Engaging with users throughout technical development helps us as engineers understand how to design solutions that perform well in practice! It allows us to differentiate between what is technically possible and what users actuallywant.
At Mamilla, we have beendeveloping an app-based tool to provide practical breastfeeding support to mothers at their own paceand in their own time. Mamilla started as a university module project and has since developed into our business. With a founding team of passionate designers and engineers who are not yet mothers ourselves! It has been even more critical that we engage with a broad variety of potential users to avoid overlooking challenges or allowing preconceived notions to influence our product.
In this article, we discuss how we prepare for different types of user studies, recruit participants, conduct user interviews and, importantly, synthesise what we learn into ideas that shape our product.
Engaging with users as engineers
Speaking to end users is not limited to any one stage of development instead it is often something that is highly iterative with benefits regardless of your development stage.
In many of the solutions we develop the end users do not have technical backgrounds. As such it is also important that we balance the feedback we receive with engineering constraints such as those linked to:
Although end users are often certainly the experts in their needs, they may not always be the experts in defining what technical proposal can meet these needs. This is where it is important for us as engineers to work around our users, engaging with them constantly throughout development to make sure that we are still aligned!
Preparing to engage with users
For many users, this may be the first time they engage with any product development process. As such, it is critical that you, as the engineer or researcher, come well prepared with what you want to find in that particular interaction.
This is referred to as your research objective.
This question should be as specific as possible. User interviews can often be a bit chaotic, so it’s worth preparing for as many different scenarios as possible!
At different stages of your development, your research may be more exploratory, e.g. understanding a user group's general needs and behaviour, or more validation-based, e.g. how they interact with your particular concept or proposal.
Your research objective will influence the user research method that feels most appropriate. Some common forms are:
Often, a combination of these techniques may be useful. Before conducting any of these methods, important things to consider and question yourself or your team about are:
- What is your target user group and how are you able to best reach them?
- What is your research objective? What are you trying to find out?
- What data do you need to capture?
- How will you consider ethics, obtain participants’ consent and protect their privacy?
- How can you pilot the study before rolling out the full study?
Recruiting Participants
Finding the right participants to address your research objective is critical. The mind map below explores some characteristics you may want to look for in participants. Next to each, we have given examples of how this could apply to our startup, Mamilla.
Some common methods of recruiting your participants are:
- Your university/company network
- Friends and family
- Using social media and engaging with online communities
- Using a recruitment agency (paid)
- Intercepting people/stopping people on the street
- Snowball recruitment (recruiting participants by asking for referrals from existing participants)
When recruiting participants, it is important to diversify your sources so they represent your user group. Compensation, such as gift vouchers, can help attract participants, particularly those outside your network. It is also important to keep in mind that recruiting only people keen to participate may introduce overly positive results.
Conducting User Research
The first thing to consider is your environment.
- How can you make sure that participants feel comfortable sharing their honest opinions?
- Are there things that could distract participants from your research?
- Is it important to conduct the interview in the same environment where participants experience the challenge you are aiming to address?
- Online: Are you in an area where your participant’s responses could be overheard?
- Online: Are you in a quiet environment with a stable internet connection where the participant will be able to hear you clearly?
Next, it is important that you gain consent from participants. Often, this will be written consent directly from your participant or, in some cases, from their guardian or carer. Before seeking consent, you must discuss all details of your research, including but not limited to: the purpose, the topics you will discuss, how you will use the information collected, how you will store any collected information and how you will discard of any information stored at the end of the research.
You can then begin your study. It is important to use open-ended questions rather than questions that lead participants towards a certain answer, which could bias the results. Questions that rely on hypothetical scenarios, e.g. “Would you use this product/feature?”, also often offer limited information and can lead to overly positive results driven by the participant wanting to please the interviewer. Instead, ask questions that relate directly to the participant, such as: “Could you talk me through the last time you experienced X problem?”
Some useful follow-up questions include:
Your role as the interviewer is to collect information rather than to try to sell your idea or influence their responses. It is always important to consider whether you, as the interviewer, could perhaps be unintentionally biasing the results.
Where possible, it is often useful to have one person conducting the interview and another who is in charge of note-taking. Where permission is given, it can also be helpful to record the interaction through audio or both audio and video.
Things to note down include:
End each interaction by asking: “Is there anything that you wished I had asked?” or “Is there any other information that you would like to share?” Just before ending the interview, also remember to ask if your participant has any contacts who may be open to participating in your research (the snowball recruitment method mentioned earlier!).
Synthesising Findings to Influence your Solution
Information collected offers little value unless you can draw actionable insights from it that can influence your solution.
It may be helpful to organise the information collected into themes such as:
Look for patterns in what users say versus what they actually do and how this may impact your technical solutions, while also looking out for any important outliers.
It is also important to distinguish between an observation and an insight that could actually influence your solution. For example:
These insights should be prioritised based on factors including how frequently they appeared, the severity of not addressing them, the technical feasibility of implementation and the financial feasibility or business impact.
Finally, the insights you choose to address should be translated into engineering requirements, such as your product specification, testing criteria and future research objectives. Ultimately, the entire user research process is highly iterative and will look different depending on what you are researching, but we hope this has given you an introduction to the process and some of the methods we use at Mamilla.
Interested in Experiencing User Testing in Practice?
If you are between four and nine months pregnant, or a new mother with a baby under two years old who has attempted to breastfeed, we would love to hear from you. As part of our ongoing development, we are running user testing studies for the app ahead of our launch!
You can sign up for a slot here:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ1HzpIn0lCN6-b7_sAS78Ri68bor2pFIC5aCoaxPf3lat4FkRlXDIbvovsRnTzVuWVdyX_hsUFy
We would also love for you to join the Mamilla community. We are building a product designed to support you through the realities of breastfeeding!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mamilla.breastfeeding/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mamilla-breastfeeding
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