Module 2
Page 9 of 11

Task 1: Framing questions and research design

This task is about designing your user research. It relates to our section on Research methods: from interviews to design stimulus. In this task you’ll be looking at research questions and how to use them to frame interview questions. Ideally you should do this on a working real-life project or product, but if you aren’t in a position to, you should spend 5 minutes before starting coming up with a plausible fictional project to use.

This task assumes that you’re just beginning to think about your user research in a particular area.

Step-by-step
  1. As a group, agree on your research questions. (Refer back to the section on these if necessary).
  2. Imagine you’d decided to carry out interviews to answer these questions. Write a short script for a semi-structured interview with a relevant participant that would aim to answer those questions. (A semi-structured interview is one that uses the questions as prompts for the areas you need to cover, but doesn’t stick rigidly to these questions if other relevant areas to explore open up, or you want to probe into one area for more detail).
  3. As a group, check over the questions. Are any of them leading? Or closed? If so, rewrite to be open and not leading.
  4. If you can, carry out a mock interview with a participant who you think can help answer the research questions. E.g. if you’re interested in finding out about people’s experiences with insomnia, find someone who suffers from insomnia. If you’re doing this, also think about how you can apply what you learned about consent, ethics and context here (from our section on User recruitment, consent and ethics).
    If you aren’t able to do this, role-play the scenario with someone in the group.
    Take field notes (see our section on this) and save them for later.
  5. As a group, reflect on the following questions. What did you learn from this activity? Was anything surprising? Or particularly challenging? What would you do differently if you were to do this again? Would your questions be different if you were speaking to a target user? Would your questions be different if you were if a different context?