With a new UX Design project the first thing to do once your project plan is in place is to find out as much as possible about your potential users.
What we need to know about our potential users
Survey tool used: Typeform
I used Typeform because I love it’s simplicity and the fact it focuses strictly on the task at hand.
Getting people to fill in the survey
Lets face it, few people are motivated to fill in a survey. Here is how, where and why I sourced my respondents:
| Where | How / Why | Notes |
| Facebook friends! |  I filmed myself talking about what I’m up to and why, and posted the link to the survey. I thought people will ignore just a survey link but my friends and family seeing me talking would inspire action |
I was surprised to end up with over 30 respondents including volunteers for user testing 🙂 |
| Byron Bay Web Guild Facebook Group | I just posted the link here since I’ve not met all these members but have met a few at local web Meetups | I only got a 3 or 4 respondents from here in the end, but they were good ones |
| UX Mastery Community forum | Since I’m loosely following the guidelines set out in the UX Mastery book and have seen the community members are friendly, helpful and active I add the survey link here. | I got some great respondents here too although not many at all |
UX Needs Survey – Conclusion Summary
I’m putting the summary here first since it’s probably what you are most interested in…
Prevalent demographic
I’d like to add a lovely infographic here, but hey here’s a list instead:
- Male
- 35-44 years of age
- In Australia or the UK
- Bachelors Degree
- Lives at home with family
IT Familiarity
- High level of confidence with IT, unlikely to need any help
- Spends a fair amount of time per week on a connected device
- 50/50 chance of knowing what “UX Design” means
Thoughts on the idea
- 50/50 chance they would use the service
- They’d rather not have register to use the service but if they had to then they’d prefer to use a third party registration option
- They know of no other similar service
- They’d use it primarily to help resolve UX issues and make the better a better place in terms of UX Design
Gender
Expectation
I didn’t really have any expectations here
Outcome
The design will need to be geared more towards the Male gender but must not Male dominant. I will research gender role in UX design and work out what to do
Age bracket
Expectation
I was expecting a broader coverage of the age bracket
Outcome
The dominant age bracket is the one that lived through the birth of the internet so have seen all manner of UX issues and are no doubt expecting great UX and nothing less
Country of residence
Expectation
I was expecting a broader range here
Outcome
UK and Australia are quite advanced now in terms of UX Design for government services and banking, so the UX expectations here will be high
Level of Education
Expectations
I was expecting a broader level of education
Outcome
We won’t need to dumb anything down since it will be safe to assume the level of critical thinking of the users will be quite high
Living arrangement
Expectations
I was expecting more people living with flatmates and not so many with family
Outcome
I asked this question because I wanted to know if people have someone they are living with to help them troubleshoot any user experience design issues, since often a different perspective could make the UX issue irrelevant. With this in mind we can assume that most of the issues submitted will have been looked at by someone else before hand. Meaning in theory a higher proportion of relevant issues on the site.
IT Confidence Level vs tendency to ask for help
Expectations
In hindsight I should have expected this result anyway
Outcome
It’s no surprise there is a direct correlation between a persons IT skill level and their tendency to ask for help. It is a good to confirm that this is the case since we can assume someone with a low IT skill will ask for assistance if living with other people.
No. of hours on a device VS No. of UX issues encountered
Expectations
I would have thought there would be a solid correlation here
Outcome
There is indeed a solid correlation here (apart from a couple of blips either way). Combined with the other data we can now assume that most of these UX issues encountered would be legitimate rather than issues arising from lack of IT skill.
Familiarity with the term “UX Design”
Expectations
I would have thought most people would know about it
Outcome
Seeing as though almost half of the users have not heard of “UX design”
- We must be light on lingo
- A bit of UX education could be in order
Do you know of any existing services that already do this?
Expectations
I thought there could possibly be an existing service that provides this service that I hadn’t yet found
Outcomes
The majority of users basically said no – they don’t know of anyone providing this service. In hindsight I should have asked the question differently in order to get more useful answers. I should have asked “Do you know of any existing websites that provide this service or anything similar? (please provide a url if possible)“
| Service | Comments from survey | Notes |
| sitetuners.com | “Some design firms might market on a similar message.” | Yes, this company specialises in optimising conversion rates, however that is not really similar |
| “UX Fails” on Pinterest | “Not focussed on fixing, but certainly on calling out” | Yes, I agree – this is a good one to look at |
| “UX Fail” on Tumblr | Same as above | Yes, I agree – another good one and this opens up a whole new angle on finding new people to submit issues. Such as “UX Fail” everywhere especially Twitter, YouTube maybe Reddit? and so on. A gold mine in fact – I’m stoked with this 🙂 |
| darkpatterns.org | (my own suggestion) This is the closest I have found to what UX Files aims to do however this is focused on UX ‘dark patterns’ which are in fact very well designed scenarios engineered to achieve their goal by unscrupulous means. Whereas UX Files will be focused on finding unintentional UX issues with the aim of getting them resolved. It will be worth mentioning this somewhere in UX Files | |
Average for “Would you use this service?”
Expectations
I would have thought a higher percentage of people would like to use the service
Outcome
It’s only just bordering past viable according to these results! However the data is slightly skewed by the people who didn’t finish the survey and thus get to this question. Secondly it is obvious some people didn’t really understand what the ‘UX Files’ service is all about. Ideally if I had a little more time I’d do a bit of comparative analysis on this data set to filter down into more relevant and informative results. Suggestions on this?
Primary reason for using the service
Expectations
I would have thought the primary reason to use the service would be to get a resolution to the issue
Outcome
The result is mostly as expected apart from the kudos and exposure being a lesser reason than I presumed. This means not so much time needs to be put into promoting the user behind each issue submitted. So for example there no need to have a large profile image with social media links right next to a submitted issue.
Would the need to sign up / register to use the service put you off?
Expectations
I would have thought a higher percentage of people would not use the service if they had to register
Outcome
Yes ideally the need for people to register should be avoided if possible but it is no big deal if it can’t happen
Would you use third party registration if it was available?
Expectations
I was thinking that yes most people would use third party registration if available. Such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and so on – to aviod the usual hassle of registration
Outcome
Yes ideally if we end up using user registration then we’ll need to try and make sure we have the third party option
What I’ve learnt about the process by doing this survey
- I need to be more careful, precise and clear with the questions and their grouping. Maybe considering how I’m going to visualise the data will help next time with getting the questions right.
- Asking too many questions or ones with cross overs can lead to doing extra unproductive work
- For some questions a scale of -5 to +5 (instead of 0 to 10) would have led to more definitive answers
- I love data visualisation but there is so much to learn and so many tools to use!
- It is unlikely I’ll ever find one tool that can do the job since they don’t all doing everything, some graphs still need to be manually done in Illustrator
- I would have liked to use responsive embedded charts linked to real data but it was too time consuming
- I’m not sure how this information would usually be presented to stakeholders? I assume a presented at a meeting using a slideshow?
- To save time next time I might use a service which combines an online form, spreadsheet and chart generation – probably Google Drive
- I severely underestimated the amount of time this process would take up!
