to interface between technologies or platforms. In practice, they would prefer not to and will overlook web creators who don’t demonstrate mastery of the most popular technologies.

It’s also worth noting that a significant subset of customers exclusively view a website as the goods they’re paying for, instead of looking at a website as one element (albeit the most important one) in a greater package of services that can be extended to them by web creators. 

On-page SEO, branding and marketing are no longer added benefits. Customers expect web creators to provide a holistic service package with these components very much a part of it.

Lastly, the relative weakness of portfolios and recommendations suggests an industry-wide 

move towards customization and personalized service. Every customer believes their website is unique and may dismiss portfolio examples as not being representative of their specific needs. This may not necessarily be true, but web creators will need to keep it in mind when marketing their services.

You’re One Step Closer to WordPress Success

We hope you’ll find this data as valuable and insightful as we did. It’s a great time for web creators and digital marketers to adjust their strategy to meet new demands and develop new competencies to thrive in a challenging market. The more you know about your market, the better you can position your brand to succeed in it.

The post The State of WordPress: UX and Insights for 2022 appeared first on UX Mastery.

UX Analysis

The goal of user-centered design is to meet the users’ needs.

Data is used to guide design decisions. Data can help you map out your personas, user flows, interfaces and other elements in your UX design work.

But what metrics should you be considering?

• Website metrics
• Device metrics
• Conversion related metrics
• User metrics
• Competitors
• SEO metrics

Let’s look at it all briefly.

Monitoring website metrics and device metrics is vital to see how much traffic your webshop receives, what device your webpage visits, and what elements generate the most leads. Find out if you need to optimize for mobile or desktops. You can also find out which items and subpages need to be improved.

This is closely related to the conversion-related metrics that denote actual user interactions. For example, you can find out which is your most popular product and how many people have subscribed to your newsletter. If you have few subscriptions, you may have to optimize your CTA for newsletter sign-ups.

User data refers primarily to demographic data. How old, what gender, where do people live, or even what interests do your typical users have? You’ll need this information to tailor your website to your visitors.

But how does SEO get here? It has an interesting but prominent role here as well. Consider one of the most significant on-site SEO metrics: the loading time. If your webshop loads slowly, you will have a high dropout rate, significantly degrading the user experience.

Hopefully, if you’ve gotten this far by reading the article, you’re sure to think about how much work you will have to do. But how about we say that a tool automatically collects most of the data listed above for you? Enter heatmaps. Here’s a closer look at these tools and how you can use them in UX optimization.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are more of an analytical tool for measuring the efficiency of your website. It allows you to track the number of visitors to each subpage, the performance of your products, the source of your visitors, and even the performance of your buttons and CTAs.

A heatmap gives you a complete view of how visitors engage with your website and the compelling parts of your site. As a result, you can improve the user experience with the help of heatmaps.

Different forms of heatmaps include:

• Click heatmaps
• Segment heatmaps
• Scroll heatmaps

Each of the tools will help you track various metrics and prove valuable for UX optimization.

Click Heatmaps

Click heatmaps track of how many times each button is pressed. Warm colors are used to highlight areas with the most clicks, whereas cold colors highlight areas with the fewest clicks.

With this knowledge, you can determine which CTAs and button types are most effective on your website. If you want to make your website more user-friendly, it is valuable information.

Click heatmaps are also used to determine where to optimize. We also encourage you to review each of your subpages and see which subpages are rarely visited by your users. 

You may want to make UX upgrades on these subpages to increase their popularity and thus your conversion rate.

But what does it looks like in practice?

Assume that the analysis suggests that the orange buttons and the “Let’s do it” CTA wording are the most successful on your website. You can consider using that color and specific language more often to improve readability and enhance conversions.

Your website will be significantly more transparent if you employ CTAs and text that heatmaps reveal to be effective. Signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product doesn’t have to take a long time for your visitors anymore.

Segment heatmaps

Segment heatmaps provide a much more complex analysis than click heatmaps. It not only informs you which region of your website was the most popular, but it also tells you where that specific click came from. The software maintains track of the visitor’s origins and assesses the data accordingly.

The visitor may have arrived at your page after clicking on a link in one of your social media ads, they may have arrived at your website after clicking on your PPC ad, or they just come organically. With segment heatmaps, you can see this.

When it comes to optimizing the UX, you can observe which platform brings in the most visitors and how they interact with your site. As a result, you can tailor your website to each segment. You can also find out the demographics of your visitors.

Scroll heatmaps

The function of these heatmaps is to determine how many visitors are scrolling down your page.

Scroll heatmaps are mostly found on content-heavy interfaces, where it’s used to figure out how long articles are read on average. It is important data because you’ll be able to tell which parts of the article you should place a link to, and you can determine where you should write important information.

With this information in mind, you can place links to your product and indicate the most helpful information in the most popular places. This will make your blog posts much more valuable to your visitors, which will, in turn, enhance the user experience.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are more connections between web analytics and UX than you might think. We recommend that you use heatmaps to optimize the user experience. You can use all the methods listed above together. You can combine other methods, such as split testing (a.k.a. A/B testing), to further leverage data in your design decisions.

The post Heatmap Analysis To Improve Your Website UX appeared first on UX Mastery.

Don’t Ask Leading Questions

A leading question guides the respondent to a desired answer by implying that there is a correct answer. People tend to provide socially desirable answers, so if you ask a question that guides them, they will likely provide one that they believe you want to hear. Leading questions can be used by people to persuade someone. They should not be used when trying to uncover new information or understand an audience. They reduce the objectivity of the session, and therefore, reduce the reliability of the results.

Example:
Leading: ‘Why would you prefer to use our product?’
Better: ‘What are your thoughts about using our product?

In the leading example, it implies that the respondent prefers the product and is enquiring as to why. The respondent may list a bunch of reasons that they like the product but may leave out crucial information where they believe the product could improve. Asking about their opinions and thoughts will provide them with a platform to discuss the product freely.

Example:
Leading: Would you prefer to use the product to improve efficiencies or to gain an overview?
Better: Why might you use this product?

In this example, the interviewer provides two reasons why someone might use a product. The interviewer may have only considered the two reasons why someone may use the product. Simply asking why they may use the product achieves the same goal, but also allows the respondent to consider other options.

To avoid leading questions, act as if you know nothing of the topic. Note down what you would ask if you have no information at all. Keep the questions simple, neutral and free from any words with connotations or emotions. It is also best to have an independent observer assess the topic, as it is easier for them to have an unbiased opinion on the matter.

