Remote Contextual Inquiry as a UX Research Technique

Benefits and Goals

Contextual Inquiry or UX Shadowing is a great user research method that helps to understand the as-is or status quo state of the processes that your software is trying to improve. This UX research method will question the current understanding of the stakeholders and domain experts. I find that oftentimes such stakeholders have overlap with reality, but are generally working off of assumptions that might be outdated, missing the perspectives of certain user segments, or are just outright incorrect in certain key aspects.

This research technique also works best for creating empathy and an understanding of specific industries that might be completely foreign territory to a software designer, product manager, or other technology professional. It’s also a great technique to employ for identifying business requirements, problems, and opportunities within process-driven environments, specifically for B2B or enterprise workflows.

Who to Involve in UX Shadow Sessions

The goal of this type of ethnographic UX research is to create a deep understanding and empathy with your end-users, and specifically to understand the "why" behind their existing workflows. Familiarization with their existing workflows can then lead to identifying problems, gaps, and opportunities that can be tackled through design solutions, such as new features, new copy, or a completely new product hypothesis.

How to do Contextual Inquiry Remotely

I find that UX shadow sessions are best executed after User Discovery Interviews. The user discovery interviews will identify the key types of end-users to do the shadowing sessions with and the key tasks to watch them execute. Once the key tasks are identified, a test subject can be given instructions beforehand to prepare a specific task to walk through, while sharing their entire screen on Zoom. The reason is that often there are several applications and programs that they use simultaneously, the goal is to discover their workflow, rather than just how they interact with one program. The goal is to understand how they switch from one application to another, and how they set up their desktop and work environment.

The core instruction is to tell them to prepare the materials beforehand and have them up on their screen, and that it’s a way to understand their world rather than judge their work. This might involve watching them toggle between 4 different applications on their desktop, while they Google things in the middle.

As they narrate what they're doing out loud, it's the UX Designer's job to probe with questions as points of friction come up, or to discover the whys behind the actions.

Deliverables & Outcomes of UX Shadow Sessions

The key outcome should be a document capturing their existing workflow, whether it’s on a competing software, or a combination of various tools which might also include a physical process such as sticky notes, or “hacks” such as scheduling emails to themselves. This might be accompanied by video clips of the key highlights in the screen share stitched together for better delivering the key points to stakeholders, or screenshots. The secondary output should be points of frustration within that flow. And the third output should be any opportunities as they relate to the frustration points, and how it fits into the software that the research is done for.

If you want to find out if Remote Contextual Inquiry or UX Shadow Sessions are appropriate for your organization or startup, feel free to reach out to us! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with our series on UX Research Roadmaps.

UX Listening Tour: A Different Type of UX Interview

Benefits and Goals

A UX listening tour is a great user research tool used to identify stakeholder goals and objectives from across your organization, that can then be solved through UX Design. As a UX consultant, the main point of contact at the client company will communicate general UX objectives to me. However, after conducting a UX Listening Tour with various stakeholders within the startup or company, I generally discover varying goals and problem areas of focus, defined differently based on each stakeholder’s area of expertise, personal objectives, and personal biases. These gaps in focus tend to be greater in larger organizations, but also occur in startups. The goal and benefit of a listening tour are to highlight these gaps and differences and bring them to the forefront. 

A UX listening tour is one of the key must-have kick-off steps for any new project as a way to align your company’s product vision, utilize previous findings and research data, clarify any misalignments about the domain space or business requirements, and gain an understanding of the priorities of your stakeholders. It also serves as a great way to get buy-in for UX from stakeholders within your organization who may not fully see the value in the process.

Who to Involve in a UX Listening Tour

It’s beneficial to involve anyone within your company who influences the way your product is designed or what features it prioritizes. This usually includes anyone who has been involved in the design of your product or anyone knowledgable about the problem space within your company but could also involve influential stakeholders such as a Marketing Lead who might not directly be designing your product. Typically this involves anyone in a Product Manager role, which in startups might be the CTO or co-founders, as well as lead developers, industry or domain experts, and anyone the Product Manager interfaces with.

How to do a UX Listening Tour Remotely

A listening tour is guided by specific questions designed to reveal key nuggets of information but feels like a free-flowing conversation. It is simply executed through 1 on 1 video calls, with some stakeholders sharing and walking through previous product assets, data points, and customer feedback. It might additionally end up being the stakeholders venting their frustrations about company politics, and features that should have been done, which in itself is extremely useful information. As a third party UX consultant, I find that stakeholders are much more honest and transparent about these things with me than with their colleagues.

