Research Method to measure user's satisfaction through Questionnaire

Question

So, I have a project in gesture, where I proposed some gestures to be used for some action. Let's say it's a hand gesture design to control a menu (menu as in dropdown menu, or main menu in a video game). These are the steps I did:

1. Study the past hand gesture
2. Design hand gesture to be applied to menu, based on those past hand gesture
3. Make a simple software to test those gesture (like a simple interface with menu that controlled by hand gesture, where the example of gesture applied is, how waving hand can select a menu)
4. Test gesture to sample (users), and make sample tries the gestures
5. Gives questionnaire in the end to get their feedback

Note: I didn't take notes of how users/samples practice the gesture, because the research's purpose is knowing user's satisfaction of the gesture I proposed to control menu, and that's where the questionnaire is used.

Now, while the step was clear, I'm confused on what method is it that I used. Is this considered user-centered design? Is it a usability testing already? or just usual research method?

If I asked in wrong place, please tell me where I should ask this. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

I would consider this user-centered design, in that you studied past solutions, created a solution, and tested it through a prototype with users.

However, instead of collecting first-person responses to whether the users found the gesture satisfactory, I think your results would be more genuine if you instead measured the user success rate of the gesture.

Users often, mostly unconsciously, try to say positive things when asked subjective questions. For example, users tend to say they like something more than they do because they want to help you. In order to off-set that, you could measure the success rates and times of the new gesture vs. the old gesture, which will allow you to objectively compare them.

Often in UX research, we tend to measure how much something fails or succeeds in order to avoid basing design decisions on "i like it" instead of "4 of 5 users couldn't complete the task the first time". In addition, in my experience, if a user is truly delighted by a feature, it will be very noticeable and they won't let the session end without talking about that particular feature.