Application Design: Assessment 2 - Research

on

15.10.25 - 21.11.25

Celine Christabelle Patricia / 0374872 

Application Design / Bachelors of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / The Design School

Task 2: User Research

Table Contents

  1. Lectures
  2. Instructions
  3. Proposal 
  4. Feedback
  5. Reflections

Lectures

Week 4

Why is research important..

  • to know users needs, experience more influence than advertising
  • Process understanding of user behaviors, needs, and attitudes, employ appropriate methods

Role of UX Design

  1. help understand users behavior, goals and needs
  2. reveals how users interact with system
  3. understanding the emotions
  4. ensure design process is grounded in user understanding

UX Research duties

  1. develop coherent research
  2. select and recruit targeted users
  3. conduct individual interviews
  4. utilize data analysis tools to enhance product

“Muscle memory, the more you do research, the more insights you build up, you have to be part of the hard work, try your utmost best to engage, insights grow under you”

Integrating UX Research
integrated throughout the concept, Iterative design and launch phases of a product

Integrated process

  1. starting early ⇒ foundation of understanding
  2. concept and iterative design → concept validation and continuous feedback
  3. launch phases → user centric adjustments and post launch insights

The value of UX experience

  1. PRODUCT BENEFITS
    1. provide insights to end users, usage patterns
    2. aids in decision making
    3. direct customer feedback
  2. BUSINESS BENEFITS
    1. product development
    2. minimize redesign cost
    3. user satisfaction
  3. USER BENEFITS
    1. uninfluenced by investors
    2. acts as a bridge between users and company

UX RESEARCH

  1. objectives
    • what areas of knowledge require further exploration
  2. hypotheses
    • what are the assumptions
  3. methods
    • considering constraints
    • online survey, interview, user persona, card sorting, information architecture map, flowchart
    • qualitative is for user behaviors and motivations
    • quantitative is numerical data inform user based
  4. conduct
    • implement chosen method to collect data
  5. synthesize
    • address the knowledge validate and refute

Interview Pros and Cons

  • detailed and clarify individuals concern
  • limits sample size, based on interviewer’s skill, time consuming

Online surveys Pros and Cons

  • “define the goals and consider getting information on user satisfaction and suggestions and user improvement”
  • super easy to do, can be anonymous
  • ensure a representative sample is challenging, biased responses, lengthy surveys may discourage participation

Usability testing

  • evaluating a product or service, tasked with completing specific actions
  • Account management, navigation and exploration

Week 5

What is Card Sorting

  • powerful method to understand how users group and categorize information
  • helps determine an organization scheme that aligns users mental models
  • informs the design navigation menus and content strategy
  • display users a collection of cards, each of them contains info

Types:

  • Open → participants sort the cards in group and label them intuitively, create new groups
  • Closed → participants know the groups, they just sort it based on the given groups
  • hybrid → blends open and closed card sorting, they can create new groups and use the existing ones
  • remote
  • moderated → facilitator present, qualitative insights
  • unmoderated → facilitator not present

Purpose

  1. flexible
  2. insight
  3. user-centric design

Benefits

  1. capture user language
  2. identifies gaps
  3. enhances creativity
  4. You can ask followup questions!!

Action Items

  1. Prepare a set of the cards with the benefits
  2. Sort the cards into categories

Week 6

Research Summary

What do with data

  • even it out
  • spread it
  • find patterns
  • find outlier

Why synthetizing

  • funnel it down
  • make sense of it
  • find the root cause

Affinity mapping

→ associating the data, find the patterns and connections, reveal insights in qualitative data

  • Splitting notes → 1 idea per note, divide them
  • Controlled chaos → one color per user, a note can be part of multiple groupings
  • Split and merge → 1-5 likert scale
  • Name the themes → just focus on the users problems

User persona

→ create user scenarios

  • mask or image we present to the world
  • design to make a particular impression on others, concealing the true nature
  • create an archetype from bits of the interviews, know what are their problems and needs
  • to create empathy → imagination and interpretation

Why user persona

  • summarise research → no need to go back to interviews
  • stretch the teams horizon
  • align the vision
  • focus

Pros

  • bring the user meeting
  • put us in their shoes
  • common framework
  • evolve with each project

Cons

  • extra research time
  • us vs them mindset
  • “designers puppet”

User persona

  • name and face
  • goals, needs, pain points
  • social anchors and relevant anchors

How many personas

  • main persona → main goals and needs, 80% of the users
  • secondary → specific goals and needs, mention users that are less involve
  • Make it diverse

Week 7

User persona

  • its not just one person, its someone who represent a range group of user
  • give names to ease the identification
  • backstory, needs and pain points