Behavioural, Attitudinal

People often hold a belief that does not match with their behaviours. Using a mixture of attitudinal and behavioural questions uncovers what a person does, but also their thoughts about their actions. Attitudinal questions are used to understand their opinions and motivations. Behavioural questions are used to find out how a participant does something. It is best to utilise a mixture.

Example:
Attitudinal: How often should you brush your teeth?
Behavioural: How many times did you brush your teeth last week?

Try to keep all behavioural questions about the user’s past, as future behaviours are influenced by opinions and attitudes. It is best practice to repeat questions from a different angle. Don’t be afraid of users repeating themselves or going over a topic multiple times.

Ask Open-Ended Questions Instead of Closed Questions

Open-ended questions are ones that require more than one word to answer. Closed questions result in either a yes/no situation. Open-ended questions are used to find out people’s goals, motivations and pain points. They provide an opportunity for the participant to speak freely on the topic.

Example:
Yes/No: Do you like coffee?
Open: What are your thoughts on coffee?

Closed questions should be avoided unless you want to either clarify to gain more context to the user’s situation. Yes/No questions close down conversations and can be considered as quantitative. The following examples are both fine to use in an interview, as they will put other details into perspective.

Context: Do you drink coffee?
Clarify: You mentioned you drink coffee, correct?

When creating your questionnaire, try and stick with ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ questions.

Don’t Use Double-Barreled Questions

Sometimes interviewers get excited and want to ask multiple things at once. Double-barreled questions touch on more than one topic. This can be overwhelming to answer, and respondents may either try to answer both at once or answer only one part of the question. If you want to ask something on multiple topics, it is best to split them into two different questions.

Example:
Double-barreled: What do you like about coffee and new coffee products?
Better: What do you like about coffee products?

It is normal in casual conversation to ask questions in such a manner. Interviewing is best when the questions are short and to the point, focusing on one topic.

Differentiate Between Quantitative and Qualitative Questions

Quantitative and qualitative questions both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Quantitative questions are typically reserved for surveys but can be used in interviewing to add some context and allow the interviewer to ask more follow-up questions. They mostly uncover ‘who’ and ‘what’. Qualitative questions will provide detailed information on the topic of interest, uncovering the ‘why’ and ‘how’.

Examples of quantitative questions:

• Numerical answers: How many coffees do you drink a day?
• Preferences: What type of coffee drink do you prefer?
• Single word answers: What brand of coffee do you drink?

It is not immediately obvious and clear-cut the quantitative nature of these questions. You can tell through the low complexity of data gathered. If you ask these questions to participants, you will get a straightforward answer. However, the issue is that the responses are not statistically valid, and require further investigation. You can better use your time in an in-depth one on one session asking qualitative questions such as:

Examples of qualitative questions:

• Recount your morning routine.
• Why do you prefer one brand over another?
• Why do you drink coffee everyday?

Shifting to why and how people do things, outlining goals, motivations, pain points and delights gives a much more in-depth perspective. These insights can be validated later through other techniques, but interviewing is the quickest and easiest way to gather them.

Wrap Up

For qualitative interviewing, there are few clear best practices. Each interviewer has their own way of gathering information and forming questions. The tips above are there to guide you but are not definitive rules that one cannot break. I hope these help to elevate your interviewing process and gather better insights.

The post How to Write Effective Qualitative Interview Questions appeared first on UX Mastery.

User research is now not only a deeply integrated part of business, but also using ResearchOps to align with the DevOps practices used by development teams, and DesignOps functions of production teams. So why is there such a broad range of different UX maturities across our professional landscape? And what specific role might ResearchOps play in supporting this maturity more equitably?

How UX maturity can be measured 

As the maturity of an applied user experience culture within an organisation grows and adapts over time, the specific approaches that people use for user research often also change. This reflects their progression through different stages of maturity. Knowing where your organisation and your team sit within these definitions of maturity is useful for helping you tailor a realistic approach to research and design for your stage of maturity. They can enable your team to effectively meet organisational strategic goals, while still remaining human centred. They can also help executives understand what UX people do, and what ‘good’ looks like.

‘UX Maturity Models’ are objective frameworks that enable organisations to categorise the quality and effectiveness of their user experience processes and practices. There are a number of UX maturity models out there, with most models defining a spectrum from low maturity (where user research is completely absent) up to the high maturity end (where research is well integrated into strategic decision making).

Bonus Resources:

– ‘How do you measure UX maturity?’ An empirical approach to validating and refining different UX Maturity Models — Jeff Sauro, MeasuringU

– ‘UX Maturity Models – A Collection’ by Natalie Hanson, anthropologist and UX professional.

ResearchOps framework as an indicator of UX maturity

As user research becomes more valued and more integrated within organisations, it starts occurring at scale… but along with that success, we are also confronted with a challenge where the mechanisms and strategies may not exist to support the growing user research practice. This is the problem that ResearchOps seeks to address.

Kate Towsey was the instigator of the #WhatIsResearchOps global workshops and research initiative, and a founder of the ResearchOps Community, an organised group of people openly learning what it means to build and manage research operations. Together, this resulted in the definition: “ResearchOps is the mechanisms and strategies that set user research in motion. It provides the roles, tools and processes needed to support researchers in delivering and scaling the impact of the craft across an organisation.” [source]

The ResearchOps framework developed in 2018 by the ResearchOps community is a good reference of the breath of ResearchOps. The framework defines the key elements of the ResearchOps practice, such as recruitment, knowledge management, governance and more. This framework is the result of analysis from a global survey as well as 33 workshops held around the world to help answer the question ‘What is ResearchOps?’. While the underpinning concepts of ResearchOps are not new, there is an increasing level of awareness and formal recognition of ResearchOps-specific roles. Establishing and growing a ResearchOps team is an indicator that an organisation is towards the mature end of most UX maturity models.

Bonus Resources:

– ‘The Eight Pillars of User Research’ How can you get started with ResearchOps unless you understand what is important to User Researchers? Emma Boulton explains.

