Research Skills
Foundational Research
As the first primary UX research at Backstop from 2018 - 2021, I take the responsibility to establish research practice and evangelized human-centered design across the organization. I have the opportunity to pick up the knowledge from subject matter experts and board members who were in the Alternative Investment industry for decades. I create artifacts that help employees across the whole organization build information structures, help them quickly create empathy for users.
Research Methods
Future vision Workshop: Backstop in 5 years
Customer Journey: Allocator Investment Lifecycle
User Profiles Inventory
User Engagement data Analysis: 3 Years MAU(monthly active users) data insights
Deliverable Example
Backstop serves for investors in Alternative Investment. The client types and user types are complicated. How to make information structured? How to make the learning experience more interactive?
Exploratory Research
This is the area that I had the most experience. Research is a decision-making tool to reduce the risk by understanding the problem or validating the hypothesis. My favorite part of the research process is to tangle the ambiguity and simplify the complexity. I am passionate about discovering new research methods and stimulus tactics to discover the unknown.
Research Methods Overview
Survey: to understand the daily mobile usage pattern
Case study: to understand what roles the agent play
Interviews with users, stakeholders, subject matter experts,
Observation: to observe generating the due diligence report
Ethnography research: To understand nutrition education
Competitive analysis: to define new product positioning
Card sorting: To define roles from 400+ different names
Participatory Design: to design the home page for the new mobile app
Concept Evaluation: concept walkthrough, task evaluation
Product Prioritization: Kano model, Moscow, 2x2 value mapping, $100
Evaluative Research
Evaluative research helps the team to evaluate the design by observing how users conduct certain tasks. We use metrics as task success rate, task on time, number of frustration moments to evaluate the experience for tasks.
Currently, I am working to define User Experience Metrics and set up the benchmark usability study to set the baseline for Chamberlain products.
Research Analysis: Use Framework to Accelerate the Analysis
Analytical frameworks help me to structure the data and generate key insights. Examples of the framework I often use are 4As, AEIOU, ERAF, Value web, etc. I also create my own framework based on user journey or data theme to quickly surface up the insights.
I also have the chance to do some quantitative data analysis work as finding usage patterns from three years of engagement data based on time, client types, and user types.
Workshop Planning/Facilitating
A design researcher plays an important role as a facilitator to help subject matter experts, designers, and users together to share knowledge and generate new ideas.
I have experience in organizing workshops independently and co-planning as a team for about 20 - 30 stakeholders.
I believe in the concept of "engineering workshop", which means to plan for every detail: space, time, activity, participants' energy, also the foods, the transition moment between activities. The process of engineering on every detail prepares us in handling unexpected happenings.
You also can refer to Conversational Agent Project to know more about my experience in workshop planning.
Visual Communication
Visual communication empowers me to dispel the complexity and communicate the core message. I created an Experience map, story map, and diagram to facilitate the story-telling.
Interactive Prototype
Some interaction examples are at https://www.xiaojundu.com/ux-design/
Test assumption to prove or disapprove the hypothesis leads the design to the right path. The interactive prototype gives users a tangible experience of concepts and guides the research to the next steps.
