I just finished reading Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. It was a truly remarkable book for how the author gives a glimpse of all the basics of user research with much clarity and detail in so few pages. Like the author points out initially, I take away with me several more questions than answers. For instance, how significant are personas for design ideation? It also helped me understand the basics of different user research methodologies a lot better.
Here are my key learnings from the book.
1. Learn to read between the lines during user research. The core problems are not usually about what the user says they want but about what they do.
2. Ethnographic research helps gather a deeper understanding of the problem at hand than focus groups. Ethnographic research involves understanding user relationships, habits and mental models.
3. Attributes, value proposition and customer perspective are crucial factors when it comes to branding.
4. For a service or product, the brand experience is the user experience and the product’s visual interface is its brand identity.
5. I also found this YoutTube channel from the resources page.
https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidTravis
These are 5-minute videos by noted psychologist and founder of User Focus, David Travis. He addresses different questions related to UX research in each of the videos.
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