– ‘Democratisation of UX Insights: What Does This Really Mean?’ Remote teams, online research tools, and efficient access to use feedback compel action at the operational level via ResearchOps. Alfonso de la Nuez

Deepening organisational maturity

It’s important to recognise that being on the mature end of various UX maturity models doesn’t mean that the UX practitioner’s job is done. It’s now about deepening the organisational maturity (rather than just shifting it up the maturity model). There are a number of factors to consider when going for depth in relation to ResearchOps. Some of these include:

• Requiring different mechanisms and strategies to support User Researchers, versus People Who Do Research (PwDR – a term coined by Kate Towsey). While it is ideal to have highly skilled user researchers doing research, the reality for large organisations often means that a large number of non-researchers are doing the research. They require different types of support to help move towards better quality research so that PwDR can conduct research on their own without support.
• Building and using an effective knowledge management system. We generate an immense amount of information in our research activities but turning information into valuable knowledge and insights that can be actioned and mined over time is a difficult process. User research repositories and libraries are all the rage at the moment but this is incredibly difficult to build and manage. Having access to a good tool to help with this is important but don’t forget to start with the user needs.
• Building research capability. There is often a shortage of highly skilled user researchers and ResearchOps people. Good people are an investment, and building research capability is one area that needs focus.
• Bringing together and supporting qualitative and quantitative research, particularly in relation to Big Data. 
• Cost, quality and the value of research. As ResearchOps centralises a number of the operational processes and costs of research, it becomes more evident how much it costs to do research across the organisation. This quickly changes the conversation to the quality of research being conducted, the value it has for organisational strategic and service decision making process, and the impact the research is making.  

Bonus Resource:

– How to Grow User Research in your organisation Nikki Anderson, a qualitative user experience researcher.

Extending UX maturity

A ResearchOps practice is certainly not the only indicator of UX maturity of an organisation, but it is definitely a factor, particularly for larger organisations. A ResearchOps practice is just the start of the journey – there is so much growth in this space. If you want to learn more about ResearchOps, please join the global ResearchOps community and contribute as we are all on the journey together.

The post Success in ResearchOps: An indicator of UX maturity appeared first on UX Mastery.

In the quiet of a crisp Minneapolis morning in November 2017, Zack Naylor stared at his laptop screen. An email had just blinked into his inbox, in reply to some routine customer research he was doing for his product strategy software, Aurelius. The sender line showed it was from one of their earliest customers, but it was the message itself that sent tingles down his spine.

“We’re actually exclusively using the beta now”.

At that time, Aurelius was product strategy software, just entering its third year. It had recently launched a beta version that reimagined the tool with a focus on research and insights. What made this email special was its confirmation that Aurelius customers were now using the beta—the optional beta—more than the product they were actually paying for. 

“It was an interesting, but also a very proud moment… It became very clear to us we should sunset the older product and focus everything on research and insights,” Zack told us.

It was the point where they pivoted direction, changing tack to become the popular research and insights platform we now know as Aurelius.

Planting the Seed: Zack’s Early Career

Zack describes himself in his early career as a “pretty good front-end developer, and an okay visual designer”. He was dabbling with an approach to design that didn’t really have a name or clear definition yet. He was working in start-ups, and through practical experience taught himself the principles of user research. Utterly fascinated, he read everything he could about what would later become popularly known as ‘UX’, working further back in the human-centered design process, starting with his design and development view until he was at the early stages of discovery and product strategy. As many UX professionals can relate, he got bitten by the UX bug and didn’t look back. 

Zack had UX experience working in both Fortune 500 and startup contexts, but it was with his move to Minnesota for a job at The Nerdery that many pieces fell into place for him. The Nerdery is a strategy, design and technology consultancy, and his role as the Principal UX Designer there gave him responsibility for up to 50 active projects across his team at any given time. What this meant, practically, was his ten thousand hours in teaching people and building a research practice.

“I realized that while I could teach anybody how to design, it’s much more difficult to teach people the right things to design.” 

He also realized that the best way to do this is by creating a design culture with a foundation of customer empathy backed by solid insights gathered from user research. 

The Nerdery gave him experience in helping people make the right decisions on designs, products, and features, and as a result, he discovered for himself the constants within this type of effort. “There are a number of patterns for how you ought to approach this work. It doesn’t matter where you are, what the industry is, what your team looks like… There are some pretty basic universal truths”. He wanted to help people make these decisions at scale, rather than have to hire someone every time. It was in this environment and way of thinking that he met his future business partner, Joseph Szczesniak, and Aurelius was born. 

Genesis of Aurelius

It was just before November 2015 that they were in Zack’s basement (surely a place where great ideas are born) discussing product strategy. “There’s got to be a way we can help people make these decisions better—like we did when we were actually hired to help them”. After an inevitable round of brainstorming, they emerged with some exciting concepts for building the software to help. 

Aurelius thus began as a product strategy platform that valued research and insights. A lot of hard work went into developing the idea and its execution, and things grew rapidly.

Juggling time while building Aurelius

Aurelius is 100% bootstrapped and self-funded – which means all the design mapping, UI creation, development, startup admin, problem solving, and everything else, happened on their own personal time. Zack would wake up at 4:00am to clock in on Aurelius for several hours, do a morning workout, and then go on to his day job. At night he’d get home to spend more time with his family, then make some more progress on Aurelius.

With two young kids—a one-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son—plus full-time work, commitments as the president of the UXPA, and all of the Aurelius workload, there isn’t much time leftover. 

“Any of my time and attention that does not go towards my family, Aurelius, or my full-time job; I basically don’t do”. 

Both co-founders are in Minneapolis, but much of Zack and Joseph’s connecting is done remotely. Despite being only 20 minutes away from each other, meeting online is much easier for simply getting things done.

Zack laughed when we asked where he got his energy and persistence from. He says it’s a matter of dedication; it’s because he loves what Aurelius does, and they really want to solve this problem with research, to help people and teams make sense of what they learn. 

This motivation is uncommon amongst a startup culture often driven by dreams of corporate takeovers and buyouts. Aurelius intends to remain self-funded. “We don’t want to take funding because both of us have worked in startups and seen how various levels of funding influence direction and priority and, quite frankly, mess up the direction of your product. That’s important to people like us because we are the people who do that work. We want to stay very true to solving that problem.”

As you’d find with many successful startups; it’s also about passion, “We work really hard learning from customers and folks in the industry to help Aurelius support successful products and successful companies. That’s what drives me.”

Motivation to solve the ResearchOps problem

You get another insight about what motivates Zack in the way he describes Aurelius as a vitamin;

“You may not feel like you need to take a vitamin today, but four or five years down the road, if you weren’t getting an essential vitamin, you’d really regret it.”

Aurelius helps you build a research repository so that you can come back and get even more out of the research you’ve already done. “When it comes to ResearchOps, InsightOps, and DataOps, there are great, sophisticated tools for doing the design. But we don’t have good, sophisticated tools for making sure we’re designing the right things. And that’s arguably much more important.” 

Zack suggests that most products fall on one side of the fence or the other: they are either a painkiller or a vitamin. Painkillers might suppress the problem for the time being, but vitamins keep the practice healthy for years to come. “Aurelius is very much a vitamin. It helps you grow your research practice into a healthy asset for the business.”

