How To Conduct Great User Interviews

Researching your audience is imperative to developing a successful, ‘needed’ product or service.

To create something people want and need, you first must find out what they want and need. After all, creating a product or service without that vital information is like getting into a car and saying, “Go!”

In the book Pain Killer Marketing, researchers Chris Stielhl and Henry DeVries found that one-on-one interviews can generate around 80% of all possible pain points for your target market. That’s some seriously helpful information!

Of course, you can’t just rock up to anyone in the street with a pen and paper. And you can’t just make it up as you go along. To get the right information, you must prepare the right questions.

That’s where user interviews come in!

A man conducting a user interview with another man
User Interviews are critical to building great products and features
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Sentiment for UX Research Notes + Organizing Tags

Aurelius Product & Feature Updates [Oct. 2019]

We recently launched several new features to even further supercharge your UX research analysis! You can now manually add sentiment (positive/negative) metadata to any user research note. Also, our new Tag Groups feature helps you organize user research notes, data and insights across multiple studies easily!

Note Sentiment

Add positive and negative sentiment to your notes in Aurelius to do faster, more in-depth analysis later
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The Essential Guide to User Research Notes

User research notes are the building blocks of customer insights. Without useful and effective note-taking, we can’t hope to uncover true user needs and deliver an experience that solves their problem or meets those needs.

This post is a recap of our webinar with special guest Bethany Stolle, Design Research Lead at Blackboard. Read the post below to view the slides and full recording of our session!

The Essential Guide to User Research Notes – full webinar recording
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Build a Quicker, Easier Research Practice – 8 Tip Guide + Video

8 Tips to Build a Quicker, Easier Research Practice

We teamed up with our friends over at User Interviews to bring you an knowledge packed webinar to learn how to make your user research efforts faster and easier. We covered how to store and share research insights, managing participants and more. 

Keep reading for the full video recording, slides and transcript.

read more… “Build a Quicker, Easier Research Practice – 8 Tip Guide + Video”

How to Create an Affinity Diagram for UX Research

People doing an affinity diagram with sticky notes

What is an Affinity Diagram?

An affinity diagram is a tool often used to organize data and ideas. Affinity diagrams help you organize information into groups of similar items to then analyze qualitative data or observations.

Business and design teams have used affinity diagrams for a long time to organize ideas, complex information and even customer feedback into themes or groups. For UX researchers, affinity diagrams are often used for analyzing and synthesizing user research findings by patterns and themes. In this case affinity diagrams are sometimes referred to as the KJ method or an affinity map. Also in other broad application like business brainstorming or idea generation it may be called a cluster map.

read more… “How to Create an Affinity Diagram for UX Research”

User Research Tagging and Coding – Aurelius Product Updates July 2019

Tagging and coding user research notes and data just got easier with our latest updates in Aurelius!

We’ve been very busy learning from our customers on how to help them best tag, analyze and share their user research data and findings. In continuing with our product updates and sharing what we learn from customers and what we did about it, keep reading to hear all about our latest product updates.

read more… “User Research Tagging and Coding – Aurelius Product Updates July 2019”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 36 with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research

Episode 36 highlights with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research:

  • Differences between in house and external UX teams and the unique challenges of each
  • Tips for collaborating with others on your user research work
  • How to encourage non-designers and non-researchers to collaborate on user research and insights
  • Tips for working with stakeholders who believe they already know what needs to be designed
  • Effectively communicating user research insights to inspire action from executives, developers and more

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 36 with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research”

How to Organize and Share User Research Data and Insights: 3 Step Guide

Trying to organize all of your user research data and insights in one place to easily find and reuse again later? Let’s talk about how to do that. 

We’ve been working on Aurelius for almost four years now and as a result we’ve spoken with a lot of teams trying to find a place to store, track and organize all the raw user research data and insights they have.

The challenge is that storing UX research often doesn’t fit neatly into places or tools we already have in place because they’re not built for that purpose. What ends up happening is that either you give up in frustration and have no real organization for your UX research, or, you try to create a UX research database with existing tools and methods.

This can have mixed results. An important factor here is having a strategy for how you’ll organize and share all of your UX research once you decide on a platform. In this article, I’ll discuss the three main steps to consider in order to most effectively store all your UX research in one central repository.

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Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

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Sharing and Organizing User Research Just Got Easier

Aurelius Product Updates – March 2019

We’ve been working hard on several updates to Aurelius! 

Our customers and trial users give us tons of feedback and we use all of it to directly inform our product roadmap and what we eventually launch. This is something we take a lot of pride in since we are a user research tool, built by UX and research folks, for UX and design research teams.

Additionally, we found that other people like us just plain find it interesting to hear about what we build and what led us to making those decisions.

In this post we’ll outline some of what we learned and what we built and launched in response to those research insights from our very own audience.

read more… “Sharing and Organizing User Research Just Got Easier”

Aurelius Podcast: Episode 35 with Rob Walling on Making Tough Design and Product Choices

Episode 35 highlights with Rob Walling:

  • How Rob started and/or acquired multiple SaaS apps over the years and some product and design lessons he’s learned from that experience
  • Rob’s background as a software engineer and what made him decide to become an entrepreneur
  • The story of founding Drip and how Rob and how the team made some pretty big changes in the product
  • Finding the confidence to help you figure out how, and when, to make big product decisions
  • Minimum Path to Awesome and how to successfully launch new features in your product

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 35 with Rob Walling on Making Tough Design and Product Choices”