RedEye

UX research techniques

RedEye offer a range of UX research services. On my team I delivery the following services for a wide range of clients.

Moderating and observing usability testing sessions

for my typical research projects, I interview 12 participants over 2 days, with an hour's session per person. Over the two days I research using three devices, typicall desktop with eye tracking, tablet and smartphones.

User research is the core responsibility of my role, which definitely gives me the most stories to take home. It's refreshing to meet so many different people throughout the sessions and provide a new level of understanding for my clients. I love being able to show just how people are using their products.

Recruitment briefs

While we use external professional recruiters to ensure accurate demographics for our clients, I am responsible for creating the recruitment briefs and signing off each participant. The process I like to take to create a recruitment brief, is to build up personas and really get into the mindset of not just who my users would be, but also their situations.

Discussion guides

For each testing session, I will plan the journeys and write a guide. Each guide has a key journey requested from the client, with points of interest for the observer to look out for.

I learn the key points off by heart, to ensure it flows more like a natural conversation rather than make it feel any more lab like.

However in the actual sessions, I always ask the participant additional questions to tailor the tasks to them. I feel this builds rapport with users quite quickly because I'm showing an interest in them personally, and it increases their emotional investment in the task.

Presenting findings to clients

Before writing the report I am responsible for meeting with clients to debrief them on the findings already and offer a severity for each issue. Here I like to discuss with clients how their business runs and ask any queries about some solutions which may not be feasible. For any issue with a difficult solution, I always take note of providing more than one solution, specifically taking on board business needs.

Reports of issues and recommendations

In between each session, I debrief and gather feedback from the client about the testing, new issues found and brainstorm possible solutions. After the last day of testing, I write up a report of my findings. Each issue comes with its current context and quotes, each with multiple solutions with advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Expert reviews

As an aside to usability testing, a much smaller service we offer is Expert Reviews. Here we check the website for any issues that we have seen before in testing, ensure the website conforms to UX principles and conduct competitor analysis. The method of this, is more like testing and quality assurance, with the outcome of a presentation of issues and recommendations.

Analytics

We use HotJar on almost all of our client websites. This tool allows us to monitor which forms incur a drop off point, untouched rate (where people don't interact with the form at all) and and which field most people drop off from as well. Using this data we also use heatmaps of where people are clicking. Overall HotJar allows us to collect more quantitative research.

Surveys

In order to reach out to users in a quantitive manner I have designed many surveys. I've also learnt how to craft surveys for different parts of the user's journey and the sector of the client. From abandonment to after purchase surveys, I also built the template we use at work so Sales can use them in pitches and we can build surveys very quickly.