WEBVTT 00:00:07.840 --> 00:00:12.466 Looking at when to use surveys relative to  the product or service lifecycle? 00:00:12.466 --> 00:00:18.410 Well, you might have an existing solution and for that you  may well want to consider a survey after every 00:00:18.410 --> 00:00:21.321 *major release*; or perhaps on a *calendar basis*, 00:00:21.321 --> 00:00:26.360 every quarter you might run a customer satisfaction or a user satisfaction survey. 00:00:26.406 --> 00:00:31.184 And that allows you to keep a pulse on things to know how your offerings are faring 00:00:31.184 --> 00:00:33.775 in your users' or customers' eyes. 00:00:33.775 --> 00:00:37.436 If you have specific ideas for improvements, 00:00:37.436 --> 00:00:41.280 you can also ask users about that, ask customers to tell you 00:00:41.280 --> 00:00:45.308 the sorts of things your competitors are doing that they like or perhaps 00:00:45.308 --> 00:00:48.410 ask them about *sticking points* in your current solutions: 00:00:48.450 --> 00:00:52.930 what is it that they find problematic, where would they like to see improvements? 00:00:52.930 --> 00:00:56.890 And, of course, in those kinds of areas, you are talking more about open-ended. 00:00:56.890 --> 00:01:01.840 But certainly, if you've got a list of things that your  competitors are doing, it's very easy to ask people 00:01:01.840 --> 00:01:06.873 whether they would be interested or would find  those particular features useful. 00:01:06.873 --> 00:01:11.767 For new solutions, you often end up using quantitative research, 00:01:11.767 --> 00:01:15.200 which is what a survey is, to what we call "triangulate" – 00:01:15.200 --> 00:01:20.000 get extra data about – back up – qualitative research that you've done. 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.393 So, you might have gone out and done some contextual inquiry 00:01:23.393 --> 00:01:28.412 and you might have some really exciting ideas about new product directions, 00:01:28.412 --> 00:01:33.687 and you want to make sure that that makes sense for the majority of your customer base. 00:01:33.727 --> 00:01:38.001 You wouldn't just go out on the strength of a dozen interviews 00:01:38.001 --> 00:01:42.565 and launch a new product or major revisions to a product  or service. 00:01:42.605 --> 00:01:48.369 So, the use of a survey is really almost essential in those kinds of cases. 00:01:48.409 --> 00:01:51.443 *Alternatives* – I mentioned contextual inquiry. 00:01:51.443 --> 00:01:54.652 The great thing about contextual inquiry is that it's grounded. 00:01:54.652 --> 00:01:58.518 We go out and speak to real people about real situations 00:01:58.518 --> 00:02:01.501 in a fairly – what's called – *ethnographic way*. 00:02:01.501 --> 00:02:06.760 So, we're trying to do it in their own settings, where they  would be using this product or service. 00:02:06.800 --> 00:02:10.464 And a contextual inquiry is *extremely exploratory*. 00:02:10.464 --> 00:02:13.680 So, if you start hearing about certain 00:02:13.680 --> 00:02:17.142 ideas on a regular basis, you can start asking *more* about that 00:02:17.142 --> 00:02:22.348 and try to expand the scope of your inquiries to cover these new concepts 00:02:22.388 --> 00:02:26.822 and find out a lot more about the product or service that you should be providing, 00:02:26.862 --> 00:02:30.473 as opposed to the one that you perhaps currently are or were planning to. 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:37.200 *Semi-structured interviews* – well, these are a really  important part of most qualitative research and,  00:02:37.200 --> 00:02:42.856 in fact, is used in contextual inquiry as well, but  they aren't necessarily as well grounded. 00:02:42.856 --> 00:02:47.073 We don't necessarily go out into the user's environment  to do those, but 00:02:47.073 --> 00:02:52.306 one of the attractions there is that we can start off in both of these examples 00:02:52.306 --> 00:02:55.028 – contextual inquiry and semi-structured interviews – 00:02:55.028 --> 00:03:00.238 start off with a collection of initial questions and then explore from those. 