July 10, 2014
5 min

User research and agile squadification at Trade Me

Hi, I’m Martin. I work as a UX researcher at Trade Me having left Optimal Experience (Optimal Workshop's sister company) last year. For those of you who don’t know, Trade Me is New Zealand’s largest online auction site that also lists real estate to buy and rent, cars to buy, jobs listings, travel accommodation and quite a few other things besides. Over three quarters of the population are members and about three quarters of the Internet traffic for New Zealand sites goes to the sites we run.

Leaving a medium-sized consultancy and joining Trade Me has been a big change in many ways, but in others not so much, as I hadn’t expected to find myself operating in a small team of in-house consultants. The approach the team is taking is proving to be pretty effective, so I thought I’d share some of the details of the way we work with the readers of Optimal Workshop’s blog. Let me explain what I mean…

What agile at Trade Me looks like

Over the last year or so, Trade Me has moved all of its development teams over to Agile following a model pioneered by Spotify. All of the software engineering parts of the business have been ‘squadified’. These people produce the websites & apps or provide and support the infrastructure that makes everything possible.Across Squads, there are common job roles in ‘Chapters’ (like designers or testers) and because people are not easy to force into boxes, and why should they be, there are interest groups called ‘Guilds’.The squads are self-organizing, running their own processes and procedures to get to where they need to. In practice, this means they use as many or as few of the Kanban, Scrum, and Rapid tools they find useful. Over time, we’ve seen that squads tend to follow similar practices as they learn from each other.

How our UX team fits in

Our UX team of three sits outside the squads, but we work with them and with the product owners across the business.How does this work? It might seem counter-intuitive to have UX outside of the tightly-integrated, highly-focused squads, sometimes working with product owners working on stuff that might have little to do with what’s being currently developed in the squads. This comes down to the way Trade Me divides down the UX responsibilities within the organization. Within each squad there is a designer. He or she is responsible for how that feature or app looks, and, more importantly, how it acts — interaction design as well as visual design.Then what do we do, if we are the UX team?

We represent the voice of Trade Me’s users

By conducting research with Trade Me’s users we can validate the squads’ day-to-day decisions, and help frame decisions on future plans. We do this by wearing two hats. Wearing the pointy hats of structured, detailed researchers, we look into long-term trends: the detailed behaviours and goals of our different audiences. We’ve conducted lots of one-on-one interviews with hundreds of people, including top sellers, motor parts buyers, and job seekers, as well as running surveys, focus groups and user testing sessions of future-looking prototypes. For example, we recently spent time with a number of buyers and sellers, seeking to understand their motivations and getting under their skin to find out how they perceive Trade Me.

This kind of research enables Trade Me to anticipate and respond to changes in user perception and satisfaction.Swapping hats to an agile beanie (and stretching the metaphor to breaking point), we react to the medium-term, short-term and very short-term needs of the squads testing their ideas, near-finished work and finished work with users, as well as sometimes simply answering questions and providing opinion, based upon our research. Sometimes this means that we can be testing something in the afternoon having only heard we are needed in the morning. This might sound impossible to accommodate, but the pace of change at Trade Me is such that stuff is getting deployed pretty much every day, many of which affects our users directly. It’s our job to ensure that we support our colleagues to do the very best we can for our users.

How our ‘drop everything’ approach works in practice

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 10.00.21 am

We recently conducted five or six rounds (no one can quite remember, we did it so quickly) of testing of our new iPhone application (pictured above) — sometimes testing more than one version at a time. The development team would receive our feedback face-to-face, make changes and we’d be testing the next version of the app the same or the next day. It’s only by doing this that we can ensure that Trade Me members will see positive changes happening daily rather than monthly.

How we prioritize what needs to get done

To help us try to decide what we should be doing at any one time we have some simple rules to prioritise:

  • Core product over other business elements
  • Finish something over start something new
  • Committed work over non-committed work
  • Strategic priorities over non-strategic priorities
  • Responsive support over less time-critical work
  • Where our input is crucial over where our input is a bonus

Applying these rules to any situation makes the decision whether to jump in and help pretty easy.At any one time, each of us in the UX team will have one or more long-term projects, some medium-term projects, and either some short-term projects or the capacity for some short-term projects (usually achieved by putting aside a long-term project for a moment).

We manage our time and projects on Trello, where we can see at a glance what’s happening this and next week, and what we’ve caught sniff of in the wind that might be coming up, or definitely is coming up.On the whole, both we and the squads favour fast response, bulleted list, email ‘reports’ for any short-term requests for user testing.  We get a report out within four hours of testing (usually well within that). After all, the squads are working in short sprints, and our involvement is often at the sharp end where delays are not welcome. Most people aren’t going to read past the management summary anyway, so why not just write that, unless you have to?

