Q: What does UX research focus on?
- Prioritizing what a business believes users want from a product
- Understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback
- Following the process that takes a product from an idea to reality
- Analyzing market trends and competitor strategies for product development
Explanation: User experience research (UX research) collects information on how users engage with goods or services via the use of techniques such as user interviews, usability testing, surveys, and analytics. The goal of this study is to enhance the users' overall experience and level of satisfaction. Even though these are all potential inputs to user experience research, it is not about prioritizing what a company feels people want or studying market trends and strategic approaches taken by competitors.
Q: A UX researcher is working with designers on a mobile app and wants to answer the question, “How should we build it?” Which type of research can best help the researcher answer this question?
- Foundational
- Post-launch
- Design
Explanation: The form of study that is most likely to be of use to the user experience researcher in answering the question "How should we build it?" is design research. Investigation and characterization of the issue space, comprehension of user requirements and behaviors, and the generation of insights that contribute to the design and development process are the primary foci of design research. It assists in making well-informed judgments on how to approach the design of the mobile application, which helps to ensure that it efficiently satisfies the requirements of the users.
Q: Why is the ability to collaborate an important trait for a UX researcher?
- It helps UX researchers adapt to working with a range of people, personalities, and work styles.
- It helps researchers understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation.
- It helps UX researchers stay focused on the goal of the project and solve problems practically.
Explanation: Working closely with designers, developers, stakeholders, and maybe even consumers is an essential part of the collaborative process in user experience research. To develop user-centered designs, it is necessary to possess the skills of effective communication, empathy, and the capacity to include a variety of views. Because of this quality, user experience researchers can traverse the numerous dynamics that exist within a team, encourage innovation, and ultimately contribute to the successful completion of a project by combining a variety of perspectives and ideas.
Q: What is the purpose of a survey?
- Understanding what most people think about a product by asking many people the same questions
- Observing people doing an activity in the user’s context
- Evaluating a product by testing it on users
- Collecting in-depth information on people's opinions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings
Explanation: One approach for collecting quantitative data is via the use of surveys, which include the administration of a series of standardized questions to a large number of respondents. To get a better understanding of the general ideas, preferences, habits, and attitudes of a population or a particular target audience with a product, service, or issue, they are considered.
Q: A design team is looking to build an application for mobile users who own cats. They did research and decided to build a cat-sitting app to address a gap in the market. The design team needs to know how they should build the app. At this stage, what kind of research in the product development lifecycle should they employ?
- Foundational research
- Post-launch research
- Design research
Explanation: Investigation and characterization of the issue space, comprehension of user requirements and behaviors, and the generation of insights that contribute to the design and development process are the primary foci of design research. Design research would be of assistance to the team in answering questions such as how users currently manage cat sitting, what features are most important to them, how they prefer to interact with such an app, and what pain points they experience with existing solutions. This is because the team has already identified the gap in the market and made the decision to build a cat-sitting app. To make educated judgments about how to design and construct the application to efficiently satisfy the demands of users, this study is essential.
Q: Which type of bias is the collection of attitudes and stereotypes associated with people?
- Primacy bias
- Confirmation bias
- Recency bias
- Implicit bias
Explanation: Unconscious prejudice is a collection of attitudes and preconceptions that influence our knowledge, behaviors, and choices. Implicit bias is a term that describes this collection. These biases may impact how we view and interact with other people depending on qualities such as ethnicity, gender, age, or other criteria, and they can do so without our awareness most of the time. Understanding implicit biases and taking steps to mitigate them is vital in a variety of domains, including research, design, and interactions with users, to guarantee fair and equal results.
Q: The primacy bias refers to remembering the first participant most strongly. Identify a method that can help overcome primacy bias.
- Reflect on our own behaviors.
- Identify and articulate assumptions before interviews or conversations, and survey large groups.
- Practice active listening and ask open-ended questions.
- Interview each participant the same way and take detailed notes or recordings.
