UX Research
I am a UX Reseacher and Designer with over 8 years of industry experience and a PhD in Media Technology. I have successfully led many user-centric projects from problem definition to product launch with any user research needed on the way.
As a UX person I always look holistically at the projects I participate in or lead. It’s never just research or just design. All is interconnected within a complex process where often many hats must be worn.
Every UX problem requires a specific research and design method mindfully chosen from a wide spectrum of the available options. My experience from academia and industry helps to make proper choices.
Overview of the research methods
The table below presents a spectrum of research methods I use in my daily work as a UX Researcher and Designer.
Process
As a UX Researcher and Designer I look holistically at every project and plan accordingly. My process includes several stages. Its ideal version follows the below path.
Grounding
Setting the goals
Iterations planning
Iterative improvements
Delivery
Take a look at some of my projects and methods I like to use in my daily work. It’s never just research or just design. All is always included in a bigger picture.
Project 1
Volvo Autonomous Drive
Development of an understandable, trustworthy and elegant interface and experience for the first generation of Volvo autonomous cars
my tasks
*Introduce iterative research and design process to deliver meaningful solutions faster.
*Improve collaboration within the team and with stakeholders.
position: Senior Designer
role: UX and Team Lead
team: 5 people
stakeholders: 10+
time: 10 months
Grounding
At this stage it was important to me to get familiar with the necessary background materials to be able to make informed decisions, plan the work for the team and quickly move forward. We collected information within the presented categories.
Legal and functional requirements:
– to understand the stakeholders point of view
– to steer the priority
– to know the boundaries.
Benchmark:
– to understand the competition and industry standards
– to get inspired
– to find our uniqueness.
User needs and behaviours:
– to understand for whom we are designing and what are their needs
– to inspire the experience design.
A review of internal and external research:
– to understand what has already been investigated
– to identify knowledge gaps.
Setting the goal
For this project we set several important goals to start with:
1. Bring the concepts back on track and define design drivers/design intentions so the team can understand and agree on the design path to follow.
2. Introduce iterative thinking to keep improving two chosen concepts rather than starting every time from scratch.
3. Define metrics to measure the project progress.
Grounding outcomes
User journey helped to understand the flow which user will be exposed to and focus on the proper elements in the development process. This, complemented with design drivers, helped the team to agree on, and follow the experience intent during the design process and to monitor the development of the perceived experience while testing. Metrics were used to assess how successful is the design.
Exemplary metrics (the one used in the study must be kept secret):
– User must to take back control of the car within 10 seconds from the initial take back prompt
– 10/10 users must learn how to successfully active and deactivate AD within the first three trials.
Design Drivers were used to build a questionnaire to monitor the improvements.
Design Intent and Design Drivers
A precisely choreographed experience where every piece of the journey is crafted towards a defined goal.
DRIVERS: Guiding / Clear / Motivating / Smart / Intuitive / Easy to understand / Easy to use / Pleasurable / Calm
ANTI-DRIVERS: Stressful / Patronising / Overwhelming / Nervous / Fragile / Pushy / Ambiguous
Iterations planning
Based on the available knowledge, needs and gaps the team’s work was planned in an optimal way with available time and resources balanced with the fidelity of the prototypes.
Here is an example of a planning session. Plans have always been revised with the team, its feasibility analyzed, voted, and agreed or re-planned.
Iterative improvements
Each iteration consisted of:
- Detailed specifications of multimodal concepts (always two to compare)
- In-car prototype
- Test of the implemented concepts
- Analysis the results
- Definition of the actionable insights
Tests included several activities:
- Drive-along and perform defined tasks
- Measure time-to-activate and time-to-take-back
- Count successful activations and deactivation
- Perform questionnaire based in the design drivers
- Post-interview to dive deeper into ‘whys’.
Iterations
Let’s grab a virtual coffee to discuss the details of the iterative improvements we introduced. For secrecy reasons not everything can be exposed.
The final delivery
Safe, guiding and elegant interface for the autonomous drive.
We achieved the autonomous drive interface design to be an intriguing new element and at the same time an integrated part of the assisted drive journey. The design was thoroughly tested to first provide usability in a form of an understandability and guidance. Secondly, with a beautifully crafted visual and sound interface we achieved an elegantly choreographed experience.
Head of User Experience at Volvo introduces the new Volvo interface with Assisted Drive being a prominent part of the full experience.
