How to UX Research like an artist

Gather more data-driven insights to help guide UX design decisions in less time than it takes to recruit user participants.

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Using time constraints to your advantage as a UX designer

Every UX designer has had to trade quality for speed due to time limitations induced by demanding stakeholders. Consequently you try to follow a defined and trusted UX process — and while this was feasible in the early stages of your learning to be a UX designer phase — you quickly realise that in the workplace, where things are fast paced, you have little to no time to follow thoroughly, the UX process you hold dearly and wish to practice more with now you’ve got that job. This could be the reason for your crippling imposter syndrome. You’re lowkey thinking that what you’re doing isn’t good enough because you’ve had to rush through the process to create what might be a good or crude user experience. Now with little knowledge on how this product will satisfy the end user, you find yourself collaborating with the engineer to see it built out and getting ready for launch 🚀.

It finally gets launched and with dopamine pumps pumped into all aspects of the product marketing efforts, users begin to sign up and use your creation. It seems all is well after all. However, not so long down the road, you notice the break lights from the users, the decline in the graph trend, and the complaints from the customer support team, and you’re back to having that adrenaline rush. However, this time it’s your conscience playing tricks of jury and the judge on you. You discover flaws in the design that could have been identified if you had taken the time to follow your UX process, and you have to go back to the drawing board.

Perhaps, you’ve gone round this circle of knife a couple of times with every new product feature release and you keep coming back to the same cut 🔪.

How do you mitigate this type of marginal design flaws and navigate the UX process in product development, without the full-fledged prior research when time is always of the essence and non-negotiable?

Well, from personal experience, I’ll approach this with two distinct but simple concepts:

1. Rapid Competitive Analysis
2. Near-proximity Guerrilla Test

The first few phases of a UX process are focused on understanding the problem so that you can gather enough insights to guide your ideas during the solution exploration phase. These are the prior research steps taken to define the problem, the customer, and the medium of the product. Depending on the size of the team, these activities could be performed by a team of researchers, the UX researcher on the design team, or you, the UX designer — which puts you at a disadvantage due to your perceived deliverable of providing screen mockups. That is, you only have time to stay in the solution exploration phase because that is the deliverable that your stakeholders expect from you. This then raises the important question which the ideas shared in this article emanated from.

How do you quickly gather just enough data points to inform your decisions in the solution exploration phase, when you don’t have time to perform a full-fledge research activity to understand the problem?

Firstly, I’ll conduct a comprehensive but rapid competitive analysis. Not the kind you’d normally do on Dribbble or Behance, for example, where you gather inspiration for how things should look. This is the type of competitive analysis that ensures you investigate how an experience is interacted with. It will entail you downloading and testing a product that has already been developed by someone else, whose decisions were informed by a data set that you did not have access to or the time to collect, and then innovating around that information while relating it to your specific problem space.

Research does not always need to be overly elaborate, to gather enough insights, but it does need to have a broad connection to a large pool of data points that can help the designer connect the dots between the findings and the problem space they are solving for, in order to make better, data-backed decisions. It could be related to the popular phrase “steal like an artist,” which is, of course, a clever play on the title of this post.

Another good technique for gaining these types of quick insights from available data sets is to ask questions and get feedback as soon as possible with the nearest sample to you, which leads us to the second thing I’ll do. This is what I call a “near-proximity guerrilla test.” It is carried out by randomly asking a person nearest to you in the other corner of the room what they expect when they interact with a certain action in order to complete a task, or by asking them what they think of an interaction you’ve created and what can be done to improve it. This is a unique, live interactive method of gathering data points from a human for whom we ultimately design. The more time you practice this with as many close samples as you have and can accommodate within the timeframe, the more data points you’ll have to connect the dots and inform your decisions to create something — a prototype — that is the result of a user-informed experience.

By combining these two activities and collecting these data points while exploring solutions, you can make better use of the limited time you have and eventually roll out a design that is sufficiently data informed.

Here are a few things to do as next steps:

• Stress-test this solution and see how it performs against a larger sample size — your users — to identify where it fails to satisfy the user’s intent and iterate quickly based on newly gathered insights.
• Pay very close attention to the data from user activity — especially for ideas your guts aren’t so confident of — and incorporate that knowledge into the solution board to make small but significant changes.
• Enroll in business and design leadership courses to learn how to convince your stakeholders on the benefits of an extensive prior research while communicating the positive impact it has on the business in terms of research & design ROI.

I hope this helps you in some way as you return to your artboards and continue to create amazing solutions by researching like an artist that help humans live a better life aided by technology.

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