[Sigia-l] User Groups for Research?

Jonathan Baker-Bates jonathan at bakerbates.com
Fri Apr 25 16:48:14 EDT 2008


Thanks Eva,

Just to be clear  - I am not intending to rely on any one source of
information to inform my designs. That would indeed be silly. Instead,
I'm thinking of diversifying my (already pretty diverse) portfolio of
sources. 

I have about 15% returning users. Experience design orthodoxy says that
you need to have a representative segment of users from whom you can
derive design direction. I wouldn't disagree with that. However, I would
say that in seeking to create a user group, I *want* them to become
biased - I don't want them to be fresh. I want them to tell me what it's
like to rely on the site. What features, for example, can I give them
that "fresh" users would just ignore? Granted, most of their responses
will be worthless, but I can't assume it would all be worthless any more
than I can assume that I have a monopoly on good ideas. Bear in mind
also that part of my brief is to increase loyalty.

I suppose much of this comes down to the ancient divide between design
for first use and design for repeated use. The two can be very
different, but can (I believe) co-exist on the web - cf keyboard
shortcuts in Gmail, the Google CLUI or OpenID.

So, I'm wondering whether having a user group representing loyal users
might (I stress *might* because I don't know) bring insights into the
kind of usage that tends to be ignored by traditional research, surveys,
market research, and other techniques that seek to reach out to "real"
people on the assumption that they have never used the site before.

I could of course simply screen for loyal users when conducting user
research, but such research isn't cheap and I would find it hard to
justify anything other than a representative demographic to my
superiors. So, I was wondering if anyone here has taken the user group
route.

Jonathan





On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 10:08 -0400, Eva Kaniasty wrote:
> Jonathan,
> 
> I think this depends on your user base.  Does it consist of mostly new
> or repeat visitors?  If it's mostly new, then the members of your user
> group will quickly become unrepresentative of your actual users.  If
> you do have a large group of repeat visits from expert users, then it
> might make more sense.  In either case, the people in your user group
> will become biased by virtue of being more involved with you and your
> company, which means that you'll have to build in mechanisms for
> keeping your group fresh.   I would also be careful about making
> decisions solely based on the opinion of your user group, or using
> those group members repeatedly for user research.   
> 
> If you are looking for feedback from your existing user base, you can
> also design other systems for dialogue with your larger community of
> users...  email feedback that you actually analyze and respond to,
> forums, beta testing programs, preview versions, and of course
> surveys.  
> 
> -eva
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 8:59 AM, Jonathan Baker-Bates
> <jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:
>         Seeing as nobody replied to my last post about in-page
>         navigation
>         (apart from Paola off list), maybe this will elicit something:
>         
>         Does anyone have any experience of setting up and managing a
>         "user
>         group" for the purposes of conducting trials of new features
>         on web
>         sites? That is, a group of people of whatever type (domain
>         experts,
>         laymen, whatever) who can be contacted for field trials,
>         opinions etc.
>         in order to inform design decisions?
>         
>         I have the capability and the budget to do traditional market
>         research
>         (which I tend to take which a bag a salt mostly); can also
>         conduct A/B
>         testing of designs on live sites (which can tell you a lot
>         about some
>         aspects of the design), and am able to conduct facilitated
>         user
>         research in labs (the mileage varies of course). However, I've
>         always
>         been curious about the effect of mixing "naive" users (eg
>         market and
>         user research fodder) with interested opinions from people who
>         regularly use the system. Many of these people are in the
>         organisation
>         itself of course, but I think they're too close to the issues
>         for my
>         liking.
>         
>         Jonathan
>         ------------
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Eva Kaniasty
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/kaniasty




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