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This, and all of the user research blogs, give an overview of the process and steps taken for each part. I’ve included images taken from the FigJam boards where the majority of the work lives to illustrate the process.
If you would still like to see further details on each part, please view the FigJam board in full.
It can be found at the end of this page, or on this master page.
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I was now ready to plan some user interviews.
Discovery interviews are something I’ve found really important over placement, and something I want to bring to my project. These will allow me to get first hand accounts from users to create more informed personas and user journeys to work from.
I first wanted to figure out who I was going to interview. Due to the scope and resources of this project, I figured if I could speak to at least one person from each user group I’d be doing well. I wanted to get a range of experience too, so for one user I got someone who had lived in London and solely relied on public transport to get around. This would broaden my user research as it wasn’t constrained to just Northern Ireland.
After thinking about who would be good to speak to, I asked them to participate and planned in times to interview them.
| User Type | Interviewee | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light (Convenience) | Seth | 3/12/25 12:00 | Online |
| Medium (Reliability) | Karen | 3/12/25 13:00 | Home |
| Medium (Reliability) | Mark | 2/12/25 11:00 | Uni |
| Super (Efficiency) | Michael | 3/12/25 11:00 | Home |
I now needed to prepare a discussion guide to use for my interviews. I’ve found over placement it’s better to not just have a set of questions, but more a collections of prompts that don’t have to be asked in a specific order, and can lead to new questions. This helps interviews be more conversational and natural, as well giving more opportunities to go down certain trains of thought rather than sticking to the script.
I also find it’s good to have some sort of stimulus for users to react to. This helps to break up the interview and can keep things fresh when talking a lot. For this, I took Translink’s MLink app experience as I knew ticketing and payment would be an interesting challenge to investigate.
I then formed this all into a slightly more formal discussion guide to work from. As this is something only I’ll see, I knew it didn’t need to be too overly worked. I was pleased with this as I felt there were plenty of questions but it wasn’t overkill and should keep interviews to the 30 minute area.