The Pivot: Moving from Product Strategy Tool to ResearchOps Engine

The original version of Aurelius was targetted to product strategy, and Zack estimates ten percent of signups wanted it just as it was. But it was the other 90% that often said things like ‘I love this. I wish we were mature enough to work this way. But tell me more about this research and insights piece that you’ve got’. Once they’d heard that more than a few times, Zack and Joseph got curious. There was a pattern of people struggling with organizing, applying, and getting more out of the research they had already done.

 “As you mature in research practice, the broader product strategy problem will actually start to become apparent.”

People were interested in the research and insights potential of Aurelius — but what was the solution? The decision was made to take it out and make it it’s own product: the beta version of Aurelius version 2 was a dedicated research and insights platform. While this was emerging they still had paying customers using the original version 1, but then came the moment that Zack will never forget. “It was one of those early mornings where I got an email from one of our first, early customers on Version 1. I was doing some regular customer research with them… and I remember them saying, ‘We’re actually exclusively using the beta right now’. They had paid upfront for a year’s license of Version 1, but were basically neglecting it for the beta of the new product.”

Their customers were using the new beta more than their paid product, justifying it by describing the purpose and supporting functionality as a better fit. It was a very proud moment for Zack. He followed it up with other existing customers “If we killed v1 tomorrow and just continued building this, would you even blink an eye?” The answer? No, they wouldn’t.

“It became very clear to us we should sunset the older product and focus everything on research and insights. And we’ve been far more successful as a result.”

The Shift: How Aurelius Changed

Aurelius reinvented itself as a research and insights platform with some novel approaches to solve traditional problems of user research analysis and synthesis.

In short, it helps you tag, analyze, organize, search, and share everything you learn from a qualitative research dataset. Notes, connections and patterns learned from customers, Aurelius helps speed up the process of discovery. 

By collating research in Aurelius, you automatically start building a research library. This holds some powerful potential. When asked what was learnt from a particular research project there are two common outcomes:

1. You weren’t the person who did the research, and maybe they’re gone, so a lot of the native fluency with the findings are lost. You may need to redo the research. Or,
2. What was learnt wasn’t captured in enough detail by the original report—so it’s only a snapshot in time.

With Aurelius, this isn’t a problem as it’s already been recorded and tagged, possibly even while still in the research session itself. The platform is flexible in how it can work, where you can add and connect key insights. You can take a bottom-up approach where notes can be used to create insights. It was intentionally built flexible enough for customers to do that.

It could also be described as a multi-functional note collation tool. Whether you’re recording research as transcripts, notes—or a mix of both—you can use Aurelius to tag as you record, and then theme and group thoughts you want to focus on and think about more deeply. It helps you see what you have and what you’re still missing, so you have more time to focus and work on your insights.

It also means more flexibility across design teams. You don’t need to just hand over a report; teams can explore and dig deeper into the original data, discovering new things of their own via tags and key insights in the project space. When teams have access to the entire, raw collection of evidence, organized in a way that’s easy to see, new opportunities for discovery can open up.

Zack recounts a story shared by a paying customer in the Version 1 days, who told him it was often ‘faster and easier’ for them to do a whole new research project than to put together learnings they had collected in past research.

“I mean, that just hit me like a ton of bricks because that should just never be true… As an industry we can do a better job than that. I got very passionate about tackling it, and today it’s one of the biggest reasons why people come to Aurelius.”

Aurelius supports user experience designers in the way they out to think.

“No single tool will make anybody good at UX design. I very, very strongly believe that. Simply put, Aurelius helps researchers do the work that they are doing today, but makes it faster and easier.”

The Meta of using Aurelius to build Aurelius

Zack and Joseph use their own platform daily, to understand future improvements for the Aurelius platform. “Everything I learned from customers, everything I learn even from prospects of the market, I use Aurelius projects to do that”

“We want research to actually inform the direction of where a company goes because these are the most successful products and companies in my opinion”.

Once teams have the ability to organize and do more things with the research and insights they have stored in a respository, then they’re able to consider the bigger picture, and ask for more of what they need from the platform. Ultimately, as part of Aurelius, Zack wants to support these people as genuinely as possible. And 99% of the time Zack is the one doing that; answering support questions, responding to feature requests, fixing bugs. “I take a lot of pride in the fact that people really appreciate it, despite how small we are. We care about what we’re doing and the people we’re trying to serve”. 

Both co-founders are clear about the problem to be solved: to help people make sense of what they learn. “User research is going to help you make better products, better features, better designs, better decisions. We’re just trying to help you do that faster”.

Mention UX Mastery to get 10% off any Aurelius plan, just email Aurelius after you sign up to claim the offer.

The post Living the change from Product Strategy to Research Ops: The Journey of Aurelius Labs appeared first on UX Mastery.

Well, you’re not alone. Thousands of UX researchers across the world see the clear need in being able to efficiently organize, search and reuse their past research insights. Often referred to as ‘user research repositories’, teams are looking for systems and tools that allow them to get the most out of their user research efforts without hiring more researchers or getting additional resources. Our world—and the work we do—are both moving faster. The quicker we can answer someone’s question about past research insights; the more valuable our work can be for the entire company.

What is a User Research Repository?

A user research repository is a digital platform that stores and organizes all of your UX research data so that it can be easily searched and reused again later. This can take many forms such as traditional tools like Google Docs/Drive, Confluence and internal wikis, as well as newer platforms built specifically for the purpose – like Aurelius, the one I co-founded.

The main goal for any user research repository is the ability to quickly search through past research studies to apply those insights at a later time. Other primary goals for teams include finding patterns across multiple studies, and sharing the data and key insights across the organization.

A user research database or repository provides the ability to quickly search and trace your findings to particular past studies, allowing you and your team to get more mileage out of the research you’re already doing. As teams look to get faster and more efficient, having a system like this in place allows you to reuse past research insights where appropriate and focus new research efforts in the right places.

Rise of the UX Research Repository

These systems have recently become popular for several reasons. Mainly, researchers are realizing that many of the tools we use to do our work aren’t built for the purpose of UX research. The ways in which we take notes, analyze our data, document our findings and ultimately store all of that information is often scattered across multiple tools or platforms; none of which are built particularly well for user researchers’ needs.

The ever-popular standby of a research report is a great example. UX research reports are traditionally the most common way of sharing and communicating findings from a study. Where research reports sometimes fail us is that they don’t include all of the data and insights we’ve gathered from any particular study. Often, research reports only include summary findings and answers to questions that immediately address the needs of a project. The information contained in them is not easily searchable, making it harder to find specific findings or insights that may apply to a future need. This means a lot of valuable customer insight gets lost.

