Bid Ethiopia

Several forms of background research are used to uncover user needs: surveys, scenarios, competitive analysis, interviews, and focus groups.

These give us a better idea of our true user profile, user needs, and user preferences. Most of these methods are also very good at generating conceptual design ideas.

Designers don’t have to rely on their own ingenuity to solve design problems but can use background research to elicit the considerable knowledge and domain expertise of the target users.

With most of these methods, you’ll want to work closely with the marketing department, because of the large overlap of interests between usability concerns and marketing.

You’ll also find that there are some distinct interests: whereas marketing is interested in how much people are willing to pay, what magazines they read, and how they make purchasing decisions, the usability specialist is more interested in their disabilities, computer skills, and work practices.

As a result, while many of these techniques are also part of traditional marketing practice, such as competitive analysis, you’ll see that the way we carry them out is somewhat different than the traditional methods, stressing usability concerns.

The first method of background research that we’ll discuss is conducting a user survey. Since most people have answered a marketing survey at one time or another, this method is likely to be the most familiar.

What to Ask About
What kinds of information are surveys particularly good at collecting? Surveys work well for issues that are clear cut and easy to categorize, such as basic demographics. They should also focus on questions that directly resolve design dilemmas, helping to guide your design decisions.

Demographics
Surveys are a good way to collect the demographics of your users, especially to help uncover the breadth of diversity. A quick questionnaire can determine the target population’s general age, gender, profession, education, computer skill, type of computer, and nationally.

The first use of demographics is to verify that you have properly sampled your target population. The second use is to find out basic data about your audience’s skills, experience, and lifestyle.

For instance, if you are building a gaming site for young men, you can first check to make sure that your responses are actually from young men, and then you want to find out what those young men are like: what computers do they use, what games do they play, what types of game controllers do they have, what is their reading level, and how much time do they spend on internet gaming sites?

Needs and Preferences
Surveys explore people’s preferences with questions such as “What kinds of products would like to buy online?” Surveys explore the problems people have with web sites by asking questions such as “Which of these issues would you consider to be the worst aspect of browsing the Web: _ download speed, _ browser incompatibility, _ getting lost.” And surveys also explore the problems users have with the job task for which they are using the Web by asking questions such as “What are the most common problems you have with tracking inventory today?”

Design Impact
In crafting your survey, choose questions that will have a direct impact on your design. If you can’t decide how an answer would affect your design, then delete the question.

For instance if your design wouldn’t be affected by gender, don’t bother asking users to specify their gender.

And definitely do not depend on stereotypes of how gender should influence the design. Your stereotypes may be wrong, so rely on user data.

If you think men prefer black background on their web sites, you’re much better of asking “What background color do you prefer on web sites?” than asking their gender.

Similarly, don’t assume technical people want a design with elaborate technical wizardry or that children prefer talking animals before you’ve actually asked them.

While it may be interesting to ask about gender and find out how gender correlates with other responses, this is mostly useful if you’re trying to do long-term research rather than practical design.

For solving the design problem at hand, keep the survey short and the point, skipping questions you won’t apply directly, and design your web site to work across the spectrum of responses you get.

Occasionally, it may be useful to ask general questions to look at how users’ backgrounds may affect their responses.

This may lead you to broaden your survey sample if the pattern of responses suggests you had a biased sample, Form 3-3 is a sample survey template that can be modified according to the kind of information that is needed. (Download from http://www.mkp.com/uew/.)

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