What, Why and How: User Research
What is it?
User research is a process that product teams will carry out to understand their users and customers. The process involves going out and talking to existing and potential users to uncover their lifestyles and challenges in context to your product and/or service. Ideally, this will uncover similarities between users to build a set of personas you can use for your design and marketing decisions.
Why should you be doing it?
We have found that all projects come with a level of assumption from those looking to make improvements or overhaul a product or digital touch point. This can steer a project down the wrong path if you don’t go out and check these assumptions via user research. Through the research, we can hear first hand what the problems, frustrations and successes are for users.
This allows us to concentrate our efforts on the right challenges rather than undoing functions that already work, or creating new user journeys that no one will use. We can priortitise effort and budget into new features and fixes that will benefit your customers from day 1 of the design process rather than discovering after the product has been developed via dwindling session numbers and drop offs.
How do you start?
Ultimately, it all starts with a question you want to answer. Having a question to answer at the beginning helps you direct your research queries and choice of activities to undertake. Especially in the first round of user research, this will then start highlighting other questions you would like to undertake and answer.
Questions that might help to get you started:
Who are our users?
What are the goals of our users?
Why has conversion dropped off?
Why have return visits not been increasing?
Why has our user retention reduced?
What features are the most popular and why?
Why are certain features not used?
The key benefits of User Research
There are many benefits to carrying out user research. Ultimately an initial phase will have the biggest impact on a project and budget but it should also be built into your roadmap and processes to regularly check in and make sure your product is still performing well on behalf of the user. This will allow you to keep a user-centred approach to your business and ultimately get more retention in your user base through a leading user experience.
We have found the key benefits of applying user research at the beginning of the project are:
Removes assumption from project teams
Gives a clearer understanding of issues faced by users
Understand the wider context of where the issue exists
Data to back up conversations and difference of opinion
Hear firsthand from your users
Find new opportunities
Make sure efforts are concentrated on real problems
Save budget in the long run with earlier successes
We speak in more detail about this in our article ‘6 Key Benefits of User Research’.
Activities to undertake
There is always a growing list of user research activities you can undertake but we wanted to share the key activities we find help us the most in understanding a new audience we haven’t worked with. Ultimately even if the audience is similar, it's always best to undertake a fresh batch of user research to remove any assumption of strong opinions carried over from previous projects which may not be valid.
This list of activities will get you well on your way to uncovering the issues and finding similarities in your users, creating user documentation to steer decision making in design and marketing activities.
Micro surveys on the website/product
Long-form surveys via email or calls
User interviews 1 to 1
Usability testing 1 to 1 or remote
Observations of real time users using your product or website
We speak in more detail about this in our article ‘5 Activities to Kick-start Your User Research’.
In Conclusion
If you are going into a project where you are being told, or think you know, the issues that need rectifying: you should undertake a round of user research to qualify if these are in fact the issues and uncover the real problems if not.
This process will allow you to uncover the true causes of frustration in your user base, or a downturn in user sessions and ultimately help you find opportunities to get a product or service back on track.
We personally will always push for a round of research to help tailor a brief before we start any design work to make sure that our project team and the client all agree on the main points of action to take, the challenges we are looking to solve and the users we are looking to help.
