Research like an artist
Gather more insights to help guide UX design decisions in less time than it takes to recruit user participants.
Every UX designer has had to trade quality for speed due to time limitations induced by demanding stakeholders. Consequently, you try to follow a defined and trusted design process, and while this was feasible in the early stages of your “learning to be a UX designer” phase, you quickly realise that in the workplace, where things are fast-paced, you have little to no time to thoroughly follow the double diamond approach you hold dear and wish to practice more with now that you’ve got that job. This could be the reason for your crippling imposter syndrome. You’re lowkey thinking that what you’re doing isn’t good enough because you’ve had to rush through the process to create what might be a good or crude user experience. Now, with little knowledge on how this product will satisfy the end user, you find yourself collaborating with the engineer to see it built out and getting ready for launch. 🚀 *cringe*
It finally gets launched, and with dopamine pumped into all aspects of the product marketing efforts, users begin to sign up and use your creation. It seems all is well after all. Then, not so far down the road, you notice the break lights from the users, the decline in the graph trend, and the complaints from the customer support team, and you’re back to having that symptom of imposter syndrome. However, this time, your conscience is playing jury and judge tricks on you. You discover flaws in the design that could have been identified if you had taken the time to follow your ideal design process, and so now you have to go back to the solution board.
Perhaps you’ve gone round this circle of knife a couple of times with every new product feature release and you keep coming back to the same cut 🔪.
If this sounds familiar, then you are probably wondering:
How do I navigate the human-centered design process without full-fledged prior research when time is always of the essence and non-negotiable?
Well, from personal experience, I’ll approach this with two distinct but simple concepts:
- Rapid Competitive Usability Evaluation
- Near-proximity Guerrilla Test
In the first few steps of the human-centered design process, you try to understand the problem so that you have enough information to guide your ideas during solution exploration. In these steps, you try to discover the domain, define the problem, understand the customer, and determine the medium for delivering the solution. A group of researchers, the UX researcher on the design team, or you, the UX designer, could carry out these tasks, depending on the size of the team. In this case, you are the team.
However, your perceived deliverable by your stakeholders is to provide mockups with pre-existing knowledge of the domain, thereby limiting you to staying in the solution exploration phase only, as that is the expected deliverable from you—a UX designer. This box you may find yourself in exposes the important problem space from which the ideas shared in this article emanate.
To quickly gather just enough data points to inform your decisions in the solution exploration phase, you'll first conduct a comprehensive but rapid competitive usability evaluation (rCUE). Not the kind you’d normally do on Dribbble or Behance, like gathering inspiration for how things could look. This is the type of competitive analysis that ensures you investigate how an experience is interacted with. It will entail you signing up for a product that has already been developed by someone else—whose decisions may or may not have been informed by a data set that you do not have access to—testing it, then innovating around that information while applying it to your particular problem space.
It could be related to the phrase made Popular by Austin Kleon, “steal like an artist”, which emphasizes learning from others and using them as building blocks for original work. It’s a good way to embrace influence while adding your unique perspective. And as you may have guessed, it inspired the clever play for the title of this post.
In order to make better, data-backed decisions, the designer needs to be able to connect the dots between their findings and the problem space they are trying to solve. This is research, but done horizontally.
Research doesn’t always need to be overly elaborate in order to gather enough insights, but it does need to have a broad connection to a large pool of data points.
Secondly, a good technique for gaining these types of quick insights is to ask the right questions and get feedback as quickly as possible from the nearest human who could use your solution. This is what I call a “near-proximity guerrilla test (npGT).” You can do it by asking a random person in the opposite corner of the room what they anticipate happening when they interact with a particular experience to complete a task, or you can ask them what they think of an interactive experience you've created and what you can do to make it better.
This is a unique, live, and interactive way of gathering data points. The more time you practice this with as many close samples as you have and can accommodate within the timeframe, the more data points you’ll have to connect the dots and inform your decisions to create something—a prototype—that is the result of a user-informed experience. In this day and age of remote work and fewer physical human interactions, this method could be performed by having a quick virtual call with that friend or colleague who fits the ideal participant profile to give you the best possible insight.
By combining these two activities and collecting these data points while exploring solutions, you can make better use of the limited time you have and eventually roll out a design that is sufficiently data-informed.
Here are some things to do after you've made a prototype using the techniques we've talked about so far:
- Stress-test this solution and see how it performs against a larger sample size, that is, your users, to identify where it fails to satisfy their intent. Then iterate quickly based on the newly gathered insights.
- Pay very close attention to the data from user activity, especially for ideas your gut isn’t so confident of, and incorporate that knowledge into the solution board to make small but significant changes.
- Learn how to convince your stakeholders of the benefits of extensive prior research while communicating the positive impact it has on the business in terms of research, design, and return on investment.
I hope this helps you in some way when you go back to your artboards and research like an artist to come up with great ideas that help people live better lives aided by technology.
Further reading:
i. Competitive Usability Evaluations: Learning from Your Competition — Amy Schade, NNGroup
ii. Guerrilla testing: what it is and when to use it—Benjamin Parry, UX Collective
