In September, 2021 Mary gave a presentation on “Assumption Mapping in Discovery Research” at QRCA’s UX Flex Summit. Here’s a transcript of that presentation. I’m going to start by sharing a scenario that might be familiar to some of you. It’s certainly something that I’ve encountered a lot where a team knows or has been…
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A Tale of Two Restaurants A frustrated restaurateur was complaining to a friend over coffee. “I don’t understand it, we opened last month and we have fantastic pasta. A week later, another place opened up down the street, and I went one day for lunch and their pasta was OK but nowhere near as good…
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Recently I was asked how I would approach the following hypothetical situation: A product team has come to you stating that users are not utilizing a feature they’ve released. They’d like to add a button on the home screen to make the feature more obvious. How would you approach this as a UX Researcher? What…
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As a researcher, how many times have you gotten a request to, “Go do some user research” and been frustrated with the lack of specificity in that request? Before you can conduct quality research, it must be designed, and designing a qualitative research project starts with defining the audience. In this context, “audience” is the…
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Recently I was introduced to the work of Naomi Henderson, author of Secrets of a Master Moderator. She talked about the “standard” probes that qualitative research shares with journalism (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How) along with “Help me understand…”, “Tell me more about…”, or “Please expand on that.” All of these are good,…
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Or, what happens when user experience research is missing from the product development process. [View the story “Lessons from the Start-Up Trenches” on Storify]
In a previous blog I talked about the importance of stating and validating strategic hypotheses and assumptions. Once the team gets the hang of thinking in these terms and writing down hypotheses, the extensive list of what you don’t know, or what you think you know but are not sure about, can be quite daunting.…
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When people approach me with a request for new research often my first questions to them are “What do you want to learn?”, “What hypothesis do you have you want to validate?”, or “Which of your assumptions would you like to confirm or deny?” People new to requesting research sometimes have trouble thinking in terms…
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