Ux Research & Marketing - an odd couple

Björn StocklebenUX Research & Marketing @ WUD Slovenia 2013

UX Research & Marketing -An odd couple

WUD Slovenia 2013

Bjoern StocklebenRundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg & University of

Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal

http://www.ma-crossmedia.de/



Alan Cooper - Bridging the Gap

This does not only look old. This is from About Face 3 (p.18) by Alan Cooper, the frist edition dates back to 1995.




Today:

Usability Research User Experience ResearchUser Experience Design Interface DesignInteraction Design Service Design Thinking




Gap bridged – Problem solved.

Note to self: End presentation here if already talked too much.




New Problems, but on a higher level• UX research is filling a gap, not replacing market

research• Both claim expertise about the user / customer• Market research produces powerful, as seemingly

evident numbers & statistics, which are read by yourcustomers, bosses and co-workers.

• Often it is not the market research that causeshassle for UX researchers and designers, but peoplethat superficially quote their reports.

• A lot of publicly available market data is actuallyrather PR than research.




Symptoms of UX vs. Market research

• Your research gets questioned.• They ask why you do test with just a few users.• They say your research was not representative.• They say your work is fuzzy and inexact• „but the latest report by market-monster-

research-corp says 70% of our users would liketo …“

• „Our average customer is 62 years old“




Your Reaction• You find yourself in permanent justification of

your work• You develop a latent aggression against market

research• After all, UX research can produce some decent

numbers as well, so bring ‘em on …

Well, the good news is: Coexistence is possible, even meaningful and might lead to productivecollaboration.




Market Research UX Research

Large samples Small samples and single users

Focus on quantitative methods Focus on qualitative methods

Creation of target groups as abstractionof a group of individuals

Creation of personas as abstraction ofindividuals

Focus on what members of target grouphave in common

Focus on what members of target grouphave in common and where they differ

Inform Marketing Inform Design

A phenomenon observed with a singlecustomer will be ignored

Any finding can inspire design, regardless of occurence

People are customers People are users




Episode 1: Rigid Representativeness!

Just warming myself up. Let‘s see whether I can make a point in 1 slide.




About Representativeness• What fails twice will likely fail again. For user research large test

groups in early design stages are inefficient.• It is not of too much relevance whether a usability problem

affects 20 or 80% of your users. They all are your users.• The magic number of 30 participants refers to the normal

distribution in statistics. But there is no single attribute thatwould allow to predict a particular usability problem for a particular user.

• (Applied) user experience research wants to know about theparticular problems of a particular design and not whether thisproblem can be generalized.

• That said, be sure you cast your test persons out of theprospective target user group of your product/service.




Episode 2: Bloated Benchmarks!

In case you wonder: This text is deliberately printed small.




Your product here




Critizism of Benchmarking• It tries to define your service/product as an intersection

of existing services. This is close to a negative description of your service and eventually you just haveto go for that black hole / white spot in the center.

• Mashing up interaction concepts from different services does not result in a coherent service.

• It biases your design towards copying features insteadof deriving them from actual user needs.

• While it is always good to have an overview of existingsolutions, benchmarking is not a user research method.




Episode 3: The Survey Curse

Note to self: End presentation here if already talked too much.




In Q4/2011 47% of German TV Viewers used their tablet PC while

watching TV (Nielsen 2012)




In the UK this number is at 64%




And in the US already at 69% !!!




Conclusion

.. if we provide a tablet app for our TV programme

.. 47% of our viewers will use it

.. with a likely growth to 69% within 1-2 years

Well, yes – now I am exaggerating. But it is to make a point, okay?




Another Reality.. according to IfD Allensbach only 6,3 Mio Germans (about 8%) had access to a tablet PC in theirhousehold... RTL‘s 2nd screen service RTL Inside reached 4% ofthe audience of Who wants to be a Millionaire?




Problems with Numbers• It is very tempting to just mash up single attributes that show

spectacular numbers, ignoring whether the contexts of thoseattributes are compatible.

• The early second screen hype was fueled by ignorance of the usagecontext behind the phenomenon: It was just asked, whetherpeople used their tablet, not whether what they did was in any wayrelated to the running TV programme.

• Statisticians address this by correlation analysis, but this is not practicable with all dimensions that play a role in user research.

• In general, constant numbers are boring. They either have toskyrocket or to disappoint expectations spectacularly.




Statistics Mashup yields Mashup User

Upper left Lower right Upper rightLower leftCopyright links



http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2012_Michel_ID.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Happy_Old_Man-crop.tif

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kea1008_female_enstpanntes_gesicht_1.PNG

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_after_eye_enlargement_procedure.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_after_eye_enlargement_procedure.jpg


Surveys yield Stereotype Target Groups

Target Group 1: Elderly Men Target Group 2: Young Women

Surveys tend to sort by rather coarse criteria, which have a tendency to become stereotypical. Although, the survey questions usually do not relate to the actual product/service and its particular usage context.




Target Group: „People who cannot read“Test of a subtitling application in HBB-NEXT

Hard-of-Hearing Deaf




Could this have been predicted from the pre-test?

Task executiontime in seconds

Technical skill**Technical skill was indirectly assessed by „How often do you ask others for assistance in technical matters regarding iTV and internet?“ from 0=very often to 4=never.




„The best way to successfullyaccomodate a variety of users is to

design for specific types ofindividuals with specific needs.“

(Alan Cooper, About Face 3, p.77)




Personas from User InterviewsPersona A:

Frequent, structured usersPersona B:

Occassional, browsing users

In User Interviews identify what individuals have in common with regard to the use of the service/product and its context. Generic criteria, especially demographic info like age or gender are usually irrelevant.




