Articles

Mayya Azarova

Mayya Azarova, Ph.D.'s expertise includes in-depth interviews, storytelling, design thinking, and contextual inquiries. She has published academic research on biometric technology, online collaboration, and multidisciplinary teamwork.  

Articles and Videos

  • Balancing Natural Behavior with Incentives and Accuracy in Diary Studies

    Diary studies involve a series of tradeoffs as researchers must capture participants’ natural behaviors, but the method to do so can be intrusive and reward producing more entries.

  • The Hawthorne Effect or Observer Bias in User Research

    Individuals often modify their behavior if they know they are being observed. That phenomenon became known as the Hawthorne effect or the observer bias. We can mitigate this effect by building rapport, designing natural tasks, and spending more time with study participants.

  • 27 Tips and Tricks for Conducting Successful User Research in the Field

    Leave your office and go where the users are. Learn about common pitfalls and how to avoid them from our experience.

  • Secondary Research: Important UX Learning Right at Your Desk

    You don't have to do all UX research yourself. You should learn from existing published work, which will save you much time, especially when beginning a new project.

  • Why Field-Study Sessions Go Wrong: 5 Common Problems

    Stay focused and avoid long complaint sessions during a field study by communicating the purpose of the visit early on, maintaining the partnership relationship with participants, and looking for concrete examples over abstract generalizations.

  • The Context CUEs Framework in Field Studies

    Context CUEs framework is rooted in distributed cognition theory and guides in-depth observations of users’ physical and social settings.

  • How Many Users Should You Visit for Contextual Inquiry?

    The question of "how many users" has 3 answers when doing contextual inquiry: users per visit, visits per day, and the total number of visits in a study (which again varies depending on the type of design project).

  • Two Tips for Better UX Storytelling

    Effective storytelling involves both engaging the audience and structuring stories in a concise, yet effective manner. You can improve your user stories by taking advantage of the concept of story triangle and of the story-mountain template.

  • Top 3 Informational Interview Questions in UX

    Informational interviews allow you to connect with users and other people and get a glimpse into their world and how and why they work. They serve as an informal research tool for learning about a new domain or role.

  • Secondary Research in UX

    Secondary research is an essential foundation for UX work, necessary to explore the problem space and scope of prior projects and to identify important questions and best practices in the field of study. It also helps to focus the scope of your own project and often saves money.