What are /r/UXResearch's favorite Products & Services?

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If I'm doing something like Jobs-to-be-done or Mental Models in house, I'll have budget to pay for transcription and I do want every word coded because of how critical the work is. I try to spend very little of my time personally on transcription - there are tools and companies that specialize in this.

If I'm doing a quick iterative usability test or just asking about a few focused problems, I may skip the full transcription.

Of time spent in qualitative research, analysis takes up probably the most time, followed by reporting, then planning, and then the actual interviews/data collection.

If your budget is small, otter.ai is free for transcribing and you can code with google sheets for free as well.

Hey!
I was lucky that my Uni put heavy focus on making their psy students understand and love statistics, so i cannot really recommend you courses or places.
Though, during my studies, what helped me a lot – please don't laugh – was Psychology Statistics for dummies and once I found myself working more with quantitative projects as a UX Researcher I found Quantifying the User Experience also to be very helpful.
The latter has big overlap with the Psychology of Statistics for dummies, but the examples are just super helpful as they come from User Research scenarios.

Hope these books might help you as much as they help me. :)

Our team has found some success by building our internal wiki-type pages with https://www.notion.so. It is a freemium service, so you can likely get a long way with just the free version. I have also had past success with Microsoft OneNote. I know Microsoft is a bad word a lot of times, especially in UX circles, but that product particular is beneficial for just the sorts of things you are trying to do, and it is also free. Hope that helps!

You should get Jobs to be Done by Jim Kalbach. It's the best book I've read on it - has just enough theory and then real life examples from companies.

I'll say from someone who has done the qual side of it, don't skimp on the synthesis phase. It will take a long time but it will be very rewarding. Also, involve stakeholders as early as possible, they will be more bought into the results.

Not to be a downer, but this is a space that is quickly filling with lots of competition: https://airtable.com/universe/exp7BidtSB73ihAqw/user-research-tool-box?explore=true

Also, if you truly want to research this, you should do some ethnography (and quant validation) if you can to understand the problem space. Directly asking what someone would build will not get you the golden ticket (as much as I wish it worked like that). Jobs-to-be-done was built for this approach.

Sorry for the confusion. In my HCI courses we are often referenced to these two books:

Lazar's Research Methods in HCI

Universal Methods of Design

Some of the more unique (to me) methods that caught my eyes were:

• Artifact Analysis
• Diary Studies
• Graffiti Walls (open free space for participants to express their thoughts)
• Home video tours
• Love/Break up Letter (ask participants to write, by hand, a love or break up letter to the product, company, or industry being researched.

hope this helps a bit more.

Prepare and go through a case study from your portfolio that demonstrates your design process and thinking.

You'll find an example of UX Researcher portfolio on Figma's community website: https://www.figma.com/community/file/963394112012219151

Interesting! I completed a MOOC a few months ago which touched on neuroscience and cognition, which I found fascinating: https://www.coursera.org/course/learning - the course itself was great.

Your route reminds me of my own. In my early twenties I had no idea what I was doing, so I thought I should probably do something that interested me and fit with my prior experience. I chose to do a foundation degree (I think an associate's degree is the equivalent in the US?) in sound design and engineering. Terrible mistake - one that I realised halfway through the course when it occurred to me that I didn't want to sit in a darkened room for fourteen hours a day, going from poorly-paid short-term job to poorly-paid short-term job. So I finished it, dithered a bit and then started my Technology degree, which I finished a few weeks ago.

So here I am now, hoping not to follow the same pattern that I did in my twenties! If I was to pull something from it that I thought was insightful, I'd say that it grounded me in empathy, which - to me - is fundamental when designing with and for others. I suppose when thinking about 'what to do', I often feel pulled between doing something enjoyable or profitable (self-indulgent, even) and doing something useful. I think that's why entrepreneurship feels important to me, as it might give me an opportunity to satisfy both.

The Monster list of UX books has everything you might want https://airtable.com/universe/expqM3OWZoJkjl7wy/the-monster-list-of-ux-books

1. Never ask anyone if they like your product

2. Test early and often

3. But first, use expert reviews

4. More than usable and desirable, great user experience is…

5. Get on board with Design Thinking

6. Use personas to keep the user in focus

7. Learn to make research-informed design decisions

8. Try mapping your product ecosystem with the team

To get started you can refer https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn-ux-research

The research part of the UX continuum is defined as an action where you investigate something systematically. In UX Research, you apply various techniques in order to add context and insight into the design process. Research is needed to reach new conclusions, establish facts, and find problems.

https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn-ux-research

This website aggregates all important tutorials in one site

I hope this was helpful.

Nice, thank you!

