Designing Collaborative User Research for News Organizations @ SRCCON
@mauramaura & @emgollie

Want to get your work-in-progress product in front of prospective users but don’t know where to start? Unsure how to get your team comfortable with sharing work before it’s ready to ship? Talking to users can help generate product purposes, validate hunches, and challenge assumptions. User experience researchers from The New York Times will discuss how to foster a culture of soliciting internal and external user feedback. Whether you’re looking to get a few newsroom producers to chime in or want to test with hundreds of people you’ve never met, this conversation about research methods and promoted practices will help you get underway.

Interviews
 * Make sure you have a plan. Don't wing it. Make a thorough plan and drop it if necessary.
Usability testing
 * "Watching a user try to use your product."
 * Not about determining color of buttons — looking into how an individual expects something to work
Diary studies
 * Case study -- breaking news interactions. Wanted people to capture "snapshots" throughout the day of reactions they had to various news stories
 * "What people do, and what they say they do can be different things."
Concept testing
 * Put prospective product in front of someone
 * Approaches that "push the boundaries of what we have traditionally thought of as user research"
Surveys
 * Good for getting many responses in a short period of time
 * Keep in mind — what people say they do vs. what they actually do
Conversation facilitation
 * "Varied stakeholders around the table"
Generative exercises

Examples of approaches
 * NYT Mag redesign
 * In-depth hour-long discussions with 8 subscribers, 8 non-subscribers, and the importance of longform to them
 * 
"No one is serving latecomers' news needs very well...this feels like a real opportunity space." - EG People often went to Wikipedia pages to learn about breaking news events (like Germanwings crash)

Also, they are looking more at how different ethnic groups/people with specific behavioral characteristics/other groups read NYT. "Emerging millennials." See what people's working and living environments are like and how this affects their news consumption.
 * Riding the F train w/ people who read the NYT Now app on their subway ride
 * Result of this research: 16-minute film shared with the newsroom. "

Key User Research Principles
 * Depth
 * Flexibility
 * Rigor
 * Team & Partner communication / co-learning

"There's nothing worse than analyzing your data and realizing, there are a few questions we forgot to ask." - EG

They pay with Amazon gift cards "better than cash because there is a transaction record of it, and if we as researchers were ever...you just don't want to be carrying a ton of cash on you as a researcher. As much as possible, if you can make it an online transaction, that's great for your internal accounting practices."


Design resources for you
 * http://uxchecklist.github.io/?ref=producthunt
 * http://designresearchtechniques.com/#/
 * Can't miss research reads: http://emilygoligoski.com/2014/02/12/research-reads-you-shouldnt-miss/
 * Digital tools for design research: https://labs.ideo.com/2014/09/19/digital-tools-for-design-research/?utm_content=buffer431b9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
 * Love this blog: https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk and this intro to user research, both from the UK's GDS: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/user-research 
 * Important book: http://abookapart.com/products/just-enough-research
 * UIE (articles, events, podcasts, etc): https://www.uie.com/ 
 * UIE's All You Can Learn: http://aycl.uie.com/
 * Remote Research: http://remoteresear.ch/
 * Whitney Hess: Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects: https://whitneyhess.com/blog/2012/10/18/whats-your-problem-putting-purpose-back-into-your-projects/