Project 2
Sonic Interaction in Intelligent Cars (Volvo)
Examine the potential in pro-active and continuous sound as a medium for user interaction in unsupervised self-driving cars to support trust, comfort, usability, and satisfaction.
my tasks
*Interviews, user types and behaviours
*Participatory design activities
*Qualitative and quantitative tests to measure trust towards AD and motion sickness while riding.
type: internal research project
position: Senior Designer
role: UX Lead
team: 11 people
time: 24 months
Project goals and hypothesis
1. Explore the new autonomous drive use cases
2. Answer the hypothesis:
In comparison to silence and/or event-based sound design,:
- spatial sonification of motion patterns and car’s decisions reduces motion sickness when the user has his/her eyes-off-the-road.
- continuous sonification of motion patterns increases trust and feeling of safety.
- sonification of motion patterns increases acceptance and reduces annoyance while having eyes-off-the-road.
Exploration and grounding
Explorations goals:
- Get to know the users and define the user types (behaviours) of Autonomous Cars.
- Investigate use cases where sound plays a crucial role in everyday commuting or travelling.
- Identify AD-specific use cases where sound could be helpful.
Interviews
We interviewed 20 people asking about their commute or a memorable trip. We focused on the emotional and sensorial aspects of their travels to understand what shapes their experiences and how could we support the wanted parts and improve those which are troublesome.
User types and behaviours
Defined based on the interviews, research review and trend analysis. They helped to stear the sound design aesthetics.
Grounding Impact
- Interviews: insights and opportunties for the design explorations and other AD projects within the company, use cases for sonification, base for the user journeys, source for the behaviours.
- Behaviours: matching with hypothesis (decreased motion sickness for worker and increased trust for cautious), design intent for the iterative sound design (design of three sets of sounds for each hypothesis).
- Trend analysis: focus locked on the early autonomous drive generations.
- Benchmark: inspiration for the use cases, sound design framework and design itself.
Iterative sound design and improvements
- Help to brainstorm and communicate about the purpose and the design of sounds.
- Explore the purpose and meaning behind the sounds in the specific use cases before focusing on the aesthetics.
- Bring iterative improvements based on the user input and guide the sound design development.
- Explore the holistic aspects and fit to the environment.
Sound sketching
Imagine an exercise where you, as an UXer, designer or developer would like to sonify a use case of entering a highway and merging in traffic in autonomous car. The exploration of user needs within SIIC project showed that potentially beneficial for the users of autonomous cars would be to present the car’s intentions. The users who might experience low level of trust and acceptance for this technology will need reassurance that the car ‘knows what is doing’ and preparation for the manoeuvres. With that information we performed a quick and dirty vocalisation session (4 participants). The outcome of the vocalisation session contained both presentation of the sketches and feedback on the character and intention of the sounds. The big advantage is the ‘sketchiness’ of the sound, which helps to discuss its intention rather than aesthetics. Below is a short audio clips made by Keezy app.
Low-fi prototyping, vocalization, enactment, and sound sketching helped to focus first on the purpose of sound rather than aesthetics.
Iterative Design Outcomes
- User journey with meaningfully created and tested sound designs.
- Sets of sounds ready to be used in the main evaluations – one set to satisfy worker behaviour for the test on motion sickness and another for cautious behaviour to be used in the test on trust.
- Extra use cases and sound designs to be developed in different projects within the company (e.g. game-like sonification of a ride for children).
A Study on Motion Sickness
About 1 in 3 are highly susceptible to motion sickness
Motion sickness is a complex phenomenon but is in self driving cars (or in cars in which you are a passenger) believed to be caused primarily by:
- Visual-vestibular conflict (what you see is not what you feel)
- The inability to control the car’s motions
- The inability to anticipate upcoming motions
In self driving cars, users are going to perform various activities that require them to look away from the road (reading, watching movies, browsing social media etc) (visual-vestibular conflict).
Intention sounds can reduce motion sickness in AD
Intention sounds show the car’s intended, upcoming manoeuvres. We sonified manoeuvres such us acceleration, deceleration, turning right and left. Sounds were designed specifically for each manoeuvre presented below and played by a trained wizard (wizard of oz method) to imitate real-time generation. Sounds were played approx. 1 sec before each manoeuvre.
Study Outcomes
Based on a motion sickness scale and other metrics we concluded that those sounds helped to reduce motions sickness. Our participants mentioned that sounds helped to:
a) sound made them adjust their bodies
‘Direction sound made me hold myself upright’, ‘I could feel in the chest that I prepared for the manoeuvre (acc/dec)’, ‘You kind of balance and prepare my muscles in my torso rather than been thrown around’
b) sound helped to feel overall less dizzy and more comfortable
‘Dizziness without the sounds made the task more difficult.’, ‘I felt more comfortable having them when I was reading.’, ‘Without the sounds, I could feel the turns gave me a stomach sensation.’
c) sound was overall useful and helpful considering motions sickness
‘If you’re reading and not look at the road, they are useful in that sense that you prepare for what’s coming’, ‘I think in a way it’s useful for motion sickness, I had anxiety problems before so knowing what’s coming is important for me’, ‘first lap – getting used to; second lap – I knew what was going to happen and it was helpful. I didn’t really have to concentrate on the road. It helped me avoid motion sickness.’