Explanation: When the first participant in a research or interview is recalled more firmly or when their comments are given greater weight, this is an example of the phenomenon known as primacy bias. The most effective method for overcoming primacy bias is to conduct interviews with each participant in the same manner and to take comprehensive notes or making recordings. The use of this strategy guarantees that the data-collecting process is consistent and lowers the likelihood that the replies of a single participant will have a disproportionate impact on the results as a whole.
Q: Consider the following scenario:
A design team is designing a mobile app for a client. This client is in an industry the team is not familiar with. To better understand the industry, they do research in trade magazines and journals.
What type of research is the design team conducting?
- Survey research
- Qualitative research
- Secondary research
- Quantitative research
Explanation: Collecting information and data that already exists and has been gathered by other people is what is known as secondary research. Examples of secondary research include reading published literature, articles, reports, and databases. It helps provide background information, insights, and context about the sector or subject of interest without the need to perform fresh data gathering or primary research techniques such as surveys or interviews.
Q: Imagine that a design firm’s research team knows about their users’ pain points, but they need to answer a few specific questions before proceeding. To learn more, they decide to collect in-depth information on a handful of users’ opinions. What is the most appropriate research method?
- Usability study
- Key performance indicator
- Surveys
- Interviews
Explanation: It is possible to conduct a more in-depth investigation of the thoughts, experiences, and viewpoints of users via the use of interviews. They make it possible to ask in-depth questions and follow up on replies, which may lead to the discovery of subtle insights that one would not be able to get from surveys or usability tests alone. When the research team requires thorough qualitative data to support their knowledge of the pain areas that customers experience and to properly answer specific queries, this approach is extremely valuable.
Q: Which research method allows in-depth feedback and firsthand interaction, but only measures how easy it is to use a product?
- Interviews
- Exams
- Surveys
- Usability study
Explanation: The activity of monitoring people as they engage with a product or prototype is what usability studies do. Researchers can collect qualitative data about user behavior, preferences, and challenges experienced when using the product via the use of this approach. Usability studies often involve activities that are meant to assess certain elements of usability, such as the effectiveness of navigation, the clarity of instructions, and the overall user experience. Identifying usability difficulties and making design adjustments to make the product more user-friendly are both possible outcomes of usability studies, which provide valuable information.
Q: A design team decides to conduct interviews to learn more about users’ experiences with their product. Although this is a valuable method of primary research, why might the design team be concerned about conducting interviews?
Select all that apply.
- Interviews collect information from only a small sample of users.
- Designers need to identify a large group of potential respondents.
- Interviews require a significant investment of time and money.
- Designers can only ask about how easy it is to use a product.
Explanation: It is common practice to conduct interviews with a small number of participants; hence, the insights obtained may not accurately reflect the complete range of user experiences. One of the most resource-intensive aspects of conducting interviews is planning, which includes recruiting participants, conducting the interviews, and reviewing the data collected from the interviews. These are the two legitimate problems that are associated with the use of interviews as a main research technique to gain an understanding of the experiences that consumers have had with a product.
Q: Consider the following scenario:
Imagine that a UX designer creates an app for saving, organizing, and streaming podcasts. After conducting
interviews, the designer learns that users lack interest in an app feature that lets them add custom podcast tags. The designer has invested dozens of hours in this feature’s design. They continue to refine it, even though another user-
identified issues are pending resolution.
What can the researcher do to avoid the impacts of the sunk cost fallacy? Select all that apply.
- Break down the project into smaller phases Correct
- Outline designated points to decide whether to continue or stop Correct
- Conduct new interviews with a different group of users
- Hire an outside consulting firm to map project deliverables
Explanation: It is possible that conducting fresh interviews with a different sample of users might potentially yield further insights; however, this is not directly connected to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy. When it comes to mapping project deliverables, hiring an outside consulting company might potentially give knowledge; however, this does not immediately solve the problem of the sunk cost fallacy in this case. Therefore, to successfully reduce the effects of the sunk cost fallacy, the researcher needs to divide the study into some smaller stages and identify specific points at which they will determine whether to continue with the project or opt to stop.