Research and interviewing your users

Through analytic tools you might better understand and monitor the user navigation behavior and see what their main issues are, and now you want to understand why by listening to the user.

Doing a survey can be a starting point. According to FluidSurveys, 24.8% of people are willing to complete email surveys on average. Keep in mind that the survey questions should be quick, objective, and easy to understand. There are different nice online tools for surveys such as Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/), Typeform (https://www.typeform.com/examples/surveys/), SSI, former Instant.ly (https://www.surveysampling.com/), Polldaddy (https://www.polldaddy.com/), or even Google Forms (https://www.google.com/forms/about).

In addition to surveys, you can also do user interviews (we talked about this methodology in Chapter 2, Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies) and talk individually to the users and potential users who represent your target audience. Besides the whys behind the user behavior during navigation, which is to avoid conversion, doing surveys and running user interviews are great opportunities to better understand the context of using the website or app. You can check, for example, where the users are when accessing your app or website;  at what times during the day or week they access it; and also what their motivations are to do so.

Interviews can take place online or in person. You can choose to do it in a laboratory, in a location chosen by the interviewees (such their own office, workplace, friend's place, co-work space, coffee shop, or wherever they can be found – a school, bookstore, shopping mall, pub, event, and so on). You can even consider running these tests in your company or office; although a few experts believe you can run the risk of getting biased answers, it should be fine if you conduct the interviews well.

There are a few interview methodologies that can be combined with usability tests, as described in Chapter 2, Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies, such as:

• Ethnography: When the researcher follows the day-to-day user. The ethnography originates from Social Anthropology, one of the four fields of anthropology, which arose from the need to understand the socio-cultural relations, behaviors, rites, techniques, knowledge, and practices of societies hitherto unknown, and which have been adapted by current problems. This observation study aims to understand it from the point of view of people. In the ethnographic method, the researcher immerses themselves in the researched community, observing and experiencing their habits, their habitat, their day-to-day life, their culture. Context is the most important element of ethnography.
• Contextual Enquiry: A user interview and observation session conducted wherever the user usually accesses your website, app, or uses your product or service (for example, in their home, school, or office).
  (Make sure to ask for authorization if it's a commercial environment.) The idea is to observe them using your website, app, or product in their normal routine, as a regular activity. You can use the contextual inquiry to do a specific type of interview and gather field data from the users. Usually, it is done by one interviewer speaking to one interviewee (person being interviewed) at a time.
• Diary Study: When the user agrees to develop a diary that includes the use of the site, app, or product. You can prepare specific questions or tasks. The user will record activities, behaviors, feelings, perceptions, and so on for a period of time when using your website, app, or product and service. You can, for example, ask users to take photos to explain their activities and highlight what stood out during the day.

With the written consent of the interviewee (you can find templates on the www.usability.gov/ website), you will want to record all interviews and take notes during the conversation. Please be aware that with any kind of methodology, if you interview children and teenagers, you must ask their parents' or guardian's permission. Also, compensate the respondent (and their parents' or guardian's, when they are underage) with some toast, a cash value voucher, or gift card

You can find good tools to let you do online interviews such as Silverback, Morea, or Appear.in (https://appear.in/). You can even use video chat tools also commonly used by your interviewees such as Skype, Google Hangouts, or even Facebook Messenger. Don't forget to record these sessions and ask them to consent to the recording, preferably by signing the consent form. At the end of the interview, check with the user about their availability in case you need them to provide additional information, or maybe to participate in a second round, testing the redesign.

The interesting thing here is that you may also find UX issues that your users are facing and mentioned during the interviews, which you will want to test.