Motion sickness rating during ride
Project Outcomes
The project was concluded with several scientific peer-reviewed publications:
- Maculewicz, J., & Osz, K. (2022). UX Research and Sonic Interaction: Towards Human-Centric and Intuitive Sound Interaction Design in the Context of Autonomous Driving. User Experience Design in the Era of Automated Driving, 335-357.
- Maculewicz, J., Larsson, P., & Fagerlönn, J. (2021). Intuitive and subtle motion-anticipatory auditory cues reduce motion sickness in self-driving cars. International journal of human factors and ergonomics, 8(4), 370-392.
- Fagerlönn, J., Larsson, P., & Maculewicz, J. (2020). The sound of trust: sonification of car intentions and perception in a context of autonomous drive. International journal of human factors and ergonomics, 7(4), 343-358.
- Larsson, P., Maculewicz, J., Fagerlönn, J., & Lachmann, M. (2019). Auditory displays for automated driving—challenges and opportunities. In The 25th International Conference on auditory display (ICAD 2019) (Vol. 52, pp. 299-305).
And it was featured in several articles and received an award:
I invite you to visit the project website to learn more about the project.
Library
An overview of research methods
In my everyday work I carefully choose methods applicable to a specific problem. Below is presented a package of different methods I like to use for research as well as activities at the crossroad of research and design.
INTERVIEWS
Interview is one of the main method I have been using as a UXer. They can be usefull at every stage of the developemnt process. They can help understand the basic needs of the users, dive into their journey and low and high points, understand the reasoning behind their decisions and many more.
At Utopia Music, user interviews combined with internal worksops led to the introduction of the new functions (e.g. release planner), simplification of the tool (e.g. more intuitive navigation), new UI designs, and unification of our common understanding of the path forward.
Design Sprint
Design sprint works best for the well-defined problems, which require a set of solution ideas to be tested in a quick manner. It takes a week to conceptualize, decide, build and test.
I used it to build and test a new approach towards Parking Assist audio feedback system. With the team, we wanted to know if our new idea, could fly at all (can potential users understand intuitively and follow the spatialized sound cues).
OBSERVATIONS
An example of observation is a benchmark with users. It is a great way to get familiar with the competitive space and also to perform early user studies to understand the main low and high points from you competitors. From the beginning you know what to avoid and which solutions treat as inspirations. Should be performed in a form of a semi-guided observations where the UX designer or a researcher have a chance to ask more in depth questions to understand not only what users like but also why they like it and what it helps them with.
A/B TESTING
A/B testing helps in understanding which of the two solutions works better according to the established metrics.
I used this method extensively during my time at university and my everyday work. Here is one of the experiments presented in my PhD dissertation.
METRICS
Metrics based on the subjective and objective data can be used during the iterative development of a design solution or to make decisions if a concept or a product fulfill the established standards.
We used metrics during development of the Autonomous Drive interface for Volvo. A survey was build based on design drivers to monitor the improvements.
BODYSTORMING AND ENACTMENT
This method helps:
- the designers to understand use cases they are designing for,
- to check how their potential solutions could be understood by the users at very early stages of the design process,
- to quickly remove ideas which can’t fly.
I used it during the development of Parking Assist sound feedback concepts. It helped us quickly test several ideas based on spatialization, localization and character of the sounds. I played a car and two of my colleagues enacted the audio feedback presented from different directions and of different timbre and urgency character. We could see quickly that some of the solutions were too complicated to understand in this already stressful situation.
SOUNDWALK AND JOURNEY MAPPING
This method helps to:
- sensitize ourselves towards sounds before a conceptualization or a design session,
- understand the role of sound in everyday interactions, decision making and quality of experiences,
- identify use cases where sound has or could play a crucial role.
I used it during workshop with fellow UX designers where the goal was to sensitize the designers towards sound and its role in everyday actions and interactions with other people and objects in our surroundings. The ultimate purpose was to motivate designers to take into account the whole spectrum of available modalities rather than focus only on the visual aspects of the solutions which they are building.
And many more…
Thanks for staying with me till here 😀