5 Activities to Kick-start Your User Research
‘How do I start?’ A question that is always asked before undertaking a new process and one we are not unfamiliar with. You may be asking yourself this right now, so we have put together a list of activities that will help you start your user research and uncover some fantastic insights into your users and customers.
Remember: Research works best when you have a question or set of questions that you want answers for ahead of starting to help direct your efforts. Otherwise you could end up with research that answers no real question and gives no real insight.
Micro surveys on your product or website
Using tools such as Hotjar or Lucky Orange (there are others on the market), you can start adding micro surveys to your website and gather insights from users at different stages of the user journey you have crafted. A micro survey can be a quick interaction that is minimal effort for the customer to share their answers to simple questions such as: ‘What brought you to our website?’ ‘Have you found what you are looking for’ etc.
We usually follow this up with asking users to share their email address so we can reach out for a longer form survey to help shape the services/product on offer. Sometimes this needs to be incentivised but the insights are always worth it.
Long-form surveys via email or calls
Micro surveys are great for quick feedback but they don’t tell you the whole story.
The longer form survey gives us much more time to ask more in depth questions about the user, their background, their needs and preferences. They are aware that time is needed to answer a longer survey when they sign up, so we can ask far more questions to get the information we need to better understand who our customers are.
User interviews
Taking time out to talk to your customers directly, will always be a fantastic way to gather insight. This is something that should ideally be done on a monthly basis to check-in and make sure that you are still providing value, or whether a recent update has been well received.
Ideally you will have a script of questions and topics to talk from so that you can gather comparable data. We would also recommend a way of recording the conversation so you can revisit it later to take notes. This will stop you from missing key info while trying to take notes and listen at the same time.
Usability testing
This can be done over a video call so you can observe the customers behaviour and actions to any given task or via a remote platform such as Maze which can record the users actions for you to playback.
Testing can be carried out on an existing product which allows you to see where the current pitfalls may be, where it is working well and gain insight into the customers main frustrations when interacting. It can also be used for a prototype or new feature which is yet to roll out to gain valuable feedback before time and budget is spent developing and marketing something new.
Observe users using your product or website
Again, using platforms like Hotjar and Lucky Orange give you options to gather further insights. One major one is that you can view the behaviour of your users using your website or product. You can see where they are miss-clicking, if the website isn’t appearing correctly, where users are dropping off in a process, what content users are taking in most, along with what is gathering the most clicks on any page you have the script installed on.
This real time observation is our preferred way to accurately gain insight into existing products that need updating as well as post launch of new features.
