Defining the target audience for ronda was a helpful process because this assisted us in writing a screener, recruiting participants, creating personas and identifying tasks for testing.

User research help us to achieve a more accurate definition of our representative user, which is very useful to gather information from people to fill a gap in our knowledge.

We started formulating and answering the following questions below, so that we know what we need to learn during your research.

Objectives

These are the questions we are trying to answer:

  • Who are the people who share rides?
  • Who are the people who search rides?
  • Why people want to share rides?
  • Why people want to search rides?
  • What are the considerations to keep in mind when people are sharing a ride?
  • What are the considerations to keep in mind when people are looking for a ride?
  • How frequently do people share rides?
  • How frequently do people search rides?

Hypotheses

These are what we believe we already know and what are our team’s assumptions:

  • The most frequent users are students
  • The users want to save money traveling from one city to another

After answering the questions above we started gathering data through the method we’ve selected.

Method

This address how we plan to fill the gaps in our knowledge based on the time and people available:

  • Individual interviews

Screener

Recruiting our target audience for user research with screener questions is very useful.

We made a list in advance of the topics and questions that we wanted to covered with the pre-selected users to be sure that recruiting criteria reflect specific user characteristics.

  • Do you have a car?
  • What kind of car is?
  • How many times per month you are traveling out of town?
  • Do you travel alone or with others?
  • How much do you spend on a trip?

These questions will help determine which users are suitable candidates to participate in the research session.

Recruiting

Get representative users was an important component of our user research process because increase the validity of the test findings.

Collecting valid data during usability studies depends on recruiting the right participants, those who reflect the characteristics of the targeted users of a system.

Without the right participants, you will not get the data you need to make the best user-centered decisions for your system.

We give 10 free rides using Ronda to every participant as an incentive for attending to the session.

Conducting

All of the data we’ve collected throughout the individual interviews helped us to find fresh connections and patterns, which often lead to more powerful research findings.

One-on-one discussions with users show you how a particular user works and they enable you to get detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences.

We interviewed 12 participants to produce statistical significance in our study results.

Ideally, interviews take place at the start of the development cycle while you are developing or reviewing the objectives and goals of the site.

These interviews do not involve watching a user doing tasks, they are different from interviewing users in a usability test or conducting contextual interviews.

We conducted individual interviews face-to-face, an interviewer talked with one user for 30 minutes.

This method allow us to probe their attitudes, beliefs, desires, and experiences to get a deeper understanding of the users who will use the site.

Individual interviews resemble focus groups because they involve talking with users but they differ for because in individual interviews you:

– Talk to only one person at a time

– Have more time to discuss topics in detail

– Can give the interviewee your full attention and adjust your interviewing style to your interviewee’s needs

To conduct an Individual Interview, we need to consider:

– What we want to learn and then selecting representative participants to talk to

– Writing an interview protocol for the interviewer to follow. The protocol includes questions and probes to use for follow-up

– Hiring a skilled interviewer who knows how to make interviewees feel more comfortable, asks questions in a neutral manner, listens well, and knows when and how to probe for more details

– Getting permission to tape the sessions and have one or more note takers

After doing the user research we found out what are the main things that people want to do on the site and our next task during the design process is to make those things obvious and easy for the user.

What are the three main things your users want to do?

– Create rides easily and share it with friends in common

– Find rides easily with friends in common

– Save money

We wrote down all the research hypotheses on sticky notes, and cluster them to identify how they may be proved or disproved through different research methods.

On the left, we placed hypotheses related to who our users are, where they live and work, their goals, their needs and so forth.

On the right, we placed hypotheses that have to do with explicit functionality or design solutions we want to test with users.

In the center, we placed hypotheses related to the types of content or functionality that we think might be relevant to users.

Synthesize

In this part of the process we answer our research questions, and prove or disprove our hypotheses.

We make sense of the data we’ve gathered to discover what opportunities and implications exist for our design efforts.

Now our team have more confidence in the results, and when we will design the next feature of our site, we will take another spin through the research process to evaluate whether we got it right.

After the research effort is complete, we created a report to synthesize the results.

Takeaways

– User research help us to provide deeper context from the representative user so then we can design more effective solutions to their problems.

– After user research we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions.

– User research also helps us to avoid our own biases, because we frequently have to create design solutions for people who aren’t like us.