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Eddie Forson
Co-Founder EnVsion
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This article explores why UX Researchers should embrace video to get more out their user interviews and usability tests. Video allows UX researchers to capture the logical and emotional context of their conversations with users and better discern insights that can be shared with their team at large. Ultimately, leveraging video makes teams more aligned and enables them to make better decisions faster in order to build products that their users need.
Video has become an intuitive and interactive platform for content creation and consumption today. Even for UX Research, video is a solid medium to synthesise raw conversations and turn them into artefacts without too much effort.
Indeed, revisiting videos enables members of a cross-functional team to feel they were part of the user interview (or usability test) experience. This is because video allows viewers to seize the emotional and physical essence of the participants to a degree that cannot be replicated with any written annotations or a stand-alone audio recording tool.
In the past, having video editing skills was a hard requirement to chop up videos into clips that could be shared with the team at large. Additionally, this required people to painfully fiddle with the video play bar to locate the start and end of the soundbites they wanted to clip. Today, this process has been simplified with the progress in artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies.
Naturally, UX researchers have embraced the power of such tool, which have transformed the way the unlock insights from from their conversations with users.
In this post, we are going to share with you 6 reasons why video recordings are the next big thing in UX Research in order to do smart work, and not only hard work.
This is a big one for UX researchers out there. Insights are more than just knowing hard numbers and statistics when capturing data. Videos are a lucrative way of going deeper into human behaviour, which has the potential to bring the most tangible outcomes of your qualitative data.
Identifying the deeper reasons behind problems is a critical first step in solving them. This begins with recognising recurring patterns in discussions, tapping into expressions, gestures, audio variations, and more.
This leads to analysing the gaps between what users say and what they actually do. Therefore, leveraging video recordings in such cases backs up your findings and removes grey areas in your study. Recording your videos provides an evergreen source of insights that you can revisit at any point in the future.
As we mentioned before, video recordings are great because they enable UX Researchers and their team to recapture the emotional and any non-verbal cues in their conversations with users. This is something that text alone cannot do. But what if you could combine text and video for a much richer analysis?
Tools like EnVision offers you the flexibility to take the complexity out of this process altogether. The built-in transcripts and automated timestamp allow you to convert hour-long interviews into bite-sized insights that your team and stakeholders will love. This feature leaves you with additional hours which would otherwise have been lost if you were still relying on hand-written notes and your memory. This means you have more time to analyse data collected rather than synthesise everything from scratch.
The magic does not end here. We understand how usability testing is the next crucial step after you incorporate all the research into creating a thoughtful product. In that time, capturing your participants' thoughts and feelings as they interact with your product so that you can understand their experience is just as simple.
This might sound too good to be true but you don’t need ANY video editing skills to capture splendid moments from your UX interviews. Creating highlight reels ensures UX can quickly share the problems and insights from users with the rest of their team in an engaging and authentic way.
Really, you don’t have to hire a video editor or even spend hours teaching yourself the skills of shooting and editing videos for UX interviews. In the end, the findings you collect are for your internal teams and not to share with the world as marketing campaigns.
The learning curve with EnVsion is far from being steep. Regardless of your experience with video software, EnVsion is suited for the teams who are determined to follow the best UX research practices.
UX researchers often have a lot of information to process and organise, which can be difficult when working with words on a page or in an Excel spreadsheet. Tags can help categorise specific sections of UX interviews in order to classify critical knowledge.
Additionally, The ability to search for specific topics within the video library allows for quick access to relevant information as well.
UX Researchers can record a video, take notes and synchronise them so that they are both visible at the same time. This helps them and their team to ensure that the recording is as detailed as possible and that the text matches what was said in the video.
They can also add screenshots and annotations above them so that anyone involved in the design process gets not only a bird's-eye view but a full picture.
The more diverse your sample is for UX research, the better insights you can catch hold of. Now we know how in-person interviews have a geographical limitation, but this constraint is nullified when you shift to video interviews.
Video enables remote research, which gives UX Researchers a broader participant reach since they could speak with participants from anywhere.
Remote interview sessions are less time-consuming and comparatively easier to conduct as compared to one-on-one interviews. The efforts to gather participants lower compared to the impact it brings to your research study.
Having access to more participants increases the chance that you uncover unexpected but valuable information during your user interviews. This could be for instance insights or questions that were not include in your discussion guide, which you should use to facilitate user interviews.
Videos can be shared with the team to create greater empathy for the user and alignment to build the right solution that addresses the user's problems.
Moreover, video allows researchers to tell stories about users and create empathy with stakeholders in the team. In fact, it’s clear that hearing someone speak about their experience can create greater empathy than reading text on a page. Videos are also more memorable than text-based reports.
This also opens doors for stakeholders, allowing them to collaborate more effectively with researchers on user insights. A video recording can be viewed at any time without having to schedule meetings or book conference calls. This saves time and creates more opportunities for collaboration between stakeholders and researchers across different time zones or locations around the world.
Video is a great way to tell stories about your users' experiences and journeys, which might be difficult to express through text and audio alone. There's a lot of research that goes into creating a great product backed by solid research. It takes time, effort and patience to get it right.
But what if there was a way to do it faster? What if you could avoid the back and forth of converting videos to text and make your team's lives simpler?
That's where EnVsion comes in. EnVsion makes it easy for UX researchers to do exactly what they want — centralise videos of user interviews and usability tests in one secure place, make sense out of it, and present their findings in a clear, concise way that everyone on the team can understand. All of this, without taking the human element out of the user interviews.
Wish to give EnVision a try? Simply complete this small form and we’ll get back to you so that you can get started.
Stathis Eleftheriadis
Eddie Forson
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