We also see the landscape of our teams and work changing. Many UX research teams are working across multiple time zones and physical locations. This means the traditional affinity diagrams with post-it notes on a physical wall is getting harder to do together.

This change in landscape is also clear in the recent rise in popularity and definition of the ‘ResearchOps’ (or ‘ReOps’) community. The practice of user research is maturing in many organizations, causing a realization that our work and processes can, and should, benefit from refined “operationalization” to increase efficiency and value to the entire organization. A user research repository is only one part of this but clearly fulfills the need to easily search and share past research and reduce wasted effort on conducting research that’s already been done.

When should you Invest in a User Research Repository?

If you’re not already using, building or looking into a research repository, then the answer is ‘now’. As with many things that bring us a lot of value in the long run, investing the time and effort today pays off dramatically later.

I’ve often described our very own platform, Aurelius, as a vitamin instead of a pain killer. Vitamins don’t often provide much instant gratification, but they prevent the need for pain killers later. Taking vitamins now gives you confidence that you’ll be healthier for your yearly check-up with your doctor and allow you to enjoy life for years to come. The same is true with research repositories, as they setup your research practice for long term success.

Getting Started with a User Research Repository

Before jumping head first into a research repository, consider who will be using it and how you’ll want to reuse past research data. Obviously a good first step here is to examine how you’d like to be able to search, organize and reuse your research today. Problems, challenges and opportunities you have here-and-now will help define the model, features and workflow you should look for in a new platform. All of this will help guide you in deciding which tool(s) can best fit your needs.

Here are 6 steps to guide you in getting started with a user research repository:

1. Appoint someone to own the “library” or repository

It’s important, just like in any project, that someone is the ‘owner’ of the effort required for getting your very own UX research database up and running. This person can, and should be, driving the effort forward — but should also be making sure the team and stakeholders involved have their say in what’s important for such a platform. The owner can gather feedback from the team on tools, vendors and more to drive the ultimate decision and implementation for starting up your new user research repository. Finally, this person should be the shepherd of the platform — ensuring its use and adoption is done in the way most appropriate for your company.

2. Organize your research projects with consistency

Once you’ve decided on a tool or platform, it’s critical to have a consistent organization scheme for your projects. At Aurelius, we see teams commonly organize their projects in one of two ways; by project or by product. Sometimes people use a mix of both but, whatever you choose, be consistent so that finding those projects is much easier once they’re complete.

3. Add notes, data, observations, and feedback

Choose a system that allows you to tag and code your data as you collate user research in real time. We’ve found this is most helpful as it not only speeds up your analysis time but also builds your research library as you’re doing research — two for one!

Work out the wrinkles in your data tagging and encoding. This can feel tricky at first but don’t fret. Feel free to tag data as liberally as you need to at first. Doing so will allow you and your team to quickly find the appropriate tags, taxonomy and application for all of your upcoming projects. My general recommendation is to use tags for notes and data to help speed up analysis and create themes, then use tags for things like findings and key insights to describe them for easy finding and reuse later.

Get all those notes and observations into your repository so everything is in one place. Once there all tagged in the way you like, your research hub is slowly growing on its own!

4. Do analysis and synthesis in your repository

This will be highly dependent on which tool and/or platform you choose, but we highly recommend doing your analysis and sense-making in your repository itself. Again, if you’re coding and tagging your research notes and data in real time right in the tool, this should dramatically speed up analysis time and then provides you the ability to trace back a single data point to key findings later on… all in one place.

5. Create Key Insights, nuggets and findings

It cannot be overstated that creating digestible statements of learning within your user research repository is a must. At Aurelius, we call them Key Insights. They’ve often been referred to as “nuggets” by Tomer Sharon and his initial work in developing his own in house solution while at WeWork. Additionally, many UX researchers call them key findings or highlights. That said, we recommend creating Key Insights that have four parts, which are:

• Name – The statement of what you learned from the research
• Description – Further detail about that finding for context
• Tags – Descriptors of the key insight based on product, theme, topic, persona, etc.
• Supporting Data – Notes, observations, artifacts and data that support and/or led to your statement of learning

6. Grouping, search and share your Key Insights

Once you have all these pieces in place you should group, organize, search and share your Key Insights. Do this in way that provides access to these findings, to helpfully inform actions taken across your team and company.

We typically recommend grouping Key Insights across multiple projects by:

• product
• persona/customer segment
• team/department
• global theme, or
• business goal

Each of these groupings could have overlapping key insights and that’s just fine. The important point here is that now you have a system in place to quickly search and share relevant user research insights with all interested parties based on their role, function or focus.

Next Steps

Getting your team up and running with a user research repository doesn’t have to be a huge task. As I said, once you choose a central place to store all of your user research data – whether it’s Aurelius or another tool – choose someone to own the rollout, training, and adoption of that platform.

Once you’ve chosen a tool or platform, follow the rest of the steps above. To quickly bring in past research data, we suggest focusing on those past Key Insights first and then bringing in previous study raw data as you find extra time.

We’ve found that following these guidelines in your user research process will dramatically help you organize, search and reuse your findings across multiple projects. Ultimately, it should help you build a solid user research repository as you’re doing your work. It means there are no extra steps, and it will result in your research having a greater impact at your company.

Mention UX Mastery to get 10% off any Aurelius plan, just email Aurelius after you sign up to claim the offer.

The post How to Organize and Reuse Research Insights appeared first on UX Mastery.

Shopify is the world’s leading e-commerce platform with 800,000+ people from 175 countries using its platform as of 2018. Its ability to empower entrepreneurs and small businesses has pushed it to the forefront of the industry.

Shopify’s design and research team has been growing steadily over the past few years. We spoke with Erik Goyette, and other members of the Shopify design and research team, to learn more about how they approach user research and design.

What’s Shopify’s mission?

Erik: Shopify is a commerce platform that helps entrepreneurs and businesses of any size design, set up, and manage commerce stores across multiple sales channels. We provide merchants with a powerful back-office and a single view of their business. Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone so that entrepreneurs around the world can easily start a business to sell online, through social media or in person.

How does user research work across Shopify?

Erik: Shopify’s goal is to help small and large businesses become more successful, so making sure our product is easy to use is essential. We’re super passionate about understanding the problems our users have and building tools that will help them accomplish what they need to do.

One thing that maybe differentiates us from other businesses is that user research is directly embedded into teams. Being part of a team helps us researchers get a lot of deep context in a specific product area. On the other hand, researchers love discovering new things, so we also have the freedom to stray off the path and start digging into larger, more undefined problem spaces.

