What is User Experience Research? How do I do it? Why does it matter?

by Brock Dubbels | at MinneBar 11

People are becoming less tolerant of bad design. Many people will pay more for a product or service that moves beyond utility, and provides effective and pleasurable experiences. Customers have goals, and purpose for what they do. User Experience goes beyond traditional usability and business requirements of how and what will be delivered, to designing pleasurable customer experiences that build loyalty and participation.

In this hands-on activity, participants will experience and shape a UX Research experience with the ideas, tools, and analytical methods in user experience research that can be used to better inform technology and product development roadmaps. This includes:

Applying a user experience engineering life cycle Contextual inquiry and analysis Requirements extraction and design-informing models Conceptual and detailed design Iterative prototyping and evaluation Understanding and applying interaction design guidelines

User experience design and research is a maturing discipline. It's progression indicates a movement from the important, but narrow focus on task performance, to overarching characteristics of the entire user experience including emotion, social and cultural implications, fun, style, art, branding, reputation, political, social, and personal connections. Explore UX Research practices and implications. Brock Dubbels is currently the UX Mentorship Coordinator for the Minnesota User Experience Professional Association, and has offered coursework on UX since 2012. Come and learn about User Experience Research and how it can enhance your projects and ideas.

Beginner

Brock Dubbels

Brock Dubbels specializes in user experience, user research, and assessment. He is an applied psychologist, that uses science to examine questions about software and user experience. He teaches course work on user experience research, games and cognition, and how learning research can improve game design for return on investment (ROI). He is the founder and principal learning architect at www.vgalt.com for design, production, usability assessment and evaluation of learning systems and games.He is also the founder of the HammerTownCoderDojo.org, an organization providing free programming instruction to children, and is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Games and Computer Mediated Simulations. He currently on the UXPA-MN board and facilitates the UXPA Mentorship program.

He helped create the GScale Game Development and Testing Laboratory at McMaster University, and is currently in the Department of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour. He has worked as a Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology; at Xerox PARC and Oracle, and as a research associate at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Minnesota. He is member of the UXPA board in Minnesota, and coordinates the mentorship program. His specialties include user research, user experience, and software project management.