UER at USC

User Experience Research allows companies to better cater to their audience by studying the consumer's experience with the product. What do they like? And why?

In our case on Tuesday, the product was the Los Angeles Times Web site. I personally visit latimes.com daily despite the cluttered home page, but apparently others are not as forgiving. The site is not nearly as popular as Yahoo News, CNN, or even The New York Times, according to an Alexa ranking of top news sites. In short, it needs improvement, and user experience research can help in determining where to start.

Research Exercises

• Surveys-Most of them had a lot of questions, which made it so that we did not have a lot of time to spend thinking about each one. In this way, the answers reflected our initial reactions rather than allowing us to over-think the situation. The surveys will give the Los Angeles Times research team a sense of what type of news we prefer and where we usually go to get it.

• Categorizing news-Sorting the cards into appropriate categories was easier said than done. Some categories, like "video" and "photographs," seemed to belong everywhere whereas "religion" and "obituaries" did not really fit anywhere. Although my group came to an agreement, we made several compromises, which just shows that not everyone is going to be happy with the way latimes.com decides to organize its news. Of course, the goal of the research is to figure out how to make as much people happy as possible. The organization must be logical and comprehensive.

• Internet habits-It was weird to try to "act normal" for the Internet exercise when you had someone taking notes about your every move. Also, I don't normally just get online for the sole purpose of reading news for five minutes. I usually use the Internet to look something up and then periodically check on the news throughout my session online, so I did not feel like it was an accurate representation of my Internet habits.

Final Thoughts

For someone who uses latimes.com often, I liked the idea that my feedback might help to improve the Web site. User Experience Research is definitely valuable because know one knows what an audience wants better than the news consumers themselves. Of course, it is unrealistic to base all changes solely on user research. The exercises give researchers a glimpse into the online behaviors of potential site users, but the simulations and surveys are still nothing more than imitations of the real thing. It is also important to consider external factors that affect an individuals online news habits.