The idea is that 'process order' is roughly how these activities would flow in a project, so if you read through them in that order you can pick and choose which you need to "build" the idea of your project in advance (here's a Miro template that might make it easier to see that view: https://miro.com/miroverse/research-project-builder-research-skills-framework/)

And you definitely found a rough edge here: the 'impact ranking' is based on the idea that certain themes of skills will ultimately have much higher levels of influence / scope of impact in an org. And that's tied to the value chain diagram on the front page, expressing those themes graphically... and it's still a bit messy in drawing this out, I'm not quite sure how best to communicate that.

If you are doing datasets, expect to shell out for any number of rather expensive database analysis tools.

However, if you are just looking for a tool that can easily cross reference your research, I find that Airtable is quite suitable for the task.

Reach out to Anders Drachen at the University of York in the UK. He literally wrote the book on games user research.

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An informational interview with folks working in places you one day wish to be in never hurt as well. Go on LinkedIn and make a short list of folks that are doing what you one day want to do. Craft a respectful message and see if they will have a chat with you.

That's a great question. It's often difficult to explain how you go about your work to a potential employer.

This might be a helpful website for you in regards to details and technical terms. "Guide to UX Research".

Also, if you haven't read it already, pick up a copy of "Experience Required" by Robert Hoekman Jr. This might give you a better foundation for why you do the UX work you do.

There is a free course on A/B testing on udacity : https://www.udacity.com/course/ab-testing--ud257

I would recommend getting familiar with the tools used in the project and google the methods used in quant research when you need to apply them.

I'm a UX researcher based in the UK...My tips:

- Do the work to understand how UX works (it's very different to academia). Read a lot and also speak to UX researchers to understand more about their role and and how it differs. Your ability to land the role will be dependent on your ability to communicate your understanding / application of UX.

- My book recommendation is: https://www.amazon.com/User-Research-Practical-Designing-Products/dp/0749481048

- You can use academic research as a leverage for your skills as a researcher. The hard part is applying it to UX.

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More than happy to chat further.

think like a ux researcher

Oh, I know this wasn’t your question, but if you have the actual prototype on Apple TV or Roku you can use one of those cheap HDMI to USB sticks to get the input on your computer and record the session. With OBS you can merge the input from the box with multiple webcam inputs. E.g. a webcam on the remote and another webcam on the tester. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08QHJ2L4P/ref=sspa_dk_detail_2

There's a great book called "Radical Candor", by Kim Scott that will teach you the skills to "challenge directly", which means being professional and caring and frank at the same time. This approach is most often used in management, but it's management that usually implements it with the entire team. I've used it outside of management simply for my own sanity.

aah I'm glad!
Of course! So, I like to follow this structure given to my class by an anthropologist. It goes from general questions to more specific questions. It doesn't always apply to every project, but I feel it's a great place to start structuring my script.

So, with this structure in mind, in between questions I like to put suggestions for myself like "You mentioned "this", can you tell me more about it?" or have a specific guideline like "Make an assumption". This way, I remind myself to actually have a conversation with the person I'm interviewing and building on that instead of just following a strict script. This also reminds me to write down key points I want to ask about that I did not cover in the initial script. So basically what I end up doing is creating a script fluid enough and with enough suggestions that I'm not blindsided if something I didn't plan for happens.

Okay. I want to redesign the app. Basically a UX redesign. My main purpose here is to enhance the overall usability of the app along with that I want to understand the users of the app. I want to know if the existing app is helping them with achieving thier goals or not ? The main purpose of the app is to connect Rural-to-rural india and urban-to-rural India. I was planning to do user research through user surveys bc its easy to do(atleast that's what I think rn) The app categories itself as a news and magazine app on the Play Store. This app is one of a kind app in India. There are other news apps but they don't just focus on rural India but overall India. If you want you can check out the app here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gaonconnection.app I don't work for this app. It's just a project for me.

Okay. I want to redesign the app. Basically a UX redesign. My main purpose here is to enhance the overall usability of the app along with that I want to understand the users of the app. I want to know if the existing app is helping them with achieving thier goals or not ? The main purpose of the app is to connect Rural-to-rural india and urban-to-rural India. I was planning to do user research through user surveys bc its easy to do(atleast that's what I think rn) The app categories itself as a news and magazine app on the Play Store. This app is one of a kind app in India. There are other news apps but they don't just focus on rural India but overall India. If you want you can check out the app here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gaonconnection.app I don't work for this app. It's just a project for me.