Could you let us know about a recent user research project?

Erik: I conducted a series of exploratory interviews and concept tests for my first project at Shopify, and thought to continue using my old method for sharing information: an atomic research database (Tomer Sharon explains the method best here).

I analyzed all of the interviews into a bunch of really interesting individual observations that were then grouped up into insights. As a researcher, I love this method because it serves as a very detailed, searchable, and well organized “second brain”.

However, as a method of sharing findings, it wasn’t very effective. The team had very specific questions to answer and though the answers were available, the atomic research format has a little more friction involved in finding them. Where a presentation or a report pushes insights to its audience, insights have to be pulled out of atomic research. As a method of sharing research, it’s much more demanding on the people who need insights to inform their decisions.

Realizing the lack of engagement with the atomic research format, I went through and turned some of the more relevant insights into stories. Those stories were then included in a little presentation.

Stories informed by data is very impactful at Shopify, so I’ll have to find out how to pair that with atomic research as a method. Ideally, atomic research doesn’t just exist as a hyper-detailed library of knowledge, but also as a driver for change.

What software does Shopify use? What have you tried in the past? What’s been working well?

Erik: We use Slack and G Suite extensively. We try to use tools that the rest of the company also uses, so we can more easily collaborate and share resources. But we’re also lucky to have the freedom to use whatever we believe will get the best results.

For interviews, we’ll often use Google Hangouts, Zoom, or Lookback. The nice thing about Google Hangouts is that participants don’t have to install anything, but it doesn’t work if you’re using Safari. Lookback is a fun one because it works on mobile and desktop. Notes you take are time-stamped to the recording, which is fantastic when reviewing.

To catalog our research, we’ve built a research library. Anyone across the company can go there to find our reports, slide decks, and recordings of our presentations.

Dovetail’s been great for our research team as well because if we’re ever curious about certain keywords or themes, we can search across multiple projects for them. With 50 researchers, there’s a lot of qualitative data available to remix and learn from. In a way, it’s become our second research library in addition to being our main tool for qualitative analysis (goodbye, spreadsheets!).

What challenges do you have with user research?

Erik: Before focusing on research, I was a UX specialist. I dabbled in designing the product (wireframes and interaction design patterns) in addition to running research initiatives. When designing, I received a lot of feedback on my work that helped me re-assess my approach. Moving to a role where my focus is now entirely user research, I’ve been reflecting on how I receive feedback and how I measure the success of my research.

If I compare research to the design and engineering disciplines, where there are very clearly defined opportunities for feedback from team members, the feedback cycle for a researcher is less structured and less frequent. We’ll get eyes on our research plan. If we’re lucky, or ask for it, we’ll get some feedback on how the research findings were presented. Questions about whether or not we could have shared the information in a better, clearer, or more memorable way are rare. Feedback on how the analysis was performed? That’s a black box for most people, and it takes a long time for even a talented researcher to understand someone else’s analysis, so the lack of feedback there is understandable.

What we’re often left with as feedback on how we’re performing is the impact of our research. If the research leads to a project (which isn’t always the case) it can be a difficult thing to measure because of the long stretch of time that user research lives at.

As a researcher, you could be conducting exploratory research on a project that won’t be prioritized until a roadmap planning meeting many months in the future. Leading up to that meeting, you could try measuring the impact of your work by paying attention to how people think about a problem. At the very least, you can feel a sense of satisfaction when something you have uncovered becomes a team’s focus. It isn’t necessarily something you use to improve on your work and methodology in the future, but it’s nice to know that there was alignment on a goal and user research played a part.

What’s changing about user research at Shopify?

Erik: As Shopify expands into new markets, we’re exploring how researchers who have a deep understanding of a product area can approach international research. Localization of content is one thing, but we also have to consider how business processes and expectations may be different in each of the countries we support.

We’ve also been checking in on how our knowledge management solutions are performing. In an effort to be more resourceful, we’re going to make sure existing user research is organized and formatted in a way that can be consumed and understood by other teams. Some research is almost timeless and will always be relevant.

Why do you do what you do?

Erik: I am absolutely in love with Shopify’s users. They’re driven, they’re smart, and they’re a wonderfully diverse group of people. Seeing someone gain independence by turning their passion into a business is so inspiring. Every day I wake up wanting to better understand how they work, what their challenges are, and uncover opportunities for us to help them reach their goals.

Any advice for new user researchers?

Erik: If you’re new to the industry or are thinking of turning user research into a career, my biggest hope is that you already have some of the foundational stuff down. The most important thing you’ll need starting off is the ability to think critically about the projects you’re working on, the questions people are asking, and your own work. You have to be able to zoom in, fuss over the details, and then zoom out to see the whole picture at a high level. If you have that down, you’ll be in a really good place to grow.

What comes afterwards is getting experience and growing your skillset. You don’t need to have first hand experience running card sorts, usability tests, interviews, surveys or a dozen workshops under your belt. You’ll learn that as you go, and improve over time.

With that in mind, it’s important to find an environment that’ll allow you to try out a bunch of research methods. For me, that environment was working at start-ups. Start-ups move at a rapid pace, and people will tend to run off and build while still holding some risky assumptions (with the best intentions). If you can find yourself in a place like that, equipped with your research mindset, you can experience a lot of growth and have a lot of influence. The skill you’ll have is the ability to test assumptions before anyone has to invest hundreds of hours into building something.

The rapid pace also means projects might wrap up relatively quickly, giving you the opportunity to learn from the launch, find the gaps, learn from them, and experiment with your research methods next time. If you’re resourceful and can handle the pace of the work, you’ll expand your skill set dramatically in a very short period of time.

The post Inside Research – Interview with Erik Goyette, User Researcher at Shopify appeared first on UX Mastery.

Body language experts Barbara and Allan Pease have been researching this domain for over thirty years. In their book, The Definitive Book of Body Language, they reveal what many of us fail to recognise and understand when others try to communicate with us.

The Mirror Neuron

Research has identified a Mirror Neuron which attributes this behaviour to a physiological phenomenon. We are wired to mimic the reactions of those we interact with on a daily basis.

Unsurprisingly, scientists call this effect mirroring. It also works the other way around—a frown may yield a frown from the other party. Researcher Ulf Dimberg conducted experiments on 120 volunteers, measuring their facial muscle activity while viewing pictures of both happy and angry faces. When told to do the opposite of the pictures (e.g. smile while looking at a picture of an angry person) their facial twitching suggested that they were unconsciously trying to mirror the same reaction as the picture they were viewing, even though they were told to do the opposite.