Deliverables and Outcomes of a UX Listening Tour

The deliverables of a UX Listening Tour might include key takeaways and notes based on stakeholder priorities in terms of features they want, but most importantly will include perceived problems and pain points they see for end-users within their unique field of vision. This will open the door to determining the next steps in the UX research process, which typically involves gaining a similar insight from end-users through User Discovery Interviews. 

If you want to find out if a UX Listening Tour is appropriate for your organization’s needs, feel free to reach out to us! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated with our UX Research Roadmap series of posts.

Logistics of Remote User Testing During Covid

Covid-19 has changed the landscape of work, forcing almost everyone to either work remotely or do remote “parties” with friends. Even my parents have been doing Zoom calls as a means to socialize. This makes it a great time to do remote usability testing, since “Zoom” has become a household name. In this post, I’ll cover the logistics of how to set up remote user tests during Covid-19.

Determine Who to Test With

The pool of less tech savvy candidates that you can do user tests with has immensely grown, in the sense that many more people are now used to getting on a Zoom call. This is especially important if your target market that you need to test with is not super tech savvy.  Now you can share a calendar invite with a Zoom link, or just a Zoom link with someone, and they’ll know how to hop on without much trouble. Chances are that it won’t be their first time using Zoom. 

Recruit Users

This is the hardest step for any user test, and it gets harder the more specific your users are, which is usually the case when you are testing B2B enterprise product. For enterprise apps, a user’s job title, years in the industry, as well as indicators of their technology skills, such as age, matter greatly. LinkedIn as well as some specialized websites that dedicate themselves to finding and recruiting these people for research purposes can also be used. If it’s an existing product, existing users can be used to test new features, or existing users’ referrals can be used to test old features on new eyes.

For B2C consumer products typically demographic information such as age, sex, hobbies are what’s important. These candidates are easier to recruit, SubReddits for special hobbies, even Craigslist can be used. And if it’s an existing product, your current users can be tested for new features, and they can be incentivized to invite their friends to test old features on new pairs of eyes.

Schedule Events with a Zoom Link

Send a calendar invite with a Zoom link in it, including any instructions for what they need to prepare. For example, if you expect them to go through a certain prototype, send them the link so they have it open beforehand, but instruct them to not go any further.

Compensate

$20 - $50 Amazon gift card is on the lower end of compensating someone for an hour of their time for a user test. Lotteries and draws can be done, or free credit to your service. This is the key to making the recruitment piece easier.

Why Software Developers Suck at UX

Note: “Generally speaking” should be placed in front of basically every sentence in this post. These conclusions are completely based on my own subjective experiences of working in Silicon Valley for 3 years, running a startup for 2 and freelancing for 5.

I get brought into a lot of projects where the engineering team had created user flows and user interfaces, then either pre launch through user testing or post launch through user feedback, the client discovered those designs were far too complex for their end users. So why do those engineers suck at design? They’re far smarter than me, they understand their domain much better than me, and they’ve been working on that specific problem for many months or years. In fact, it’s so rare for a good engineer to be a great UX designer that they're called ‘unicorns’.

One of the more obvious reasons is that because they’ve been working on the specific problem for so long they have blinders on, and can no longer view it from a 30,000 ft view. There might be emotional attachment to already existing solutions that were thought up months ago. But the reason I wanna mainly talk about is that engineers, developers, whatever you want to call them, function in a different way than the general population, who tend to be the end users. When engineers are developing products strictly for other engineers, like a Chrome extension for debugging code or some sort of command line tool for example, their UX is fantastic. This is where the idea of building something for yourself comes from. So that means they don’t actually suck at design.

But when they have to design something for someone whose mind doesn’t work like an engineer, it’s a different story. They feel like things are getting “dumbed down” too much, and that “obviously this makes sense”, when for their end user it does not. There is too much of a disconnect between their understanding and mental framework of technology compared with the common person, and a larger amount of empathy is needed to bridge that gap. And that amount of empathy is hard to fake. I imagine that it’s like when you’re trying to explain something technologically mundane in your world, say, Instagram Stories, to your grandma who can barely send email. Bridging that gap requires a larger amount of empathy and patience, not because your grandma is dumb, but because her mental framework of technology is quite different than yours.

So why is it that UX designers supposedly have the ability to bridge that gap with everyone? I think great UX designers just grew up naturally having much more empathy towards others and having a much better ability to place themselves in others shoes and see the world from their eyes. I would argue that generally speaking in the real world this is a burden, when others can’t empathize with you but all you can do is empathize with them… makes it really difficult to not take on other’s pain, to not be the one who bends their rules to accommodate others, to not have solid boundaries, to not be as defensive in arguments. But in the technology world, that allows for great user friendly designs.