How we share our knowledge with the organization

Even though we mainly keep our reporting brief, we want the knowledge we’ve gained from working with each squad or on each product to be available to everyone. So we maintain a wiki that contains summaries of what we did for each piece of work, why we did it and what we found. Detailed reports, if there are any, are attached. We also send all reports out to staff who’ve subscribed to the UX interest email group.

Finally, we send out a monthly email, which looks across a bunch of research we’ve conducted, both short and long-term, and draws conclusions from which our colleagues can learn. All of these latter activities contribute to one of our key objectives: making Trade Me an even more user-centred organization than it is.I’ve been with Trade Me for about six months and we’re constantly refining our UX practices, but so far it seems to be working very well.Right, I’d better go – I’ve just been told I’m user testing something pretty big tomorrow and I need to write a test script!

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5 ways to increase user research in your organization

Co-authored by Brandon Dorn, UX designer at Viget.As user experience designers, making sure that websites and tools are usable is a critical component of our work, and conducting user research enables us to assess whether we’re achieving that goal or not. Even if we want to incorporate research, however, certain constraints may stand in our way.

A few years ago, we realized that we were facing this issue at Viget, a digital design agency, and we decided to make an effort to prioritize user research. Almost two years ago, we shared initial thoughts on our progress in this blog post. We’ve continued to learn and grow as researchers since then and hope that what we’ve learned along the way can help your clients and coworkers understand the value of research and become better practitioners. Below are some of those lessons.

Make research a priority for your organization

Before you can do more research, it needs to be prioritized across your entire organization — not just within your design team. To that end, you should:

  • Know what you’re trying to achieve. By defining specific goals, you can share a clear message with the broader organization about what you’re after, how you can achieve those goals, and how you will measure success. At Viget, we shared our research goals with everyone at the company. In addition, we talked to the business development and project management teams in more depth about specific ways that they could help us achieve our goals, since they have the greatest impact on our ability to do more research.
  • Track your progress. Once you’ve made research a priority, make sure to review your goals on an ongoing basis to ensure that you’re making progress and share your findings with the organization. Six months after the research group at Viget started working on our goals, we held a retrospective to figure out what was working — and what wasn’t.
  • Adjust your approach as needed. You won’t achieve your goals overnight. As you put different tactics into action, adjust your approach if something isn’t helping you achieve your goals. Be willing to experiment and don’t feel bad if a specific tactic isn’t successful.

Educate your colleagues and clients

If you want people within your organization to get excited about doing more research, they need to understand what research means. To educate your colleagues and clients, you should:

  • Explain the fundamentals of research. If someone has not conducted research before, they may not be familiar or feel comfortable with the vernacular. Provide an overview of the fundamental terminology to establish a basic level of understanding. In a blog post, Speaking the Same Language About Research, we outline how we established a common vocabulary at Viget.
  • Help others understand the landscape of research methods. As designers, we feel comfortable talking about different methodologies and forget that that information will be new to many people. Look for opportunities to increase understanding by sharing your knowledge. At Viget, we make this happen in several ways. Internally, we give presentations to the company, organize group viewing sessions for webinars about user research, and lead focused workshops to help people put new skills into practice. Externally, we talk about our services and share knowledge through our blog posts. We are even hosting a webinar about conducting user interviews in November and we'd love for you to join us.
  • Incorporate others into the research process. Don't just tell people what research is and why it's important — show them. Look for opportunities to bring more people into the research process. Invite people to observe sessions so they can experience research firsthand or have them take on the role of the notetaker. Another simple way to make people feel involved is to share findings on an ongoing basis rather than providing a report at the end of the process.

Broaden your perspective while refining your skill set

Our commitment to testing assumptions led us to challenge ourselves to do research on every project. While we're dogmatic about this goal, we're decidedly un-dogmatic about the form our research takes from one project to another. To pursue this goal, we seek to:

  • Expand our understanding. To instill a culture of research at Viget, we've found it necessary to question our assumptions about what research looks like. Books like Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research teach us the range of possible approaches for getting useful user input at any stage of a project, and at any scale. Reflect on any methodological biases that have become well-worn paths in your approach to research. Maybe your organization is meticulous about metrics and quantitative data, and could benefit from a series of qualitative studies. Maybe you have plenty of anecdotal and qualitative evidence about your product that could be better grounded in objective analysis. Aim to establish a balanced perspective on your product through a diverse set of research lenses, filling in gaps as you learn about new approaches.
  • Adjust our approach to project constraints. We've found that the only way to consistently incorporate research in our work is to adjust our approach to the context and constraints of any given project. Client expectations, project type, business goals, timelines, budget, and access to participants all influence the type, frequency, and output of our research. Iterative prototype testing of an email editor, for example, looks very different than post-launch qualitative studies for an editorial website. While some projects are research-intensive, short studies can also be worthwhile.
  • Reflect on successes and shortcomings. We have a longstanding practice of holding post-project team retrospectives to reflect on and document lessons for future work. Research has naturally come up in these conversations, and many of the things we've discussed you're reading right now. As an agency with a diverse set of clients, it's been important for us to understand what types of research work for what types of clients, and when. Make sure to take time to ask these questions after projects. Mid-project retrospectives can be beneficial, especially on long engagements, yet it's hard to see the forest when you're in the weeds.

Streamline qualitative research processes 🚄

Learning to be more efficient at planning, conducting, and analyzing research has helped us overturn the idea that some projects merit research while others don't. Remote moderated usability tests are one of our preferred methods, yet, in our experience, the biggest obstacle to incorporating these tests isn't the actual moderating or analyzing, but the overhead of acquiring and scheduling participants. While some agencies contract out the work of recruiting, we've found it less expensive and more reliable to collaborate with our clients to find the right people for our tests. That said, here are some recommendations for holding efficient qualitative tests:

  • Know your tools ahead of time. We use a number of tools to plan, schedule, annotate, and analyze qualitative tests (we're inveterate spreadsheet users). Learn your tools beforehand, especially if you're trying something new. Tools should fade into the background during tests, which Reframer does nicely.
  • Establish a recruiting process. When working with clients to find participants, we'll often provide an email template tailored to the project for them to send to existing or potential users of their product. This introductory email will contain a screener that asks a few project-related demographic or usage questions, and provides us with participant email addresses which we use to follow-up with a link to a scheduling tool. Once this process is established, the project manager will ensure that the UX designer on the team has a regular flow of participants. The recruiting process doesn't take care of itself – participants cancel, or reschedule, or sometimes don't respond at all – yet establishing an approach ahead of time allows you, the researcher, to focus on the research in the midst of the project.
  • Start recruiting early. Don't wait until you've finished writing a testing script to begin recruiting participants. Once you determine the aim and focal points of your study, recruit accordingly. Scripts can be revised and approved in the meantime.

Be proactive about making research happen 🤸

As a generalist design agency, we work with clients whose industries and products vary significantly. While some clients come to us with clear research priorities in mind, others treat it as an afterthought. Rare, however, is the client who is actively opposed to researching their product. More often than not, budget and timelines are the limiting factors. So we try not to make research an ordeal, but instead treat it as part of our normal process even if a client hasn't explicitly asked for it. Common-sense perspectives like Jakob Nielsen’s classic “Discount Usability for the Web” remind us that some research is always better than none, and that some can still be meaningfully pursued. We aren’t pushy about research, of course, but instead try to find a way to make it happen when it isn't a definite priority.

World Usability Day is coming up on November 9, so now is a great time to stop and reflect on how you approach research and to brainstorm ways to improve your process. The tips above reflect some of the lessons we’ve learned at Viget as we’ve tried to improve our own process. We’d love to hear about approaches you’ve used as well.

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Why user research is essential for product development

Many organizations are aware that staying relevant essential for their success. This can mean a lot of things to different organizations. What it often means is coming up with plenty of new, innovative ideas and products to keep pace with the demands and needs of the marketplace. It also means keeping up with the expectations and needs of your users, which often means  shorter and shorter product development life cycle times.  While maintaining this pace can be daunting, it can also be seen as a strength, tightening up your processes and cutting out unnecessary steps.

A vital part of developing new (or tweaking existing) products is considering the end user first. There really is no point in creating anything new if it isn’t meeting a need or filling a gap in the market. How can you make sure you are hitting the right mark? Ask your users.  We look into some of the key user research methods available to help you in your product development process.

If you want to know more about how to fit research into your product development process, take a read here.

What is user research? 👨🏻💻

User experience (UX) research, or user research as it’s commonly referred to, is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, UX research involves using different research methods to gather qualitative and quantitative data and insights about how your users interact with your product. It is an essential part of developing, building, and launching a product that truly meets the needs, desires, and requirements of your users. 

At its simplest, user research is talking to your users and understanding what they want and why. And using this to deliver what they need.

How does user research fit into the product development process? 🧩🧩

User research is an essential part of the product development process. By asking questions of your users about how your product works and what place it fills in the market, you can create a product that delivers what the market needs to those who need it. 