While smiles are infectious, so are frowns and angry faces. After a long gruelling day of research it’s important for us as researchers to put on a happy face as best we can, even if it pains us to do so. Any hint of discontent might rub the participant the wrong way, making them feel bad or, even worse, neglected.

Strategic Gestures

Strategically smiling—knowing that the participant will likely smile back—sounds like you might be leading them, the way you are told not to when running a research session. But the tendency for humans to mirror one another’s gestures is so powerful that whether you remain neutral-faced or smiling, you’ll be leading them regardless.

The last thing you want a participant to do is to tell you what you want to hear. As a moderator, one of your primary goals is to make your participant feel comfortable enough to speak their mind about “the good, the bad, the ugly.” Gesturing positively builds the rapport required to get them feeling more at ease. Ultimately this will enable them to provide more truthful (and useful) information than they would if they were not relaxed.

Smiles reveal deeper aspects of human emotions. Not all smiles are created equal. Body language experts Barbara and Allan Pease describe 5 different types of smiles. Each of these has a different MO. Two of these smiles in particular may be useful to identify to help redirect UX research sessions.

The tight-lipped smile

The tight-lipped smile is when a person’s lips are stretched tight across their face in a straight line concealing their teeth. When you see this smile, there is a good chance that the person has a secret that they are unwilling to share with you.

During a UX research session, when you encounter this gesture, you might want to ask gently: “is there anything else you would like to share with me that you haven’t already mentioned?” This last part is important. It implies that as a keen observer you suspect there is something else that they are reluctant to share with you. Always reassure them whatever they share with you will not go beyond the research project.

Consider meeting them at their level by mirroring their facial gestures. This will demonstrate empathy for their situation. They will feel like they are being heard and understood. Making gestures that oppose their own could run the risk of coming across as antagonistic and apathetic. If they are smiling, you smile. If they are frowning, then frown with slight concern demonstrating your empathy and willingness to listen. Worst case scenario, they reject your request. Best case, they feel more comfortable sharing.

Always be mindful of them trying to please you as you empathise with their cause. Revert to a neutral stance whenever you feel like you are losing the candour from mirroring them.

The drop-jaw smile

Another common type of smile you may come across is the drop-jaw smile. This smile involves the person deliberately dropping their jaw to give the impression to others that they are laughing or are happy. It is commonly used by politicians to get votes, or actors to get a laugh from their audience. The drop-jaw smile is intended to get a positive reaction from its recipient.

One of the things I insert into my research protocols before beginning the main parts of my interview guide is requesting the participant tells me what they see, think and feel, not what they think I want to hear. Participants who deliver a drop-jaw smile might be trying to tell you what you want to hear. When you see this gesture during a session, do a sanity check with your participant. Make sure what they are telling you is their opinion and not someone else’s. They might say something like: well, I think people in my field would love to have a feature like this! Redirect and make the conversation about them: while it’s interesting to know that others would use this. How about you? How would you use a feature like this in your daily work?

Micro-gestures can tell us how a person really feels

According to body language experts it is very difficult to fake body language for long periods of time. Eventually the truth reveals itself in the form of micro-gestures. These are the body’s unconscious actions revealing themselves as a person’s conscious effort to conceal their authentic self weakens. It might be pupil dilation, facial muscle twitching, accelerated blinking, sweating, blushing, a momentary sneer. Research has shown that these micro-gestures occur within a split second and are very difficult to catch. As elusive as they are, the may provide some flag to a researcher that further investigation might be warranted.

During UX research sessions, look for changes in facial expressions.

Those brief flashes of concern or stress that sail across their face disappearing (as fast as they showed up) might suggest they may have more to share. It might be a pain point that could provide insight for your research effort,or an interesting anecdote that reveals an insight for your final report. Tread carefully though. Don’t acknowledge that you’ve picked up on the cue. Use it as a speed-bump to slow down. Wait for them to come forward with more info if they feel like it. Embrace any awkward silences that come your way. Those deliberate pauses give their micro-gestures a chance to breathe.

Understanding your participant’s body language ultimately allows you to build a better rapport and achieve a deeper level of empathy. View the signals offered up by gestures as opportunities to broaden your view of their reality and gain insights for your research.

References;

Dimberg, U., Thunberg, M., Elmehed, K., “Unconscious facial reactions to emotional facial expressions,” Psychological Science 11 (2000).

Pease, A., & Pease, B. (2006). The Definitive Book of Body Language. New York: Bantam Dell Pub Group.

The post Understanding Body Language In UX Research Part II appeared first on UX Mastery.

This will give you an enhanced awareness of what to look for so that a potentially wasteful session could make for a more productive one…

A participant that you’ve been moderating a session with is sitting upright with his ankles locked next to you. His fingers are interlocked and his lips pursed. He answers your question with a head nod reassuringly, but succinctly, “Yeah sure. I’d use this tool if it were available to me.”

As soon as he finishes speaking he begins to scratch the back of his neck. He touches his nose.

In this example, should we believe what the participant is saying? Is he being forthright? He nodded his head, didn’t he? But what did he mean by scratching his neck? Maybe he was just anxious. Maybe he wasn’t. It’s very difficult to tell based on all of his gestures. You will soon find out there is more to reading body language than looking at a couple of gestures.

According to body language experts Allan and Barbara Pease, authors of The Definitive Book of Body Language, gestures must be viewed in combinations called clusters in order to be accurately interpreted; the context of these gestures also need to be considered.

The everyday gestures that we use are windows into how we are truly feeling. They give us suggestions as to whether or not someone is lying or telling the truth, interested or bored, stressed or relaxed, feeling intimidated or wanting to intimidate.

Most of the time when doing in-person UX research sessions, we ignore body language in favour of the spoken word.

As a UX researcher I admittedly spend much more time listening to the words of participants rather than reading their body language. When we listen to their opinions we try to assess whether they are truthful. Observing their actions also helps us evaluate their credibility. Reading the words on a page gets easier as we age, interpreting body language doesn’t; we get stuck in the learning stage of what psychologist Martin Broadwell calls unconscious incompetence.

It tends to get nestled into our unconscious mind, making itself inaccessible and upstaged by what we hear. We simply don’t know what to do with the information. We might visually recognise that a person is reacting to something we say but we don’t necessarily invest enough time interpreting whether these gestures actually mean anything.

Should we? Some would argue that we shouldn’t. But several studies have shown that we can reliably improve our understanding. Can we use what we learn from reading someone’s cluster of gestures to our advantage when it comes to moderating UX research sessions?