00:03:00.238 --> 00:03:04.871 So, we might have only a short list of topics that we definitely wanted to cover 00:03:04.871 --> 00:03:09.716 and we'll let the conversation ramble into interesting connected areas 00:03:09.716 --> 00:03:15.343 – not just ramble in general, by the way; "interesting connected areas" is an important part of that. 00:03:15.343 --> 00:03:20.246 You want to make sure that you're still within the focus of your inquiry, of your research. 00:03:20.286 --> 00:03:26.359 *Card sorting* – it's really good for early research for finding the relationships between concepts. 00:03:26.399 --> 00:03:30.480 We've got concepts on cards, and we ask people to sort those cards 00:03:30.480 --> 00:03:36.711 into groups, either of their own creation, so they're allowed to make the groups up themselves – that's called an *open sort* – 00:03:36.711 --> 00:03:40.917 or a *closed sort*, where we provide the groups and we want to see if people agree 00:03:40.917 --> 00:03:43.038 with where they're putting things; 00:03:43.038 --> 00:03:47.664 and in between, of course, those two is something that I call a *hybrid sort*. 00:03:47.704 --> 00:03:49.696 It has different names. 00:03:49.696 --> 00:03:53.559 And there are other early-testing tools, which we do talk about elsewhere. 00:03:53.559 --> 00:03:58.600 Those are, I should say, *tree sorting* or *tree testing* and *first-click testing*, 00:03:58.640 --> 00:04:04.640 where we're trying out very specific things; we  give users a goal, and we try to see how they 00:04:04.640 --> 00:04:08.779 address that goal with the solutions that we're thinking of providing. 00:04:08.779 --> 00:04:12.534 So, in the case of tree sorting, it's actually *menu testing*. 00:04:12.534 --> 00:04:16.840 So, the tree is the menu, and we say, "Where would you find this?" / 00:04:16.880 --> 00:04:20.647 "How would you do this on this site?" and you show them  the menus a step at a time. 00:04:20.647 --> 00:04:26.499 And there is no site yet. There's just a listing of the menu items  in a step-by-step progression. 00:04:26.499 --> 00:04:31.483 So, they're shown the top-level menus, they're shown the second-level menus, etc., as they navigate through. 00:04:31.483 --> 00:04:36.680 So, it's really easy to do and you get some really good hard data  out of that. 00:04:36.680 --> 00:04:41.459 And, similarly, with first-click testing, you might have just wireframes or really early prototypes; 00:04:41.459 --> 00:04:47.016 it can even be sketchings and you ask people to try to achieve a goal with these designs. 00:04:47.016 --> 00:04:50.914 You record where they click and how they try to achieve that. 00:04:50.954 --> 00:04:54.011 So, it's actually first-click testing is the most interesting part of that: 00:04:54.011 --> 00:04:58.228 Where do they focus their attention initially when trying to achieve those goals? 00:04:58.228 --> 00:05:01.494 So, these are all alternatives to asking people about things. 00:05:01.494 --> 00:05:04.480 And, of course, in these latter cases 00:05:04.480 --> 00:05:09.686 we're talking about seeing people do things  rather than asking them their opinions, 00:05:09.686 --> 00:05:13.169 which is a much more reliable way of getting data 00:05:13.169 --> 00:05:17.838 – not that surveys are entirely unreliable; that's not the case – 00:05:17.838 --> 00:05:22.799 but first-hand information about what people  do rather than what they talk about doing 00:05:22.799 --> 00:05:24.833 is much safer. 00:05:24.833 --> 00:05:28.528 And this is a pretty typical field-working experience. 00:05:28.528 --> 00:05:32.320 The guy on the right has a PDA or phone. 00:05:32.320 --> 00:05:36.240 Hopefully, it's a multiple-choice questionnaire  he's asking because it's really very hard 00:05:36.240 --> 00:05:39.080 to make notes on a device like that, but 00:05:39.080 --> 00:05:42.760 this is the kind of situation where you can direct the 00:05:42.800 --> 00:05:47.537 questioning according to how the participant is answering. 00:05:47.537 --> 00:05:51.840 So, this is an alternative to surveys.