The most sought-after designers today are the T-shaped specialists. These individuals are positioned between generalists, who can handle anything, and specialists, who have deep expertise in a particular field. For example, it may be a designer who specializes in UI and User Journey Map, along with Research.
Our design team decided that we needed to improve our skills in the discovery process and participate in the User Research ABC course, as our studio had implemented a new service — the discovery phase.
It was a 4-day training with theory in the first part of the day and practice in the second part. We were divided into teams. Each team had different cases based on the real projects from leading companies of our country. Our goal was to help solve the company's real problems. The company we got was Nova Poshta, the name of our team was «Delta».
CJM + Business Interview
Customer Journey Map —is a scenario containing the actions, phases, thoughts, and emotions of the customer on his way to achieving the result. When a person wants something delivered by a postal service, they go through the following stages: searching for the item, placing the order, waiting for the parcel, receiving it, and the period after it is received. The client has certain emotions at each of the stages: hesitations, excitement, fear, interest, joy, possibly disillusion, etc.
We created an imaginary person with an imaginary scenario and started our brainstorming. (You’ll find how to choose a person below.)
The main point for our team was to turn on empathy and throw everything out of our heads, filter all information, and find insights. The hardest part was creating a journey with details, because we sometimes forgot about it. After that, we met with the stakeholders — 2 designers from Nova Poshta and conducted a business interview. Also, we discussed our CJM step by step to add more detail. By finishing, we moved the physical CJM to a digital view. There are plenty of services nowadays that facilitate CJM filing. We usually use the mind map.
Screener
All our hypotheses which we use in the CJM are based on our own vision and business vision. So the next step is to adjust our CJM to real customer scenarios. First, we have to weed out an unnecessary audience, and a Google Form with simple, short questions (in other words, a screener) will help us. It’s important to put simple questions about the client and his experience it may be 2-3 questions for each point, like
- Introduce yourself.
- How old are you?
- What’s your job?
- Do you often use post services?
- What post services do you use?
Then you can proceed with more detailed research and ask the client to describe his most recent personal experience in detail and share his concerns. It’s vital to ask about the problems the user faces and how he would like them to be solved, as well as about any difficulties he may encounter when interacting with a service or its software solution. You may also ask about the reasons why he refused to use other post services and what influenced his or her decision most.
Of course, we were given the right audience to interview, so we didn’t need to search by ourselves because it took a lot of time. If you do not have the target audience specified, you have to develop accurate criteria for the respondents. They are usually divided into 2 types: sociodemographic criteria, such as sex, age, location, and interests, and the presence of specific experiences, such as shopping online. There are various types of sampling, but to make a sample representative and trustworthy, you should interview 3-6 people if your respondent represents a company and 5-10 people if your respondent is a physical person.
Interview
User Interviewing is a UX research method where a researcher asks a customer questions on the topic he is interested in to find a solution to the problem.
Question types we have to ask:
- process «how?»
- explanation «why?»
- description «what?»
- context «when?»
- obstacles «what do you do when?»
- perfect setup «what if...?»
There were three people in our «Delta» team, so we decided that one person would ask questions, and the two others would listen and note down the info.
We settled a goal and created the list of questions based on the plan we got: First the person had to introduce himself. Further on, we proceeded to the interview questions, but the main point was not to reveal the survey's real goal right away. So we came up with a more abstract goal for our customers. Then we continued with simple questions about typical situations or routines. As soon as the customer was ready for a deeper conversation, we proceeded to the stories, with specific details and step-by-step analyses of the customer's last experience. Through the interview we had to understand what «job» customers do. At the end of the interview, we asked to look through the questions to confirm the answers. In total, our team conducted 6 in-depth interviews.
We attached files and notes with all the info to the Notion at the end of the day. At the end of our work Nova Poshta’s stakeholders had to get all the information about our research, so they could analyze it and implement some of our insights.
The Power of Persona Creation in User-Centered Design
We created a real person with quotes, biographical information, needs and pain points based on our interview results, facts, observations.
We found out the similar patterns in the customers’ behavior and combined them all. Thus, we created a typical customer and represented it in a digital form.
Usability Testing: A Crucial Step in User Experience Improvement
As I wrote before, we worked with a real product, so our team tested Nova Poshta iOS app. Each team member interviewed customers separately; during the conversation, we took notes on the person’s behavior, comments, errors, and completion of each task.
We gave the customers contextual scenarios and asked them to think aloud while they were completing our tasks. Concurrent Think Aloud — is a technique which allows to understand the user’s thoughts in course of the interaction with a product. The user must voice his running stream of consciousness while completing the task.
How We Measure UX Success with Key Metrics
UX metrics are a set of quantitative data points used to measure, compare, and track the user experience of a website or app over time.
The first step is identifying the goals: what tasks the customers need to accomplish. Then goes identifying the signals — it’s how success or failure in the goals might manifest itself in the customer behavior. What actions would indicate the goal had been met? And finally, it results in the creation of specific metrics for each signal.
For example, one of our goals was called a courier. The signal for this goal is to fill out the three-step form and click the call to action. And metrics — the ratio of customers who often send parcels 10+ kg and use the courier service to those who often send parcels 10+ kg and ordered a courier only once.
Conclusion: How User Research Drives Success in UX Design
We mastered the key stages of user research—covering everything from planning to analyzing results—in just 4 days of intensive teamwork. Throughout the process, we selected methods tailored to each specific task and conducted research with real users. In the end, we presented our findings to Nova Poshta stakeholders.
Thanks to the guidance of our experienced trainer, we were able to stay focused and confident throughout the entire process. We truly value this hands-on experience and have already applied the new skills during the discovery phase of our current project.
