Discovering user goals

User goals are the most important piece of all your preliminary research. Miss them, and you’ll forever be stabbing in the dark when you design a website. Get them right and your users will be pleased, eager to return, and happy to part with their money. :0

Discovering User Goals / IR Goal Definitions

In an ear­lier post on cre­at­ing Goal Based Infor­ma­tion Retrieval Expe­ri­ences, I offered a list of fun­da­men­tal user goals that under­lays needs and usage of four sug­gested infor­ma­tion retrieval modes. In this post, I’ll share the approach employed to dis­cover the fun­da­men­tal goals of the users in our envi­ron­ment, with the aim of offer­ing it as one way of under­stand­ing goals rel­e­vant for other types of envi­ron­ments and user expe­ri­ence archi­tec­tures.
Since the root user goals we iden­ti­fied are poten­tially applic­a­ble to other envi­ron­ments and con­texts, I’ll share the def­i­n­i­tions behind the full set of root goals we dis­cov­ered. Together, the approach and def­i­n­i­tions should help demon­strate how cap­ture a sys­tem­atic and also holis­tic view of what users have need to accom­plish when under­tak­ing infor­ma­tion retrieval tasks more com­plex than search­ing.
Finally, address­ing the per­spec­tive of strate­gic design and user expe­ri­ence method­ol­ogy, fram­ing broad user goals well offers strong foot­ing for address­ing busi­ness per­spec­tives, and engag­ing busi­ness audi­ences in pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sions on the pri­or­ity of capa­bil­i­ties and the func­tion­al­ity of the user expe­ri­ence.
Dis­cov­er­ing Root Goals
Begin­ning with raw goals gath­ered via a mixed palette of dis­cov­ery and user research (inter­views, task analy­sis, con­tex­tual inquiry, or other qual­i­ta­tive insight meth­ods) incor­po­rated into the project, we first called out the dif­fer­ent types or objects of infor­ma­tion users iden­ti­fied.
Our start­ing lists of raw user goals or needs looked some­thing like this (though it was con­sid­er­ably larger, and more varied):

• Read oper­at­ing guidelines
• Review instal­la­tion instructions
• Scan tech­ni­cal sup­port requests
• Review tech­ni­cal specifications

Iden­ti­fy­ing the objects in this set is not dif­fi­cult: tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions, oper­at­ing guide­lines, instal­la­tion instruc­tions, and sup­port requests. The activ­ity verbs are also easy to spot:

• read
• scan
• review

We then com­pared the activ­ity verbs for sim­i­lar­ity and dif­fer­ences, and refined these raw goals into a root goal of “review” that could apply to any of the objects users named.
Recom­bin­ing the root goal with var­i­ous objects yields a set of con­crete goals:

• Review oper­at­ing guidelines
• Review instal­la­tion instructions
• Review tech­ni­cal specifications
• Review tech­ni­cal sup­port requests

This approach is more art than sci­ence, but is sys­tem­atic, and is inde­pen­dent of con­text and for­mat.
Here’s an illus­tra­tion of the process.
Dis­cov­er­ing Root Goals

Final Root Goals For Our Envi­ron­ment
These are the def­i­n­i­tions we estab­lished for the root goals we found for all our dif­fer­ent types of users. [I haven’t included the objects of the goals, or the con­crete goals.]

• To Assess means to make a judge­ment or deci­sion about, con­sid­er­ing rel­e­vant factors
• To Com­pare means to review the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences of two or more exam­ples of the same type of thing by look­ing at them in detail
• To Find means to learn the loca­tion and sta­tus of
• To Iden­tify means to dis­tin­guish by the use of spe­cific criteria
• To Locate means to become aware of where and how a thing may be found, and / or con­tacted. Locate and find are sim­i­lar, so likely reflect dif­fer­ing but sim­i­lar usages and con­texts in the minds of users
• To Mon­i­tor means to track the sta­tus and loca­tion of
• To Obtain means to acquire and retain for other purposes
• To Par­tic­i­pate means to be present and recognized
• To Review means to exam­ine in detail
• To Save means to store and keep
• To See means to be pre­sented with in a man­ner that makes assumed rela­tion­ships or char­ac­ter­is­tics apparent
• To Under­stand means to con­sider all avail­able points of view or sources of infor­ma­tion on a topic / item / sit­u­a­tion, and for­mu­late an opin­ion and frame of ref­er­ence for one’s own purposes.

Some exam­ple con­crete goals for an user expe­ri­ence that addresses travel plan­ning could include:

• Find hotels
• Review hotel accommodations
• Save travel itineraries
• Com­pare vaca­tion packages
• See optional excur­sions offered by a hotel
• Iden­tify full-service or all-inclusive resorts
• Locate the oper­a­tors of scuba div­ing excursions
• Mon­i­tor the price of air­line tick­ets to Sardinia
• Under­stand how to plan and pur­chase vacations
• Assess the cost and value of a vaca­tion package

Sym­me­try and Men­tal Mod­els
We found the con­cept of a root goal insight­ful for help­ing to design user expe­ri­ence archi­tec­tures because it is inde­pen­dent of par­tic­u­lar user roles, infor­ma­tion types, and usage con­texts. Being root ele­ments, they point at com­mon­al­i­ties rather than dif­fer­ences, and so can help guide the def­i­n­i­tion of men­tal mod­els that span user groups, or allow the reuse of an infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture ele­ment such as a nav­i­ga­tion com­po­nent, task flow, or screen lay­out.
Build­ing numer­ous con­crete goals that are vari­a­tions on a smaller set of com­mon root goals allows the men­tal model for the envi­ron­ment to achieve a greater degree of con­sis­tency and pre­dictabil­ity (we hope — we’ll see what the usabil­ity and eval­u­a­tions bring back). This con­sis­tency helps fur­ther efforts toward sym­me­try through­out the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture. While most infor­ma­tion archi­tects uncon­sciously reach for sym­me­try in user expe­ri­ences by design­ing repeated ele­ments such as com­mon label­ing, rules for lay­out, and com­po­nent sys­tems of fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity — sym­me­try is some­thing we should make more con­scious efforts to encour­age both within envi­ron­ments and across envi­ron­ments.
Speak­ing To the Busi­ness: Goal-based Pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of Capa­bil­i­ties and Func­tion­al­ity
With solid root goals and com­mon infor­ma­tion objects, it’s pos­si­ble to build up a sim­ple and con­sis­tent gram­mar that out­lines the set of pos­si­ble con­crete goals across user types. This set of goals is a good basis for engag­ing busi­ness stake­hold­ers in choos­ing the right set of pri­or­i­ties to guide design and build efforts. Sys­tem­at­i­cally artic­u­lated goals allow busi­ness audi­ences a com­fort­able and neu­tral basis for pri­or­i­tiz­ing the capa­bil­i­ties the envi­ron­ment will offer users. Of course, choices of capa­bil­ity directly affect costs, effort lev­els, design and build time­lines, and all the other tan­gi­ble aspects of a user expe­ri­ence. Ref­er­ence pri­or­i­ties can also help guide longer-term invest­ment and strat­egy decisions.

Original Article