Without user research, you could literally be firing arrows in the dark, or at the very best, working from a very internal organizational view based on assuming that what you believe users need is what they want. With user research, you can collect qualitative and quantitative data that clearly tells you where and what users would like to see and how they would use it.

Investing in user research right at the start of the product development process can save the team and the organization heavy investment in time and money. With detailed data responses, your brand-new product can leapfrog many development hurdles, delivering a final product that users love and want to keep using. Firing arrows to hit a bullseye.

What user research methods should we use? 🥺

Qualitative ResearchMethods

Qualitative research is about exploration. It focuses on discovering things we cannot measure with numbers and typically involves getting to know users directly through interviews or observation.

Usability Testing – Observational

One of the best ways to learn about your users and how they interact with your new product is to observe them in their own environment. Watch how they accomplish tasks, the order they do things, what frustrates them, and what makes the task easier and/or more enjoyable for your subject. The data can be collated to inform the usability of your product, improving intuitive design and what resonates with your users.

Competitive Analysis

Reviewing products already on the market can be a great start to the product development process. Why are your competitors’ products successful? And how well do they behave for users? Learn from their successes, and even better, build on where they may not be performing as well and find where your product fills the gap in the market.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research is about measurement. It focuses on gathering data and then turning this data into usable statistics.

Surveys

Surveys are a popular user research method for gathering information from a wide range of people. In most cases, a survey will feature a set of questions designed to assess someone’s thoughts on a particular aspect of your new product. They’re useful for getting feedback or understanding attitudes, and you can use the learnings from your survey of a subset of users to draw conclusions about a larger population of users.

Wrap Up 🌯

Gathering information on your users during the product development process and before you invest time and money can be hugely beneficial to the entire process. Collating robust data and insights to guide the new product development and respond directly to user needs, and filling that all-important niche. Undertaking user experience research shouldn’t stop at product development but throughout each and every step of your product life cycle. If you want to find out more about UX research throughout the life cycle of your product, take a read of our article UX research for each product phase.

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1 min read

Using paper prototypes in UX

In UX research we are told again and again that to ensure truly user-centered design, it’s important to test ideas with real users as early as possible. There are many benefits that come from introducing the voice of the people you are designing for in the early stages of the design process. The more feedback you have to work with, the more you can inform your design to align with real needs and expectations. In turn, this leads to better experiences that are more likely to succeed in the real world.It is not surprising then that paper prototypes have become a popular tool used among researchers. They allow ideas to be tested as they emerge, and can inform initial designs before putting in the hard yards of building the real thing. It would seem that they’re almost a no-brainer for researchers, but just like anything out there, along with all the praise, they have also received a fair share of criticism, so let’s explore paper prototypes a little further.

What’s a paper prototype anyway? 🧐📖

Paper prototyping is a simple usability testing technique designed to test interfaces quickly and cheaply. A paper prototype is nothing more than a visual representation of what an interface could look like on a piece of paper (or even a whiteboard or chalkboard). Unlike high-fidelity prototypes that allow for digital interactions to take place, paper prototypes are considered to be low-fidelity, in that they don’t allow direct user interaction. They can also range in sophistication, from a simple sketch using a pen and paper to simulate an interface, through to using designing or publishing software to create a more polished experience with additional visual elements.

Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 9.26.30 AM
Different ways of designing paper prototypes, using OptimalSort as an example

Showing a research participant a paper prototype is far from the real deal, but it can provide useful insights into how users may expect to interact with specific features and what makes sense to them from a basic, user-centered perspective. There are some mixed attitudes towards paper prototypes among the UX community, so before we make any distinct judgements, let's weigh up their pros and cons.

Advantages 🏆

  • They’re cheap and fastPen and paper, a basic word document, Photoshop. With a paper prototype, you can take an idea and transform it into a low-fidelity (but workable) testing solution very quickly, without having to write code or use sophisticated tools. This is especially beneficial to researchers who work with tight budgets, and don’t have the time or resources to design an elaborate user testing plan.
  • Anyone can do itPaper prototypes allow you to test designs without having to involve multiple roles in building them. Developers can take a back seat as you test initial ideas, before any code work begins.
  • They encourage creativityFrom both the product teams participating in their design, but also from the users. They require the user to employ their imagination, and give them the opportunity express their thoughts and ideas on what improvements can be made. Because they look unfinished, they naturally invite constructive criticism and feedback.
  • They help minimize your chances of failurePaper prototypes and user-centered design go hand in hand. Introducing real people into your design as early as possible can help verify whether you are on the right track, and generate feedback that may give you a good idea of whether your idea is likely to succeed or not.

