Working according to a repeatable, evolving process is essential to producing excellence and moving efficiently.

 

Research Process

In fairly succinct terms, my research process involves the following steps:

  1. Intake.
    New research is requested. Capture critical information including:

    • What is the goal of the research? e.g. Understand what our audience thinks about newsletters as a source of information, validate whether a newsletter has potential value to our audience, learn what topics our audience is interested in, test a hypothesis
    • Who is the audience? e.g. Loyal but infrequent app users.
    • What will be done with the findings? e.g., Decide whether to pursue a newsletter. If yes, draft and validate newsletter topics for further validation.
  2. Research Design
    Write a research plan including:

    • Determine optimum research method
    • Specify audience, write screener
    • Survey questions and moderator guide (if needed)
    • Identify method of recruitment
    • Prepare stimuli (if needed)
    • Review with stakeholders
  3. Study Setup & Recruitment
    • Using tool of choice (e.g. Alchemer, UserZoom) set up the test
    • Run an end-to-end pilot test to eliminate issues
  4. Data Gathering
    • At defined time frame, trigger capture of data.
    • Monitor as needed
  5. Analysis
    • Clean the data of obvious structural errors, junk data, or irrelevant outliers
    • Perform quantitative analysis (e.g. use calculations with the data, identify statistical significance, prepare for chart-making)
    • Perform qualitative analysis (e.g. categorize open-ended responses, review video)
  6. Determine Findings
    • Review the data against the research goals, frame findings (e.g. What are the most important results?)
    • Illustrate key findings as unambiguously as possible (e.g. create visual diagrams, screenshots, video clips)
    • As needed, make recommendations for further analysis or if issues were identified, ‘fixes’
  7. Report
    • Write report including executive summary and key findings, followed by deeper detail.
    • Gather stakeholders to present and discuss findings.
    • Identify follow-up (e.g. next iteration of testing, write requirements based upon recommendations)

 

Ideation / Concepting / Design Thinking Process

One of the most difficult aspects of product design is starting from a business goal for a customer audience then arriving at a singular design concept to serve an authentic and valued need for that audience.  More to come.

 

Product Design / UX Design Process

As an experienced UX Designer, I honed a process for designing excellent, detailed interactions that often serve as canonical project definition. More to come.

 

Creative Process / Problem Structuring

Research on creativity indicates that time spent understanding a problem leads to results that are more innovative and more timely. Design Cognition and the creative process were a focus of my pursuit of a Master of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction. My graduate research project involved studying expert designers, their environments and processes. More to come.