Kyle Soucy
Independent UX Research Consultant at Usable Interface, LLC
Kyle Soucy is the Founder and Principal of Usable Interface (http://www.usableinterface.com), an independent UX research consultancy specializing in qualitative user research, usability testing, research strategy, and training. For more than 25 years, she has helped organizations create more intuitive products and experiences across websites, desktop and mobile applications, medical devices, home entertainment systems, and even kitchen appliances.
Kyle founded the NH UXPA chapter and served as its inaugural President, remaining active on the board for 13 years. She has also served as Chair of PhillyCHI.
She is also the creator of Making Research Matter (http://www.makingresearchmatter.com), where she writes about increasing the impact and influence of research within organizations, and the host of The UX Consultants Lounge podcast (http://www.uxconsultantslounge.com), a space where UX consultants gather to share stories, experiences, and lessons from independent consulting.
Web teams make decisions every day based on assumptions about users: what they need, what they'll understand, where they'll look, and what will help them succeed. User research can replace some of those assumptions with evidence, but that doesn't always require a large study, a huge budget, or weeks of work.
In this session, we'll walk through common questions website teams face and explore the research approaches that can help answer them. How can you learn what users actually need? When is concept testing useful? When should you run usability testing? What can qualitative research uncover when analytics tell you what is happening but not why?
We'll also look at how to right-size research to the question. Sometimes a few interviews or a focused usability study may be enough. Other times, particularly when a product is evolving across multiple prototypes or releases, it may be worth conducting iterative rounds of research or following users over time to understand adoption, learning, and how the experience changes with continued use.
Rather than providing a catalog of research methods, this session will use real-world scenarios to help designers, developers, project managers, content teams, and other stakeholders recognize what kind of research may be appropriate at different points in a website's lifecycle.
We'll also cover some of the limits of DIY research, common mistakes that can lead teams astray, and how to recognize when a research question calls for deeper expertise.