Disadvantages 😬

  • They’re not as polished as interactive prototypesIf executed poorly, paper prototypes can appear unprofessional and haphazard. They lack the richness of an interactive experience, and if our users are not well informed when coming in for a testing session, they may be surprised to be testing digital experiences on pieces of paper.
  • The interaction is limitedDigital experiences can contain animations and interactions that can’t be replicated on paper. It can be difficult for a user to fully understand an interface when these elements are absent, and of course, the closer the interaction mimics the final product, the more reliable our findings will be.
  • They require facilitationWith an interactive prototype you can assign your user tasks to complete and observe how they interact with the interface. Paper prototypes, however, require continuous guidance from a moderator in communicating next steps and ensuring participants understand the task at hand.
  • Their results have to be interpreted carefullyPaper prototypes can’t emulate the final experience entirely. It is important to interpret their findings while keeping their limitations in mind. Although they can help minimize your chances of failure, they can’t guarantee that your final product will be a success. There are factors that determine success that cannot be captured on a piece of paper, and positive feedback at the prototyping stage does not necessarily equate to a well-received product further down the track.

Improving the interface of card sorting, one prototype at a time 💡

We recently embarked on a research project looking at the user interface of our card-sorting tool, OptimalSort. Our research has two main objectives — first of all to benchmark the current experience on laptops and tablets and identify ways in which we can improve the current interface. The second objective is to look at how we can improve the experience of card sorting on a mobile phone.

Rather than replicating the desktop experience on a smaller screen, we want to create an intuitive experience for mobiles, ensuring we maintain the quality of data collected across devices.Our current mobile experience is a scaled down version of the desktop and still has room for improvement, but despite that, 9 per cent of our users utilize the app. We decided to start from the ground up and test an entirely new design using paper prototypes. In the spirit of testing early and often, we decided to jump right into testing sessions with real users. In our first testing sprint, we asked participants to take part in two tasks. The first was to perform an open or closed card sort on a laptop or tablet. The second task involved using paper prototypes to see how people would respond to the same experience on a mobile phone.

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Context is everything 🎯

What did we find? In the context of our research project, paper prototypes worked remarkably well. We were somewhat apprehensive at first, trying to figure out the exact flow of the experience and whether the people coming into our office would get it. As it turns out, people are clever, and even those with limited experience using a smartphone were able to navigate and identify areas for improvement just as easily as anyone else. Some participants even said they prefered the experience of testing paper prototypes over a laptop. In an effort to make our prototype-based tasks easy to understand and easy to explain to our participants, we reduced the full card sort to a few key interactions, minimizing the number of branches in the UI flow.

This could explain a preference for the mobile task, where we only asked participants to sort through a handful of cards, as opposed to a whole set.The main thing we found was that no matter how well you plan your test, paper prototypes require you to be flexible in adapting the flow of your session to however your user responds. We accepted that deviating from our original plan was something we had to embrace, and in the end these additional conversations with our participants helped us generate insights above and beyond the basics we aimed to address. We now have a whole range of feedback that we can utilize in making more sophisticated, interactive prototypes.

Whether our success with using paper prototypes was determined by the specific setup of our testing sessions, or simply by their pure usefulness as a research technique is hard to tell. By first performing a card sorting task on a laptop or tablet, our participants approached the paper prototype with an understanding of what exactly a card sort required. Therefore there is no guarantee that we would have achieved the same level of success in testing paper prototypes on their own. What this does demonstrate, however, is that paper prototyping is heavily dependent on the context of your assessment.

Final thoughts 💬

Paper prototypes are not guaranteed to work for everybody. If you’re designing an entirely new experience and trying to describe something complex in an abstracted form on paper, people may struggle to comprehend your idea. Even a careful explanation doesn’t guarantee that it will be fully understood by the user. Should this stop you from testing out the usefulness of paper prototypes in the context of your project? Absolutely not.

In a perfect world we’d test high fidelity interactive prototypes that resemble the real deal as closely as possible, every step of the way. However, if we look at testing from a practical perspective, before we can fully test sophisticated designs, paper prototypes provide a great solution for generating initial feedback.In his article criticizing the use of paper prototypes, Jake Knapp makes the point that when we show customers a paper prototype we’re inviting feedback, not reactions. What we found in our research however, was quite the opposite.

In our sessions, participants voiced their expectations and understanding of what actions were possible at each stage, without us having to probe specifically for feedback. Sure we also received general comments on icon or colour preferences, but for the most part our users gave us insights into what they felt throughout the experience, in addition to what they thought.

Further reading 🧠

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