Research participants play a big role in shaping your designs because you’ll take their pain points and suggestions into account as you iterate.

NOTE: This blog is a follow-up to my previous blog that on Course 2 and Course 3 of Coursera’s Google UX Specialization. Also this blog is long long due! There were a lot of other career learnings and hence I had to pause on this course for a while. But now I have restarted the course with a cup of chai haha :)

Course 4 of this specialization is about testing the solutions I made through course 3, conduct a usability study with research participants, understand their pain points and re-iterate the wireframes accordingly. Through this blog, I will be documenting my entire journey, learning and how I approached each assignment in course 4 of the specialization.

Overview

Prompt: Design a flower catalog and delivery app for a florist in Jaipur, India.

Tasks:

• Build a UX research plan
• Conduct moderated and unmoderated usability studies
• Analyze and synthesize research results
• Present research insights
• Update wireframes based on research insights

Peer-graded assignments:

• Build a research plan
• Conduct moderated and unmoderated usability studies
• Turn observations into insights
• Update your research presentation

Task 1: Build a UX Research plan

The first step before starting your usability study and interviews is to make a research plan. To build a UX Research Plan, I did the following steps

1. Established my research goals and understanding what kind of data I want at the end of this research.
2. Listed down the research questions.
3. Defined my Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of my prototype
4. Decided which research method I am going to use: Moderated or Unmoderated. There are different types of research methods, read about them here! I decided to go ahead with moderated research method where I guided the participants over a zoom call and note down their pain-points as they navigate through the app to complete a given task.
5. Recruited a diverse and inclusive pool of participants through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Discord and WhatsApp. (also reached out to my friends for the research interviews). In total I recruited 5 participants.
6. Wrote a script that would help me to conduct user interviews in a professional and flawless way.

This is how I completed my task 1 of building a user research plan which you can view here.

Task 2: Conduct the usability study

After my research plan was ready, the next task was to actually conduct the usability studies. The best part the entire course! It was interesting to see that every participant was using the app in a unique way and each of them had different happy paths and pain-points :)

Some of the best practices that I learnt while conducting the interviews were to:

1. use participants’ preferred pronouns and identifiers (like he, she, or they), pronouncing their names correctly and using people first language.
2. ask for participants consent if you are recording the session.
3. brief the participant about the goals and our project.
4. ask open ended questions.
5. reflect on myself and learn if I have any biases while conducting the study.
6. take notes in a spreadsheet or preferred tool which helped me in my further tasks.

This is how I completed the second task of conducting the usability study interviews which you can view here.

Task 3: Analyze and Synthesize Results

After the usability study, I had a ton of feedback from participants. The next step in the course was to analyze and synthesize the results by doing the following steps:

1. Group excels sheet data into sticky notes participant-wise and then similarity-wise. This step here is called as affinity mapping where we categorize data and ideas.

1. Find the patterns/themes in data that is common across all the participants. These themes helped me to turn the available data into insights about the users. In total I came up with 9 themes which you can view here.
2. At last I came up with insights for each theme. I wrote an insight that tells how to improve the product based on a theme. In total I came up with 6 insights which you can view here.

Task 4: Present research insights

There are two types of formats in which the you can share your user research insights:

1. Research Presentations
2. Research Reports

I decided to make a research presentation which you can view here. As this is a personal project and I don’t have any stakeholders, I did not present the PPT to anyone. But I do follow some tips while a deliver a presentation or my solution as follows:

1. I start the presentation with an agenda and end it with takeaways.
2. Deliver the presentation in a form of story and give some real life/ parallel world examples.
3. While delivering the solution, I first try to present all the solutions I came up with and why I chose the one of them over the others
4. Add speaker notes in the presentation deck so I don’t miss out on any points!
5. I always try to be myself so people can easily connect with me.

Task 5: Updates wireframes based on research insights

It’s helpful to prioritise your research insights from the most urgent to the least urgent. In real life products, we will likely do this prioritisation with product lead, engineering leads and stakeholders.

Insights can be prioritised as follows:

1. P0: Problems that must be fixed for your product to work.
2. P1: Problems that can be fixed in this sprint/month
3. P2: Problems that will be fixed in the next sprint/month

As this is a personal project and has only 4 insights, I decided to go ahead and fix all of the problems. You can view the prototype with updated wireframes here.

Conclusion

Course 4 was a longgg due *cries* I started with my new job, got some really good and fun industry projects to work on and hence managing side projects and courses was difficult. Aren’t we all in the same boat of starting and not finishing a side project? Haha all the power to my readers who struggle with completing the side projects.

What kind of blogs would you all like to read? Let me know and I’ll try my best to come up with them! Also do share your thoughts and suggestions on my project and let me know if you think I could do a better job on any of the tasks. I’d be happy to connect and talk with you! My social media handles are:

Linkedin | Portfolio

or just drop me an email at: [email protected]

Thank you for reading!