A Figma library for user research that guides teams from initial consultation through data collection and analysis. It includes templates for research briefs, empathy maps to capture what participants say and do, and affinity maps to find patterns before handing findings to the product backlog.
Chapters
All right. Hey everybody. I, I want to talk about a new library I started putting together in the Figma community for user research. Now, in the past, I've gotten to work with some people that are very smart in terms of user research, and they've developed some methods that, that were very helpful, in which I try to help take some of these practices, add my own twist or add my own thoughts into them and make them scalable. And one scenario you'll see how I've taken this and as we dive through it, I'll explain some more, but just, just want to shout out that like Rob Baronez, who was very helpful in user research in another company I had worked for, he had come up with some of these methods and just wanted to make sure he gets his credit because it was very helpful. So diving into this library on Figma, we have the COVID and we have the process. Now the first page you can see here is the research consultation. Now what you do, this is almost like a brief, if you will, like a creative brief or some kind of brief where you need to like answer some context. It's almost as if you are like going to contact an agency and say, "Hey, we want some design." It's almost like that. We're saying, "Hey, research, we want some research." Now in that scenario, the first question is, "How did this come up?" So basically, what's the background context? Then it says, what are you trying to learn and why are you trying to learn this? And what are you going to do with that data once you get it? So an example of this would be, say we're going to do some discovery, and first we say, hey, we identified this problem from, you know, analytics. We want to see where this, uh, why this is a problem, why we're getting so many drop-offs. Um, and then you're going to say, so what are you trying to learn? You're going to say, well, why are so many people dropping off on this step? We want to have some— a better understanding of this. Why are we trying to learn this? Well, if we can help remove, you know, if we can find out what it is, we can come up with a solution, help reduce people dropping off, etc., etc., right? Basically to come up with a solution. And then once we get this data, we'll utilize it to either inform our backlog or help us figure out our next steps. So once, once you kind of go through that and you have this consultation, you have the researchers kind of understand what they're doing, you come up with this research plan. So after completing the consultation, you want to document your plan of attack. So now as a researcher, this is kind of what you need to fill out. So what methodology are you going to do and your reasoning behind it? So are you going to do— and I actually have this down here— are you going to do usability tests? Are you going to do concept studies? Are you going to do focus groups, interviews? Basically, what kind of study are you going to do and why, right? You can say, well, we're going to do this because we want to find out this, or because we plan on doing this. So what platform are you going to use and participants? So maybe you're going to do 6 to 8 participants using UserZoom or UserTesting or something like that. And then how are you going to get them? Well, this person is supposed to get 6 to 8, or we're going to use UserZoom's users based on this information. So once you have that, and this, this is actually more around what happens during the test, but, and this may be just general process and UX discussion, but to be honest, I think you should take notes using an empathy map because you're— what people are going to say and do, and then you can take, take notes roughly around that. So like when you're watching, uh, say the someone take a test and it's an unmoderated usability test or an unmoderated test, well, what are they doing, right? What did they see? Did you see them make an observation about something? What did they say that they like? What did they do, you know, or what did they— what do they not— what do they need to do? So this is like what they actually need to do, like here's the tasks, right? But what did they actually do? What did they hear? What were their thoughts about You know, did they hear the prompt correctly? Did they not? But this is your observations turned into notes. From that, then you take your notes from each of those, those, you know, basically from those interviews or whatever you are analyzing, and you use an affinity map to group them by patterns and themes. So say you see a bunch of people were missing the the next button in order to proceed, in which they were leaving. So that being said, you saw it happen on 6 people and they said, "I don't know how to continue." You'll have a pattern of missing next button, which will be the theme of navigation, right? So then you can take that analysis and you can identify, oh, like 5 people said here, 5, 3 people said something around this, but coming up with that affinity map utilizing the Affinity Map notes will help you group that, and from there you can get to your results, or you can present your findings, some suggested next steps, and then actually adding that work into the backlog. I don't have anything around that. Maybe I'll add a— some kind of presentation template or something around that, but that's, that's kind of where the analysis needs to actually take physical form, and you need to kind of tell it. It could be a Confluence doc, it could be on this, it really depends. This is kind of as far as I've gotten into a, a library. But that being said, if we go here and we go to the process template, I'm not sure if I added it here, and if not, then I can. So realistically, after concepts, right, you should have a usability testing page, in which case you would have the consultation. Now, I don't know if I want to do this per se, but— and maybe I'll just type it because I don't want to have a bunch of, like, a bunch of libraries splitting. But you should do at least take these and put them in the usability test. You should go through the consultation and the research plan for usability testing after you've created your concept. Before going into the high fidelity and things that are actually built, you really want to test your concept to make sure it makes sense. So just wanted to share a little bit of my current thought process around a research process library. But I'd love to know what you guys think and any ideas of whether this is a good idea or not. So talk to you later.
