User Experience Foundations

4 USER RESEARCH

When we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context.

Christopher Alexander (1964)

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And … it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Donald Rumsfeld (2002)

INTRODUCTION

This chapter starts by defining a central concept in human-centred design: the context of use. We then move on to discuss how this can be studied and understood through user research. We look at the main types of subjective or opinion-based ...