I'm in the same boat - I have an MA in cultural Anthropology. I really want to make the switch but I am at a job that doesnt give me a whole lot of extra money to take the UX workshops. they are so expensive! I am currently trying to up my skills in data anaysis and programming. Basic stuff. Im using coursera. They have this specialization thats currently TBA that I am waiting for https://www.coursera.org/specialization/humancomputerinteraction/28?utm_medium=listingPage but taking the 'data scientists toolbox' in the meantime.

Capturing, storing, and analyzing qualitative data have distinct workflows supported by different tools on and off your list.

To capture data from interviews or listening sessions, generalized tools like Zoom or Meet can work just as well as specific tools like Lookback.

To analyze data, we have CAQDAS tools which have a long history in other fields. We also use simple yet powerful tools like affinity mapping with a whiteboard.

Storing data has come along way with tools like Dovetail, EnjoyHQ, and a ton of others. There is still a lot of room for growth in these tools but it beats the generic alternative of Drive or Evernote.

I have a pretty comprehensive guide to using research repositories on my IG (Click FAIR UXR) . It even includes a research repository example and a template built with Airtable and populated with real data.

It's a little bit more complicated to set up than some other options, but you could look at Github pages. There are loads of great open source themes out there you can use and just get writing with.

Noticed this recent example of a podcasting app product team soliciting feedback from a subreddit:

Stitcher on /r/earwolf: https://reddit.com/r/Earwolf/comments/ikpurk/hi_were_the_stitcher_product_team_we_are_working/

The Slack team itself actually did co-designing and feedback sessions with some of their power users in a shared Slack channel to get quick iterative feedback:

Slack’s blog post: https://slack.com/blog/collaboration/designing-the-future-of-slack-with-customers

Great!!!!

If someone wants video tutorials,you can check https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn-ux-research

this site consists of free as well as paid tutorials

Nice work dude!

If anyone is interested in audio-visual resource I've found a site,it aggregates different tutorial sites together

https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn-ux-research

Are you surveying internal people or external? Is the concern the hosting of the survey data post survey? Limesurvey is a great open source survey that you can host yourself. I've used it in the past for surveys with high data storage sensitivity requirements.

as the other folks have said, these are usually called sunburst, although these particular two are laid out kind of funny. If you're interested in learning about other visualizations like this, the https://d3js.org/ site is pretty cool. you can click on the example images there and it shows you a bigger version you can click around on.

After looking that these two fro a bit, I think I figured out how to read them. (though I am making a lot of assumptions) They seem to represent a users flow through an E-commerce site. Each ring represents a step in the populations flow, starting from the inner ring. On the top one, everyone started on the "product browse grid". On the next page they hit - the next ring out, most made it to a PDP, which I'll assume is a product detail page? The next step, some went back to the product browse grid, some when to a PDP and some exited the site. etc etc.

FWIW, and this is just my opinion, this isn't a great way of representing this data. It's really hard to infer much from it. There are some cases where this makes sense, but I feel like in this case it was just used because it looks cool.

>Any algorithms out there that parse a transcript and pull out common themes?

This is not going to get you much results. I've done sentiment analysis in R. Even with massive data sets, not much emerges (and a script like this will be too small). The themes you want are qualitative, and qualitative is an extremely slow process. Getting the context and the 'why' is something humans do uniquely well and we are a lot slow than an algorithm in some ways.

Also, you may just want to pay for transcription to avoid relying on notes (which are abstracted from the actual session). Otter.ai has a solid free plan to try out.

having also worked with charities myself, i found that most companies have a non-profit rate if you ask – even if it's not listed on their pricing page.

i was just on another thread about UR transcription, and otter.ai offer 400 minutes of transcription for free PER MONTH. hope that helps.

Got you covered: https://www.amazon.com/Games-User-Research-Anders-Drachen-ebook/dp/B0799NJBVZ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Games+User+Research&qid=1604330506&sr=8-1

I’d recommend UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want

It’s a good overview of the UX process

https://www.amazon.com/UX-Strategy-Innovative-Digital-Products/dp/1449372864/ref=nodl_

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The good news is lots of people have made this transition, the less good news is there is a bit of a "need experience to get experience" catch 22. You can totally over come all that though.

• In addition to the suggestions by DrKevinBuffardi I'd suggest you also check out the offerings from Rosenfeld Media. Particularly Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal

• See if there is a UXPA group or relevant meetup.com group near you. Gotta do that networking.

• If you already have a masters or PhD you probably don't need another degree. Coursera has a Stanford HCI series that might be worth doing.

• Researchers tend to be a friendly bunch. I'd search around and see if there are any UXR folks in your area and ask for an informational interview.

• You can always offer to do free projects for local non-profits or small businesses. All you need is a couple projects under your belt so that you can show potential employers that you can translate your academic skills into an applied setting.

What area are you located in?