Demystifying Data Collection: Doing better interviews for UXers

If my new product was free, would you use it?

Tell me about your role AND workflow AND walk me through how you'd use this portal.

What do you love / hate about our service?

Anyone can kinda do a research interview, right? Not exactly.

Getting users to articulate their real-world behaviors and unmet needs is challenging, even for the best UXers. Fortunately, ethnography has been around for a couple of centuries and its application to UX has never been more relevant. When trying to uncover the intersection between what's important to your users and your boss, ethnographic methods can be a helpful tool to discover the real-world contexts impacting the everyday decisions of users. Adopting an ethnographic mindset to UX research offers a structured method that can be applied to any content area, user type, or product/service. Over the course of 2 hours, Rachel will introduce you to a powerful data collection tool for disproving assumptions about user behavior and uncovering unexpected insights.

You’ll learn how to:

• Develop an interview guide based on business objectives and an ethnographic framework.
• Identify common rookie mistakes and pitfalls when setting up and conducting interviews.
• Conduct an user interview informed by ethnographic methods.
• Understand good practices and workflows for storing, sharing, and next steps with data.
  

Who is this workshop for?

Anyone who participates in design and research, and has ever had to do or sit-in on a user interview or focus group. Researchers, designers, UXers, service designers, product designers, quant folks, teams of one—whatever your role or situation, you’ll learn the basics of how to collect better user data.

Who is conducting the workshop?

Rachel Ceasar, PhD, is CEO of Culture of Health+Tech Consulting and a professor of public health at the USC Keck School of Medicine. Since 2014, Rachel has been sharing her experiences in applying ethnographic methods and grounded theory analysis to UX with clients, design teams, and students.

What will be covered in this workshop?

• Basic theory and applications of ethnographic methods to UX research.
• Interview guide development.
• Examples of good and bad interviewing based on real client projects.
• Opportunities on when to delegate data collection tasks to junior team members, clients, and/or non-researchers.

What will NOT be covered in this workshop?

• Surveys or other quanitative methods.
• The research process in its entirety. I will touch on how data collection fits into the broader research process, but unfortunately we won't have time to get into how to do project kickoffs, data analysis, synthesis, etc.--the fun stuff that comes before and after data collection.