UX Research Techniques

In class, we took note of 5 distinct research techniques/items that help designers consider their audience/user.

The 5 things are: personas, user roles, customer journey maps, experience maps, and data driven A/B Testing

• Personas are fake people, based on real audience members, with actionable attributes/characteristics. Example: "Bob is color blind and doesn't have a car." If we're designing for a public transportation system, these things are very relevant.
• User roles define characteristics of users at different points in their journey. Several different kinds of people will inevitably need to play the same user roles in order to reach the end of their journey. Example: Bob and Susan both fill the "passenger" role when they ride a bus.
• Customer journey maps lay out the events a user may go through in order to reach their end goals. Example: Susan looks at a bus schedule on her phone, takes the free mall ride to Union station, looks at computer screens in the station, looks for a map, asks for directions, buys a ticket, gets on a bus, and gets off somewhere.
• Experience maps are journey maps with the incorporation/consideration of user roles and emotions throughout the journey.
• Data driven A/B testing...I'm not sure I totally understand this one. My current understanding is that this is basically straight-forward user testing. The researcher asks the 'test subject' to complete certain tasks and takes note of where the person get stuck or confused.

For my project, I will definitely make use of personas and user roles based on my classmates who are studying Japanese. Relevant persona traits may include the type of learner people consider themselves (auditory/visual/kinetic/etc.), what devices people use/prefer, how they prefer to study, etc. I won't know my user roles until I have a solid idea of what I'm trying to solve/produce. I will probably use experience maps instead of journey maps because they're basically the same thing, but experience maps include user role information. I definitely want to conduct user testing, but I'm not sure that it will be A/B...I need to look that up...



Oh, okay. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Whenever I have two versions of an idea, it would be great to compare them.