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TL;DR: beginners in user need research have trouble dealing with the openness of possible outcomes in research.

User need research is used for discovering the motivations, activities and problems of potential users. For this, the researcher often has a conversation (»Interview«) with participants and asks them questions about their …

In my posts on Visual Interviews and Visual analysis

I had only a brief section on analysis. It was fairly conventional: search for patterns and list them as text.

However I thought that it might be easier and more accessible (for you and your peers) to keep the analysis in …

⚠ Exploratory Research ahead

This is a little study that explores Designer’s attitudes to steps in the design process

The idea was based on the observation that some steps are part of almost any design process while some are left out. So I wanted some data on this. In addition …

In a previous blogpost I demonstrated some methods for mapping social relations as well as emotions/liked-and-less-liked-parts-of-a-process. In this blogpost, I will show some ideas on documenting the processes with your participants by writing step-by-step instructions together.

I’m not the first one to try something this, for example CARD …

I think that teaching-by-examples is an awesome and empowering method. Instead of a universal principle given by some authority a way to solve a problem is suggested.

Example for an Example (meta, yey!):
While the interface design principle  »Visibility of the system status« may be a great advice for interface …

a beginner friendly method for user need research

While interviews and observations are popular methods for data gathering they can be hard to handle for beginners: Asking open questions, avoiding influences and managing the flow is hard. Graphical templates on which the reserach participant sketches or writes can help the …

My Beginner’s Guide to Finding User Needs is online.

The text is aimed at students and professionals who want to learn about qualitative user research. It is written in a hands-on manner and the described methods factor in that you might neither have a big team nor a big …

I have a Love/Hate relationship with design method frameworks, these diagrams and flows showing what happens afters which step in a design process: »Human Centered Design« or »Design Thinking« to name two.

Image: Human Centered Design Cycle

Design method frameworks provide an overview of the process and give suggestions …

A major problem of  prototyping in code is that the prototype may be mistaken for a (nearly)  finished product and that the focus shifts from the interactions towards colors and fonts.

Some mockup tools (Pencil, Balsamiq) provide sketchy stencils to create mockups which look not finished. I tried to recreated …

Reading in the literature on Interviewing almost everybody recommends audio recording as well as additional video. Nevertheless I wondered how important these recordings might be especially considering that some people never learn to value a user centered design process if they find their first steps too tedious.

So: Is it …