NUX4 is the fourth annual conference organised by the Northern User Experience (NUX) team who run a tight community across the north, which currently stretches from Liverpool to Newcastle. The event last Friday was held in the Royal Northern College of Music, which is a large modern building perfectly suited to hosting the nearly 600 delegates that attended the conference.

People for Research are very proud to have sponsored such a prestigious and well attended conference and we would like to share the highlights which, as user recruitment experts, all underline the importance of conducting usability tests with users. As experts in sourcing and recruiting participants, we felt this would be an excellent space to share this information.

Ethnography 💭 Tomer Sharon, Senior UX Researcher at Google, told a story about two talented developers who built an app that nobody needed. The strong message from the talk was that it is important to actually speak to users, not just friends and family, about what they want or need when developing a new app, website or product.

More than talking to users, we must not underestimate the use of first-hand observation. Users or potential users may not be able to tell you accurately how they behave or might behave when in a certain situation. Especially if you are asking them to imagine using an app they don’t currently use.

Influencing stakeholders 💭 Jenny Grinblo, UX & Design Lead at Future Workshops, is adamant that clients don’t suck. She talked about a tool kit that can be used to maintain good working relationships at all times, even when clients are a little challenging.

The piece of advice we thought was most useful was to give users a seat in the boardroom. When designing in a boardroom, trying to get stakeholders onside actually showing them an audio or video clip of a user sharing their opinion will help the client to understand the process behind your decision-making.

Co-design worshops 💭 Stavros Garzonis, Senior UX Consultant at cxpartners, led an excellent talk about designing and planning co-design workshops. There was so much to take away from this, but the most important lesson is: from a user recruitment point of view you can’t run a co-design workshop without users. However, having users and clients in the same room involves creates some risks, so make sure you have a moderator on each table with clients and users, and a meta-moderator overseeing the whole workshop.

Interusability 💭 Claire Rowland, UX strategy/product consultant specialising in the IoT, had an incredibly informative and absolutely jam-packed talk about Interusability: Designing a coherent system for connected products. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that isn’t currently widely used by the general public, and as such not every user has the ability of understanding how to set up connected products depending on the complexity of the connectivity.

Claire used informative diagrams to show the difference between what the user sees or needs to know, and what actually needs to happen to make a connected product work. As the IoT becomes more mainstream and every home increases the number of connected products used as part of day to day life, testing the user journey of interusability is going to become more important for products to succeed. Otherwise, designers may end up creating confusing products, as “we don’t (yet) expect Things to behave like the internet”.

Designing for kindness 💭 The most simple message of the day, but the one that many organisations underestimate, was from Content Strategist Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who advised us to adjust to the users needs, don’t expect them to fit ours.

This is just a brief summary of a couple of things we have taken away from the conference. To find out more you can take to Twitter and search for the hashtag #NUX4. We also recommend a look at the Sketchnotes by Chris Spalton.

Thanks to Barry Briggs (read his interview here), Rachel Thompson and everyone else who made this conference happen. We are already looking forward to next year at NUX5!

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user testing or market research get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.