Criticism of Surveys• Surveys can only measure what is previously known.

So they tell you what might be relevant out of the things you think could be relevant. You won‘t discover new relevant phenomenons.

• Surveys proliferate stereotypes and force answers to possibly irrelevant questions (i.e. questions the user has never asked herself).

• Temptation to just combine majority attributes to an ideal user that has no reflection in reality.

• Surveys are uninspiring.




So, what are surveys good for?• Screen for possible candidates for your qualitative

research (interviews, tests). Target groups are not your users, but your users are member your product‘s target group.

• Surveys can be an instrument in market research preceding the design process and come into play again at the end of the design phase during pilots and beta testing.

• Survey results can point your attention to opportunities as a starting point for your qualitative research.

(After all, I did not say that second screen was a bad idea in general.)




Episode 4: Nifty Needs

Just for the record: Although this sounds conciliable, I still mean what I said before.




Uses & Gratification Research• The Uses & Gratification Approach is a research paradigm from

mass media research introduced by Elihu Katz in 1959.• It does ask the question „What do people to with media?“ and

assumes that1) people do conciously choose media to satisfy needs2) people can talk about those needs and satisfactions gained

• This approach reflects the assumptions behind the thinking aloud method and its variations (although we sometimes also infer implicit needs from the test results).

• Thus studies following the Uses & Gratification Approach (or in general studies that ask why rather than what) can deliver useful insights for user research / user experience design.




Motivations for subscribing to music services(UK,2012)

Share of respondents in %To access an unlimited music collection 40,00To listen to music I already know 36,00To discover new music before I buy it 35,00To use it on my phone 33,00No advertisements 30,00Not to be limited by free music service restrictions 24,00As a complete music experience 22,00To use it when not connected to the internet 22,00To listen to music before it's out for sale 20,00To get access to friends' playlists or share music 17,00To subscribe to playlists 17,00

Digital Music Nation 2013 / EMI Insight




Wrong approach to using these numbers

• Take 3 most important needs as design requirements• Confuse this table for a complete table of requirements• Combine arbitrary needs as long as they add up to 100%




A smarter approach• Compare those needs with the findings from qualitative

research, e.g. user interviews. A coincidence could hint on relevance.

• Use qualitative research to find out how those needs correlate (i.e. correspond to the same persona).

• Use as inspiration for design and address some of those needs in the first prototypes to see how it resonates in user tests.

• Take into account that not all of those needs can be solved in interaction design (e.g. „no advertising“).




Comparison of needs satisfied by TV, Facebook and Twitter.




How to use this visualization• It combines the findings from three different Uses & Gratification

studies for TV, Facebook & Twitter in a useful, but scientifically inexact way.(So this is something like a scientific disclaimer in case you wanted to cite that in your thesis. Sorry.)

• It can be used as an initial guidance on the choice of platform and functional distribution in social TV services.

• It may help you to design connected TV services that are functional complementary to what happens on the screen.

• It helps you to not design against the formal nature of a platform (or medium).

The visualization is based on the following studies. Note that the TV study is very old and that the three studies differed quite a lot in methodology!

Greenberg, Bradley S. "Gratifications of television viewing and their correlates for British children." The uses of mass communications: Current perspectives on gratifications research (1974): 71-92.Joinson, Adam N. "Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: motives and use of facebook." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2008.Johnson, Philip R., and S. Yang. "Uses and gratifications of Twitter: An examination of user motives and satisfaction of Twitteruse." Communication Technology Division of the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Boston, MA. 2009.




AttrakDiff2(Marc Hassenzahl et al.)

AttrakDiff uses semantic differentials to assess the user experience of a product according to 4 categories:

Pragmatic Quality – Clarity of interaction model, usability

Attractivity – General aesthetic qualityHedonic Quality (Identity) –

Resonation between self-perception of user and product

Hedonic Quality (Stimulation) –Potential for reaching individual goals as perceived by the user (missing in the example to the right)




Convergence with market research• Standardized tests like AttrakDiff are a good tool to

communicate the quality of the potential user experience of the product to the customer or your marketing department.

• AttrakDiff can as well be used to commonly define evaluation goals for the design with market research (instead of having the design itself defined by marketing).

• Testing with standardized user experience tests makes usually sense starting from interactive mockups that convey a look & feel similar to the final product/service.




Again, but in a Nutshell.

Yes, I know you did take notes and don‘t need me to sum it up for you.But let‘s assume for a second you didn‘t.




User research and market research have different perspectives on the customer/user.This may lead to conflicts or may be a perfectly complementary.Surveys and other market studies can be a great inspiration for design, but the designs have to be verified with actual users at some point in the design process.The closer you come to the final product, the more convergence there is between market research and user research methods.Marketing should agree on evaluation goals with User Experience Design instead of imposing design guidelines (with exception of general CD guidelines on Visual Design).




Additional References• Alan Cooper: About Face 3• Marc Hassenzahl: www.attrakdiff.de



http://books.google.de/books?id=e75G0xIJju8C&lpg=PP1&dq=about%20face&hl=de&pg=PP1%23v=onepage&q=about%20face&f=false

http://attrakdiff.de/index-en.html


Interdisciplinary Conference on Cross MediaInteraction Design // Journalism // Media Management

20.-22.03.2014University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal

www.crossmedia-konferenz.de



http://www.crossmedia-konferenz.de/


Thank you!

Questions?Now or @stockleben

