UIEtips Article: Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs
March 13th, 2007
UIEtips 3/13/07: Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs
To improve the designs we’re creating today, we know that teams do best when they have all of the essential information about their users to make informed decisions.
In our experience, one of the most powerful ways to gather important insights about users is the field study. By making direct observations, design teams can identify opportunities they may have never discovered if they had only conducted usability tests, focus groups, or surveys.
I think it’s essential for all designers to really understand how to conduct a field study and learn how to gather critical information about users. That’s why in this week’s UIEtips we’re reprinting an article I wrote back in 2003, where I discuss the unique power of field studies.
Has your design team conducted field studies? How have they worked for you? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.
[We are so excited about this topic that we've invited Kate Gomoll, a recognized Field Research and User Experience expert, to present UIE's next Virtual Seminar on March 20th. If you haven't had a chance to hear Kate describe the process of conducting a field study, I highly suggest you and your team attend. Space is limited so sign up today]
March 14th, 2007 at 8:58 am
A valuable service which I might pay for is using someone’s previous field study experience to evaluate my solution. That is, I may not be able to pay for the time or money of a custom field study, but I may be able to pay for domain expertise garnered through field studies for a short-term critique. To do so requires some ability to find someone with the pertinent domain field study experience.
March 14th, 2007 at 9:37 am
In all our field studies over these past many years I include as part of my post testing research, a review of learning styles and personality profiling because I believe it offers major insights into the test results. It directly affects how they perceive and understand content. The implications regarding persona analysis are also powerful. So far I don’t know others how are doing this but I would love to be in touch with some. I know we spoke about this in New York Jared, so I am hoping this posting might help find some more folks, or at least some interested in pursuing it. I am not sure about your policies on posting URL’s so I would encourage anyone interested to google me.
March 14th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Don wrote:
It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how you might pull it off.
We’ve occasionally piggy-backed a secondary research project on an initial one. In those projects, the field study participants overlapped between the two projects, so it was easy to add some additional research into the sessions.
However, I’m not sure you can retroactively match previous research to a new project, as it’s likely the original session won’t cover the necessary information. It would be interesting to know if anyone has made this work.