This is an introduction to the fundamentals of doing customer research for AgileUX teams. We talk about the reasons for doing real research, how to conduct on-site contextual interviews, the process to use, and how to analyze and social the results from the research. Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product in the context of an Agile development process. In addition, research seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers user products in their particular context and feed those findings immediately into the scrum's decision-making and development process. User Research takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. In AgileUX Product design, contextual inquiry and other methods of user research asserts that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, so that AgileUX Teams are always making product design decisions on actual customer feedback and behavior, and not opinion or instinct.

1. Will Evans @semanticwill Yana Kuchirko @mslogophiliac

2. 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko “ Insight about customer behavior and work patterns were never discovered sitting at your fucking desk.”

3. Why Customer Research 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

4. 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko The tendency, especially in design and product development processes, to believe everyone uses digital technologies exactly like you do. Andres Glusman

5. “ Customers are terrible at articulating what they do. When asked what they do, people give their impression of what they do—which is usually horseshit” 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

6. AgileUX Customer Research Specific Context: Specific Users: Specific Goals: 01/29/12

7. Types of AgileUX Customer Research 01/29/12

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10. What is contextual inquiry? 01/29/12 ~ Beyer & Holtzblatt Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

11. 01/29/12 Every ideation and design cycle should start with a contextual inquiry into the full experience of a customer and his/her. In AgilexUX, a regular cadence of lightweight research constantly cycled back into the scrum team allows for rapid validation of ideas. Contextual inquiry clarifies and focuses the problems a customer is experiencing by discovering the Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

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13. Get to know your user Before starting contextual inquiry process, you should establish rapport with your user since you’ll have to watch him/her working as “naturally” as possible Establishing expectations of roles is crucial to gathering rich, unbiased data. Inquiry process should be driven by the participant’s work rather than interviewer’s questions 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

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20. “ The output from customer research is not a neat hierarchy; rather, it is narratives of successes and breakdowns, examples of use that entail context, and messy use artifacts” Dave Hendry 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

22. 01/29/12 Will Evans | Manager, User Experience Design “ People from different teams engaged in affinity diagramming is as valuable as tequila shots and karaoke. Everyone develops a shared understanding of customer needs, without the hangover or walk of shame” 01/29/12 Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

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25. Thanks!