User interviews are tricky affairs.
On top of coming up with good user interview questions, conducting the interviews themselves often prove to be yet another mentally draining experience. And it’s made worse if you’re doing it without prior experience, or without anyone to guide you along.
Sure, you’ll get better with practice. But you’ll also wanna avoid rookie mistakes and score easy wins, as soon as possible.
That’s what this post is about.
Coleman Yee is an experienced UX practitioner, and over a month ago I’ve had the chance of personally learning from him. This post is a crystallisation of some of the lessons that I’ve picked up from Coleman.
User interviews are an exceptionally useful tool for user research, because it allows you to speak directly to users, and get responses to specific questions that you have. If done well, it could also uncover nuances or directions that were previously unknown or unthought of.
Like most research, however, user interviews are prone to bias, and interpreting responses can be tricky. But with a good guide in hand – and lots of practice – we can avoid the most common pitfalls and get the most out of user interviews.
Read more 5 steps to create good user interview questions by @metacole – a comprehensive guide
A few weeks ago, I created a simple JavaScript game called “Which Square is Larger?”. The objective of the game was simple: to correctly choose the larger of 2 squares.
Yet even this simple game benefited from user feedback. To illustrate, here are 4 problems that were pointed out by users:
“User experience is such a nebulous term.”
– Aarron Walter, The UX Reader
As a newbie to user experience (UX) design, one question bugs me the most: what the bloody hell is UX, really?
In my search for the answer, however, I turned from curious to frustratingly confused. It appears that UX experts can’t agree amongst themselves: 2 common definitions of UX are widely subscribed to, but each appear to describe something completely different. Read more UX is not a process
The Stanford d.school (a.k.a. Stanford Design School, for the less pretentious) is well known for its “design thinking” methodology in problem-solving. For those who aren’t lucky enough to visit their campus, they’ve created a 90-minute, video-guided virtual crash course that brings participants through the 5 stages of their design thinking process. Last week, I conducted a session of the d.school’s virtual course for my colleagues in office.
Here are the 3 mistakes that I made (rephrased as tips) and 6 lessons that I learnt in that 1.5-hour-long session.
Read more 3 Mistakes, 6 Lessons from Conducting a Design Thinking Session
I’ve recently stumbled upon an insightful podcast by Laura Klein and Kate Rutter, in which they discussed, and provided solutions to avoid, the top five things that UX (user experience) designers should never say. These include misguided questions that UX researchers often ask their customers, as well as mindsets that some UX designers have (but shouldn’t).
You should listen to their podcast. But if you can’t spare the time (or the internet bandwidth on your mobile device), I’ve summarised the key reasons why these five statements are taboo, and what you should ask (or do) instead for each case.
Read more 5 Things UX Designers Should Never Say by @lauraklein & @katerutter
Hi, I’m Yu Sheng, a UI designer at a SaaS startup based in Singapore. I’m transitioning over to a UX (user experience) designer role. And I’m going to share everything that I learn about UX design along the way.