RE: User research

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

Hi.

Someone already posted a very good outline of how they went about their audience analysis. We're currently conducting audience analysis. Email me if you want some details about what we've done so far and where we're planning on going.

May I suggest you don't even bother with surveys. No matter how well designed, you rarely get the feedback you need and want. To really get at your audience, you need to ask open ended questions, and those give anyone a chill when they appear on a survey. :-) Go with interviews and site visits. Luckily, you can usually combine these two efforts. Ask open ended questions, and try to observe your audience members while they're using the product. Avoid asking questions like "Do you use the documentation?" "How often do you use the documentation?" and so forth. Instead, ask questions about what they do during their day, how the tool helps them get their job done, what sorts of problems they encounter and so forth. This will give you an idea of their needs, which you can later build into user profiles (personas).


Also, take a look around your company. There might be information in other departments that you can use. Check out training, customer service and marketing for starters. You can get an idea of common issues from the first two. Your marketing team might have target customer profiles they use (the worth of these profiles may be anywhere from a waste of time to a starting point for further research).


As far as other resources:

Try "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper. ISBN: 0672316498 This is sort of a critical analysis of the software industry. It's geared towards product design, but it does discuss (eventually) conducting user analysis and creating personas, which are characters you create as a guideline for your design. You can adapt the process he outlines to audience analysis for your docs.


The following article discusses the value of audience analysis and examines types of audience research. It has a nice bibliography that you can start your research from.
http://www.userfirst.net/rob/audience.htm


You might want to look into contextual inquiry as well. This is a technique that has you observe your customers using the tools in question. You can gather a lot of data that you can use to help determine their needs from simply observing users. The following URLs introduces contextual inquiry
http://sunrize.nada.kth.se/usor/jml.cgi/Methods/context.jml?graphics=true

http://jthom.best.vwh.net/usability/context.htm


You might also want to check out the STC's Usability SIG. They have articles, downloadable forms and a list of recommended books.
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/index.html


User Interface Design has a lot of articles on intferface design, which include information about user analysis that you can adapt to your purposes. http://world.std.com/%7Euieweb/moreart.htm


Finally, can I just say that nothing beats a site visit. My entire perception of our audience changed with one visit. And that was an informal event. :-)

Hope that helps.

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Sean Hower - tech writer
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