Our first dive into the world of UX explorative research
UX research is vital in the design lifecycle, but it always takes a backseat. So was the case with Zeta Design. We took our first move to conduct UX research as part of the design journey to change its course.
“We don’t have the time to do User Experience research.”
“We are designers, not researchers.”
“There is no ROI of UX research.”
These statements, do they sound familiar to you? If you work in a fast-paced design environment, the answer is yes. Well, there is always a long list of excuses to put UX research in the backseat. And this situation was quite similar at Zeta as well. We were always engrossed in secondary research such as competitor analysis, understanding problem space, and design opportunities from existing literature. We mostly brushed away the primary research, which included interacting with the users and generating data. That was not the best way to conduct UX research, but we decided to make UX research a part of our design life cycle with new avenues and determination.
In early 2020, Zeta endeavoured into the retail banking space to focus on personal banking apps. It turned out to be an excellent opportunity to put things in line and deepen our understanding of UX research.
Choosing the right one
Before going into how we did the UX research, let’s first understand the types of UX research. UX research can be divided into two broad categories. First is evaluative research, where we test our prototypes or products. Second is exploratory research, which sometimes is referred to as generative or discovery research, where we understand the problem-space, user behaviour, needs, and wants.
While choosing a research methodology for retail banking, we went with exploratory research as we were exploring the domain and wanted to enhance our awareness. Being a vast domain as retail banking, we got only two weeks to research it, which wasn’t sufficient. We started anyway as we wanted to build the UX research sprints that could be used for other products at Zeta in the future.
Challenges
We got off on a shaky start as the Zeta design team had little to no qualitative research experience. To gain more UX research experience, we decided on conducting the research first with Zeta employees, then later carrying it on real users. Well, Zeta suite has grown into a 700-member, solid and diverse group of people, and we had to find and pick suitable candidates for one-on-one interviews among them. So, we put ourselves through the mill to take up the task; the global pandemic challenges forced us to collaborate and conduct the research remotely.
The plan
Earlier, we had delivered various successful UX design projects in a brief two-week timeline. But it was different this time around, as we had to conduct research and were unfamiliar with the process. To chart into UX research’s unknown territory, we started educating ourselves in the first two days.
We read the book ‘Just Enough Research by Erika Hall and various articles on nngroup.com. These reads turned out to be instrumental in shaping our knowledge about the different research methodologies and their advantages and disadvantages. Each team member learned about a specific section and educated and informed the rest of the team. For example, we noted the best practices to conduct surveys and user interviews and listed the dos and don’ts as a guideline.
This education helped in creating a research knowledge repository. Based on all the gathered knowledge and learnings in the first two days, we planned the future process.
At the end of the planning process, we formed a research document. This document would serve as a north star, guiding us through the rest of the research. Well, this document was not a lengthy one; it only was two pages and entailed the following:
Research questions such as:
- What is it that we are trying to answer through research?
- What are the specific subdomains in the retail banking space that we want to explore?
- Who are the target groups?
- How are we going to contact the target groups?
- What methodologies are we going to use?
A road map of the sprint:
- Roles
- Actions
- Results assigned to each individual
Survey
While we were building our expertise on doing UX research, we delved into Erika Hall’s literature to be careful with surveys, which became our most pressing takeaway. Surveys are easy to make, distribute, collect information, and tally. However, Hall argues in her article how surveys can produce misleading information.
“ Surveys are the most dangerous research tool — misunderstood and misused.” — Erika Hall.
Despite all the red flags and sore points to surveys, we still proceeded with it as we were not going to use surveys in their traditional form, which is to generate insights. Instead, we were going to use surveys to screen profiles for user interviews.
To screen the user interview profile, we kept the survey concise with ten questions, with mostly skippable questions. For example, if the user said they don’t have a banking app, we skipped all banking apps questions. We collected participants’ demographic information and basic information about their financial behaviour through the questionnaire. We also asked them if they would like to participate in an interview to discuss the subject further.
Screening
At the end of the survey, we had 45 participants willing to participate in the interview. Yet, we didn’t have the competency to take all the interviews; hence we created criteria to filter out the candidates:
- Candidates should not be working on the retail banking project.
- Candidates should have different banking habits compared to peers in the same category.
- Candidates should be from different age brackets.
Based on the rules, we selected 15 people in 8 categories. One candidate was the primary, while the other was a backup candidate we planned to contact if the primary candidate decided not to participate in the interview. The eight categories ensured diversity in profiles.
Remote Interviews
One of the most efficient ways to generate insights into anything is to ask/ interview people about it. User interviews give an in-depth understanding of the users’ values, perceptions, and experiences. We created the following questionnaire for the retail banking UX research and kept the interviewing process more conversational. Each interview took 40–50 minutes.
This UX research journey was amidst the pandemic, and video conference calls were a new reality. When it came to interviewing for UX research, video calls became our arsenal. In the remote setup, video calls enabled us to refer to the questionnaire on one window while talking to the candidate on the other window. We recorded all the interviews for future reference. If this had been in a physical space with cameras around, with two interviewers constantly losing eye contact and referring to the questionnaire, it would have been challenging for the participants. Thanks to the normalized remote setup, the process of conducting interviews went smooth.
After each interview, the team discussed the key insights and highlights. The interviewing process of 8 candidates took three days, and we also transcribed the call using Descript. The interview transcription aided in making the conversation scannable and helped us revisit the calls efficiently. We collated vital insights from every conversation and built a final document. The document had behavioural insights, pain points, suggestions, and quantitative insights from surveys and user interviews.
We also added feature recommendations to solve pain points and fill in the existing system gaps. The document was also shared with all the stakeholders of the project. The document helped the product and business team build a list of features and prioritize them to make the future product roadmap.
The final takeaway
Overall, the two-week gruelling research exercise helped us acquire solid insights into our target audience’s retail banking space. To comprehend the primary motives for using different modes of banking enabled us to prioritize the feature list. Researching within the company has its biases as we missed out on a chunk of demography with a lower dexterity level and belonging to the tier 3 cities and towns. However, in the next sprint, we planned to make them a part of our exploratory research.
We received another important feedback when the team’s senior members reviewed our call videos to improve our communication skills. At times in the interview, we asked leading questions to candidates, and we could have made the interviewing experience warmer and comfortable through some small talk.
To sum it up, the research activity helped us come a long way into grasping the general user sentiments and banking habits. The entire process of UX research was a conducive exercise for the team in terms of learning and gaining insights.
There is still a long way to deepen our knowledge about UX research methodologies, and this was our first step in the right direction.
Tell us how your team conducts UX research in the comments below!
Shout out to Pradeep Kumar, Veerappa Samy, Rishabh Kapoor, and Saumyaa Suneja, for kickstarting the project, Anoop Sethumadhavan for carrying out the entire activity end to end, and Sneh Singh and Kshitij Pandey for reviewing the blog.