Two research-based insights that have important implications for moderating UX research sessions are:

• A persons gestures and emotions bidirectionally influence one another
• A key place to look when someone is not being forthright is the face

According to body language experts, a person’s’ gestures and emotions bidirectionally influence one another.

Research on priming proves this. Professor Daniel Kahnemann, in his modern classic book about heuristics and biases, Thinking, Fast and Slow indicates that actions and emotions can be primed by events people aren’t even aware of. To prove that actions and emotions can bidirectionally affect one another, an experiment with college students was conducted where students were asked to hold a pencil between their teeth for a few seconds forcing their mouth either into a smile or a frown while reading The Far Side cartoon and rating its humour. The students who found the cartoons funnier were the ones whose face was forced into a smile.

If changing a person’s facial expression primes them into changing their sentiment while reading a comic strip, could we not do the same in UX research sessions?

How can we prime a participant in such a way that they would be inclined to disclose more information

We would need to identify when they might be holding back information from the moderator. What stance might they take when unwilling to be as open about themselves during a session? According to body language experts, people may cross their arms or legs to form a defensive barrier between themselves and others. They may keep their palms closed and facing down.

By recognising the clusters; in this case the defensive poses. The context; in this case their unwillingness to provide more information during a session. The moderator can then find a way to prime them into a more open position.

If there is a stimulus or artefact as a part of the research protocol, use this as an opportunity to get them to hold it in their hands. If it’s on a computer, then have them move closer to the computer. They may be forced to unfold their arms or change their posture so that they can see the screen. Their palms may be opened suggesting a willingness to engage more openly. Once they change their posture participants are more likely to provide more feedback to the moderator making for more fruitful research insights.   

Body language experts suggest a key place to look at when a person is not being forthright is the face.

According to their research, we are likely to cover our eyes, ears or mouth with our hands when we hear or speak lies. A study of nurses in a role-playing situation were told to lie to their patients. The nurses who lied showed more hand-to-face gestures than those who didn’t. Those common lying gestures include: covering of the mouth, touching of the nose, rubbing of the eye, grabbing of the ear, scratching of the neck, pulling of their collar, or putting finger(s) in their mouth. Recognising these signs along with incompatible dialogue will help you weigh whether or not to consider excluding participant data.

Consider double-downing on your inquiry by rephrasing questions differently and see if the same answer is achieved. Seek clarification when body language tells you otherwise. Read back to the participant their earlier response and follow up with questions like “can you tell me more about that?” or “what did you mean when you said…?” If they respond differently than what they said earlier then there is a good chance that their gestures were revealing the truth about their lies.

In part II we will examine other gestures that hint at a person not being honest. Stay tuned!

References
Pease, A., & Pease, B. (2006). The Definitive Book of Body Language. New York: Bantam Dell Pub Group.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Navarro, J., & Karlins, M. (2008). What Every Body Is Saying. New York: HarperCollins.

Strack, F., Martin, L., and Stepper, S., (1988). “Inhibiting and facial conditions of the human smile: a non-obtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.

Valentine, J., Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts (2011). New York: McGraw Hill.
“Conscious Competence Learning Model.” (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.businessballs.com/self-awareness/conscious-competence-learning-model-63/#toc-9

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This is part of our series of reviews of online UX courses. Read some of our other reviews or see our full list of online UX courses.

Course Information

• Course Name: User Research – Methods and Best Practices
• Creator: Interaction Design Foundation
• Length: The estimated time to complete this course is a total of 13 hours 22 mins spread over 9 weeks.*
• Intended Audience: This is an intermediate-level course recommended for anyone involved or interested in product design and development.
• What You’ll Learn: What qualitative research is, how you can incorporate it into your own design process, and how to plan and carry out a range of research projects.
• Assumed Knowledge: Some basic knowledge of UX and research principals would be useful, but the course is intuitive enough for a beginner to benefit from it.
• Price: US $13/month paid yearly for as many courses as you like.

* They’re quite specific with their estimates!

Review

It’s been a while since I did any online training and I’d forgotten what to expect so I was both surprised and impressed by the format of this course. My first impression was excellent. Upon initial login I was met by a screen which very clearly laid out how the course works, how much time I should expect to invest, how long I’ll have access, and my favourite bit – the option to add the course schedule to my calendar. As a person that frequently starts things off with a bang and then lets them fizzle out as I get busy, an ongoing calendar prompt is a big win. So nice one on that front, IDF.

The first thing I noticed when I started work was that this course is very content heavy. The introductory video was long and fairly onerous. It could have been half as long and delivered the same message.

As I moved through the first exercise I found that the variety of content types (video, reading, exercises, diagrams etc) helped to break things up, but is still pretty heavy going. You have to be feeling sharp when you sit down to work. A mix of presenters keeps things interesting and students are frequently encouraged to think about how the topic of discussion relates to their environment, which helps the ideas to stick.

Mini quizzes at the end of each section ensure that you are keeping up and not just skimming, which is clever. These questions, along with a running timeline to demonstrate your progress are good for the motivation. As the course progresses the quizzes become assignments and their score weight increases. I was very impressed by how thoroughly the assignments are explained, often giving sample answers to keep you on the right track.

The structure of the lessons is well thought out. An idea is introduced and clearly explained through text or video. Real life examples are used frequently which helps with conceptualising, and sections are well summarised at their completion. There are plenty of supplementary links to extra reading and resources relating to key ideas.

The course took me longer than the suggested timeline, but that didn’t really bother me. It was very easy to pick up where I left off and it was easy to jump back to refresh my memory when necessary. This course doesn’t offer mentoring but you do have the support of an online community of learners which is helpful for feeling connected and bouncing ideas around. It culminates in a final assignment at the end of Lesson 8 and assuming you get a score of 70% or above across the whole course, a certificate is awarded.

Pros

• A very well planned and structured course with an intuitive UI;
• Excellent, clear explanations of processes and ideas;
• Good use of real life examples; and
• Interesting, relevant quizzes along the way which allow you to apply context to your thinking.

Cons

• Some videos were an hour long which made it hard to stay focussed; and
• Occasional minor spelling mistakes irked me.

Summary

This course is excellent and I highly recommend it for anyone that has space to really focus and make the most of it. This is not a course that you can skim – the content goes deep and you have to work hard to apply it to real world situations but it’s worth it. I look forward to taking my second IDF course.

• Content (how useful, up to date, practical, and comprehensive): 10/10
• Delivery (presentation style, pace, clarity, authority): 8/10
• Production (video quality, audio quality, editing): 9/10
• Overall rating: 9/10

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