I've written another blog post for GDS, called Being a user researcher for a day. It's pretty self explanatory, but I guess I could ramble on about it a bit more if you're interested.
Read the post yet? Okay, here we go.
Preparation
The time between the decision to do popup research and actually doing it was not much more than a week and a lot of preparation was involved. My colleague Jeremy did much of it, contacting potential venues and drafting documents. Big shout out also to Louise, for her invaluable user research information and tips.
We had a lot of meetings that week to finalise the details, the biggest of which was setting the tasks for the participants. It was quite hard to come up with something participants could find using the GOV.UK search that wasn't too easy to find. In other words, the task had to be achievable but not too easy. A few participants did come close to finding what we asked them to look for on the first attempt. Others didn't find it at all.
I was hoping to do the research a bit closer to the office (Dagenham library is nearly an hour away) but none of the other places we contacted got back to us in time. One did, but it turned out to be even further away.
On the day
One detail that I left out was that the day in question made me quite ill. It was my own stupid fault, really. I didn't drink anything from leaving the office around 10am til when I got home at 6pm. Weirdly, I just forgot. I felt quite horrible that night as a result, and was still recovering the next day. Top tip, user researchers: remember to hydrate.
We also took a bag of sweets for participants but hardly anyone wanted one. Something similar happened once before with a lab session I was observing - the user researcher had a packet of biscuits, but none of the participants wanted any. It had turned into a standing joke by the end of the day.
Aftermath
It was a good day. I ran into my PM on the way back into the office and he said later that he'd never seen me with such a big grin on my face - apparently I was overflowing with enthusiasm about the experience.
When we wrote up the results afterwards we had some great insights and a lot of things to build on and do more research into. One of those insights was one we already suspected - that Google sets the standard for web searching. Users expect to type a few words into a box and immediately find what they're looking for. You can give them more options, but they're unlikely to use them. They don't want to work, they just want to find what they're looking for.
Blogging
This was my fourth blog post for GDS and apart from a gap of over a month during which nothing happened with it (due to everyone being insanely busy) it was published without much difficulty. I really like it, because it's a departure from my previous articles, which were mainly focussed on technology and/or accessibility.
Also it was nice to get out of the office and meet some people. Now let me back in, I have coding to do.