Who is this workshop for?

The Design Research day is for intermediate to advanced UX professionals working to develop a more complete understanding of their customers. Todd will guide attendees beyond usability tests and focus groups to gain a deeper and more complete picture of their customers' lives. This workshop covers everything from basic models of human behavior to interviewing and data analysis to strategies for making research work effective in your organization.

What will be covered?

The majority of discussions about user research focus on the details of various methodologies such as interviews, lab studies, surveys, etc. But the bulk of the hard work and value in research comes from what happens before and after data collection. This day is structured to provide you with a framework for conducting effective user research with a focus on research planning and analysis. Effective research is about generating ideas as much as it is about evaluating design concepts; activities and concepts will focus on developing a deep understanding of your customers through qualitative and contextual research. Nearly every section involves hands-on research activities to help you learn to put the concepts we discuss into practice. The day begins with:

• Understanding people as people: How do we as designers and researchers think about the people we are trying to design for: Tasks and goals? Efficiency and errors? In this section, we will cover important ways to expand your view of "users" to be more holistic and complete. This, in turn, allows us to uncover more insights into their behaviors and motivations
• Framing and planning research: Research is only effective if it is appropriate to the goals of the project and business. We will discuss ways to ensure that your research project is set up for success from the beginning including uncovering project goals, creating targeted research questions, prioritizing efforts, and planning for timelines and budgets.
• Creating, choosing, and mixing methods: The key to data collection is having methods that are appropriate to your questions and team. In most cases this requires a lot of ingenuity, flexibility, and creativity since there are literally hundreds of methodologies to choose from. We'll discuss some successful approaches that we have used in the past with a particular focus on qualitative and contextual methods as well as new developments in remote data collection.
• The art of effective interviewing: These days nearly all research endeavors require that your team gets out and talks to people. But interviewing is an art. We'll take some time to explore and improve our skills in the two most fundamental aspects of interviewing: Listening and asking questions.
• Making sense of research findings: Simply collecting mounds of survey data, interview transcripts, photos, and videos doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned much about your customers. The next step is to turn those observations into real insights. We'll discuss a number of ways to make sense of your research findings with a primary focus on analyzing interview transcripts.
• Making research effective: Again and again we see good research fail to have an impact in organizations. We'll end the day by discussing ways to make your research efforts actionable and durable in your organization to help demonstrate its value.

Agenda