Comic strips are not new to user research; in fact we’ve been using them for some time to illustrate personas and user journeys. But have you considered using them as a way of introducing respondents to research before the interview?

As all UX consultants should be aware, the quality of insight from your research is partly reliant on recruiting the right people to do that research with.

But this can sometimes be difficult; we’ve certainly had our fair share of weird and wacky recruits and we’ve fulfilled them all.

We recently conducted user research in Paris and Berlin, where we used interpreters to translate questions and answers between respondents and ourselves. Here’re my reflections on my experience of working with translators.

I have recently been involved in a piece of research for MasterCard® PayPass™ to trial contactless wristbands at the Isle of Wight Festival 2011.

We collected 150 responses to our post-usage questionnaire using Polldaddy, a survey application loaded onto iPads. This tool made setup and data gathering more efficient than pen and paper and it’s more fun too, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

I arrived back to the UK after attending the UPA 2011 conference in Atlanta last week, where Dan Sorvik and I gave a talk about using social networks for research and design. As part of our presentation, we shared the results of the UX Social Quiz that we ran on Facebook last month.

Social media has the potential to be a hugely useful resource for the user experience (UX) community but so far it has been largely untapped for research and design purposes. It’s time we used it as a tool to engage users in meaningful, collaborative conversations.

Because my profession – and my passion – is user-centred design, consumer research is one of the tools I use most often in my working life.

Over two decades I have encountered plenty of people who question whether research has any place within design. Nowadays these tend to fall into two camps: dimwits and the very inexperienced. Most organisations have learnt that unleashing complex or commercially important design into the world without some form of user research is dangerous – to both revenue and careers.

However, I do from time to time still encounter naysayers. These people tend to be harmless enough except they do have a habit of wheeling out a quote to help lend weight to their argument. I’ve had a bit of a deeper look at three of these which particularly get my goat. Hopefully this will arm you with something to say next time one of these gets wheeled out.
 

Original post by former Foolproofer Rob Godsmark.

Over the last three months we have been carrying out both focus groups and depth interviews with motor impaired users.

Here’s my check list for facilitating smooth sessions:

I’ve been lucky enough to go out to Sao Paulo, Brazil to conclude our global research on attitudes and expectations to mobile banking and to test a prototype. What a fascinating place.

Can a respondent’s own judgement of their knowledge, experience or understanding be reliable in respondent recruitment? In our experience the answer to this is ‘no’.

And this is because, without boundaries around what constitutes ‘high’ or ‘low’, a person’s perception will differ from our own.