Understand what exists
This activity helps designers understand existing solutions, emerging trends, and best practices within the relevant domain. By exploring what else is out there, designers gain valuable insights into successes and failures, allowing them to build upon proven concepts and avoid potential pitfalls.
Tips to complete activity
- Before you start any research outline your objectives - what questions would you like to find answers on e.g. How does a particular product work? How have they financed a product? Or who uses the product?
- If doing research online, taking a screenshot of sites and collecting these together can help build up a visual picture. An online whiteboard such as Miro can help to arrange and gather your sources of inspiration. Alternatively you might print images to create a research wall in a physical space.
- Sort your research to start to make sense of it - you might annotate things you like, or cluster examples that are similar. It can also be useful to capture any examples that show what you’d like to avoid.
Plan user research
The activity of user research serves to understand the needs, behaviours, and preferences of the target audience. This stage ensures that the resulting design addresses real user challenges, enhances usability, and aligns with the intended audience's expectations, ultimately leading to more successful and user-friendly products or experiences.
Tips to complete activity
- Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now. The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have. However, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any project.
- It can be helpful to use a mindmap to brainstorm different types of people to speak to. Highlight the most important ones and prioritise these according to the time you have available.
- Research is all about challenging your assumptions, going outside of your usual sphere to listen and observe people you might not normally get the chance to, or in as much depth. Sometimes a little time with people can go a long way to increasing your understanding of a user’s needs and situation.
- Consider questions that help you understand what users actually do rather than what they say they do. For example ‘talk me through your day yesterday step by step’ rather than the more general question of ‘tell me about your daily routine’.
Further reading
- 🔗Preparing for user interviews
How to prepare for an interview. Recruiting users. What questions to ask. - 🔗Conducting user research
Government guidance on how to approach user research when designing services. - 🔗About research methods
Selecting appropriate methods for stages in the design process.
Conduct user interviews
This activity walks you through the process of conducting an interview and capturing notes.
Activity worksheet
Conduct user interviews
Tips to complete activity
Your questions are just prompts to help the participant reveal situations, attitudes, and behaviours. Offer enough information to set the scope for the conversation, but not so much that you influence the responses.
Preparing and starting the interview
- Make sure you know how you will capture notes
- Leave sufficient time to set up (for both in person and remote interviews)
- If remote, test any tech in advance (Zoom, etc)
- Establish roles if interviewing with another (e.g. interviewer & notetaker)
- Decide how to capture notes (e.g. pen and paper, digital, recorded)
- Have your discussion guide ready, digital or printed
- Ensure you have informed consent from the participant
Conducting the interview
Adapted from Just Enough Research (PDF)
- Breathe
Remind yourself to breathe and remain relaxed and observant. Create a welcoming atmosphere to make participants feel at ease - Practice active listening
Make interested “mm-hmm” sounds. Make good eye contact and nod. Stay alert and focused on the other person. Listen more than you speak. - Ask the right questions
Don’t ask leading or yes-or-no questions. Avoid asking people what they would like - focus on actual experience. Follow up with questions to clarify responses. - Keep an ear out for vague answers
You want details and specifics. Be ready to bust out a probing question such as “Tell me more about that.” - Avoid talking about yourself
The discussion isn’t about you or your opinions. If you’ve inserted yourself into the narrative, just stay relaxed and steer the conversation back on track. - Capture everything
Encourage participants to act naturally and share their thoughts aloud. Try to capture the thoughts and behaviours of your participants accurately.
Organise research findings
The activity to organise research findings is essential in the design process as it enables meaningful insights to be derived from any data collected. This systematic arrangement aids in identifying patterns and key themes, making it easier to communicate findings and maintain a user-centric focus during the entire design journey. Organised findings also serve as a valuable reference throughout the process, ensuring that service planners stay connected to user needs.
Tips to complete activity
- Review what you’ve captured and try to spot if you’ve made any assumptions - be aware of these. It’s important to capture what was actually said - if you don’t know why they think something, maintain a curiosity and potentially explore during followup research.
- Try to spot what you are hearing the most. What’s ‘bubbling up’?
- Organise similar themes together to start to make sense of what is arising.
- You might organise your themes under areas such as:
- Interesting things people said
- Biggest challenges
- Exciting opportunities (responses to challenges) - You might want to complete this exercise multiple times for different types of users if the themes arising are quite different.
