-Imran
User research is used in UI/UX to understand what our users needs, behave, have attitudes on and consider are problems. These can help make us decisions and guides us to a implementable solution. According to Rohrer, there are multitude of methods. Some of the methods dive into what users do, some explain why a problem happens, others measure the impact and experience of users. These user methods and research are applicable in different scenarios and stages of design.
These range of methods and research purpose are a direct reference to solving the challenges of HCI. HCI deals with human behavior which means human behavior is complex. This mean different human behavior means a multitude of methods or frameworks. Rohrer describe the categories that exist to solve challenges in HCI. They are attitudinal vs behavioral, qualitative vs quantitative and context of product usage.
Within these different categories we need to understand what stage of research we are in and what we need and want to study. The three categories are attitudinal vs behavioral which are what people say vs what people do, qualitative vs quantitative which are direct observation or explanation vs measurement and context of use which is natural, scripted, limited or decontextualized product use. For example this is reflected in Trove's second research to realize that the prototype they have built is upon the assumption of researchers and they have to perform a behavioral research to truly understand how the children could use the product and what changes they look for such as the guided interviews children did on privacy solutions.
Like the above example with what Dr Stuart Grey and his team did there are rationales on why a method is chosen. This could be on where the research is at. There are three stage the generative, formative and summative. According to Dr Stuart Grey's trove research the generative stage involves prototyping and quantitative and qualitative research on narrative imbalance. Then guided interviews and focus groups are done in the formative stage with the summative stage being to measure the performance against earlier versions being down again.
These three categories with their subcategories have their own pros and cons. I believe that in qualitative methods the pros are it allows use to fully understand why user behave a certain way and allow in-depth followup questions whereas it is restricted by smaller samples and less suited to be measure. The method useful in measuring and sample size is qualitative but it misses context and failed to explain why problems happen. For the attitudinal methods they measure preferences, perspectives and give the idea of what people think and react to base on their personal belief which means it is limited onn the user's willingness to share and that must be honor. On the other hand, behavioral methods shows why a user behave and how they behave which needs set-up, close observation time becoming more intrusive and subjective.
With these pros and cons, the researchers of Trove understand the pros and cons and when they decided to choose the research method like focus groups which are behavioral in nature they also allow caregivers to be there knowing the research method is intrusive of children's life. Which means every reserachers choose their resarch with due consideration in order to prevent skewdness.