What influences user persona in product decision

  • increased adoption
    • crafting personas from multiple research form, enable the design of product align with users preference and problems
  • increased user retention
    • understanding and documenting user pain and points help to keep users
    • address these pain points
  • better prioritization
    • create matrix with persona in columns on how each features affects persona

Qualities

  • user real data
  • focus on present data
    • users need evolve overtime
  • context specific
    • to put urself in someone shoes, u need to know anyone who knows so its more accurate
  • avoid biases
  1. persona
    • defines who the story is about
  2. scenario
    • 5w1h, narrative of the persona
  3. goals
    • what are their goals

User journey MAP for user personas

  • negative and positive emotions in time line → to know where is the high fun experience and the low points
    • keep up the high points
    • work on the low points
Fig 1.1- Journey Map

  • retrospective, how users are currently doing things now, before your app helps
  • prospective, how users will do things in the future
  • at least 3 opportunities per point(?)

Week 8

User flowchart

  • like a programming way of telling choices

Why make user flows

  • breakdown activities into practical steps
  • identify decisions
  • find out information

Characteristics of flowchart:

  • It doesn’t involve screens, its process
  • User flowchart, users’ pov, how they choose, show the steps
  • One way arrows
  • Stay at the same level of info
  • Title on everything
  • Extra signs if needed
  • Clarity
  • Define the use case before starting
  • Yes/No decisions only
How to make:
  • When introduce new “things” → for example different colors, add explanation
  • Define the end state before u start
  • make a positive frame, there is no good answer
  • Make the happy path as straight as possible, everything that rans out can be the unhappy path

Tips

  • what do i need to know for next step
  • what steps are mandatory
  • which one is best path
  • where does it stop
  • what questions might user may risk

Fig 1.2 - User Journey Map

Site Map

  • visual representation of site / app content
  • Hierarchy of nodes (boxes) representing pages or content
  • arrows or lines indicate relationships between web
  • to know where the features (sub categories) belong to what big categories, from card sorting insights and user journey map

Fig 1.3- Site Map

User flow

Visualization tool: User flows are visual representation of all interactions a user has on ur site/ app

  • purpose → to design efficient task completion
  • focuses on task → user flows concentrate on the specific action user take within a product to accomplish something
  • multiple paths → there can be multiple branches in a user flow, depending on the choices a user makes at different points
  • benefits → user flow help designers understand hhh

Why use this

  • design precision → how the step by step, have it clear for users where they are and what to do next
  • unified team vision → shared blueprint, clear communication and understanding, has a visual language everyone in development team can understand.
  • proactive issue detection → know the potential pain points before they happen “oh we should be careful of this”
  • refine user experience → for ongoing refinement, enable to optimize
  • facilitate user testing → to have more understanding on the user perception

User journey vs user flow

  • Scope
    • Journey → third person view, records the entire experience from start to end
    • Flow → first person view, displays all the interactions in app
  • Focus
    • Journey → to notice their high and lows, their frustrations
    • Flow → go by step by step and know about the decision making, observe in camera
  • Components
    • Journey → Why are they doing it? emotional states, motivations, experience, (documentary this is soundtrack)
    • Flow → what are they doing, step by step details (documentary this is the image)

Steps

  1. research on customers
  2. list the purpose and goal, pain points
  3. list possible steps
  4. create the user flow
  5. review and update

Week 9

Sketch with others

  • easy to jump in
  • no skill gap, anyone without artistic skill can do
  • lower stakes of people being scared of giving feedback

Sketch constraints

  • big pen, smaller paper → less details
  • Focus on the flow → quantity over quality, make more ideas
  • big ideas first, constraint space and time

Sketch on paper

  • has better flow
  • quick and dirty
  • quantity centered, can bring much much idea in a short time

Instructions




Research journey

User research slides

Feedback

Week 5 
When making interview questions, do not add app related questions, the goal is to know users pain points

Week 6
For affinity mapping, make sure to know the users pain points using I statements

Week 7
User persona must represent all the pain points, not just one or two

Week 8
Make the user journey simple, know the ups and downs emotions of users

Week 9
User flowchart is just the logic, no feelings don't include the opportunities

Reflections

From this project, I learn that user research must be solely based on users pain points. At first, I thought that we ask about app features and things like that, but based on the lecturers' explanation, that will create biased answers or confusion, having less accurate responses. Moreover, these kinds of questions also can limit users from answering questions. I realize that making applications need very in-depth user research. I may not have so much fun when classifying the data, though I found a lot of interesting answers that gave me new insights. From these pain points that I did not think of before, it gave me new opportunities for my app, which is actually nice to add more features in the card sorting and site map. Though due to limited time and individual work, there may be some human errors when doing the card sorting because the enormous amount of features to add. Even though problems like that occur, I do hope the execution for the next assessment will go out well.

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