User research — an essential part of the design process that shouldn’t be overlooked by UX designers. Here’s a guide for UX designers or those who simply want to understand user research better.
To understand how user research is done in a real context, check out the conversation I had with Mo on how he does research as a Product Designer.
What’s covered:
1. Introduction
- What is user research
2. The importance of research
- Including the user in the process
- Empathy in user research
- What happens if you don’t do user research?
- Stakeholder and team buy-in
- What user research doesn’t do
- No ‘one size fits all’ approach
3. How to approach user research
- Defining your research goal
- Types of research methods
- Organisational research
What is user research?
User research is used to understand the user’s needs, behaviors, experience and motivations through various qualitative and quantitative methods to inform the process of solving for user’s problems.
As Mike Kuniaysky puts it, user research is:
“The process of understanding the impact of design on an audience.”
Why is user research so important?
Great UX Design is grounded in great user research - driven by user insights while balancing priorities and technical feasibility.
User research helps uncover important and useful insights about the user and their needs. Until you know your user and their needs, emotions, feelings, struggles etc, you won’t be able to deliver a great user experience.
‘It all starts with the user.’
Including the user in the process
User research is a great opportunity to include the user in the design process. By collaborating with users, you are practicing user-centered design, which is crucial to creating a successful product for your users.
Researching with empathy in mind
It’s no surprise that empathy is the key to user-centered design. Empathy means putting aside your own assumptions to see things from someone else’s perspective.
In other words, empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experiences and feelings from their point of view.
Why is this important to user research? By putting the user first, you can approach it from the angle of what the user needs to make their life much easier or simpler.
‘You are not the user.’
The benefit of this is that it builds an emotional connection between the user and the product. Users feel their needs are being met and are more likely to continue using the product.
To ensure that you doing research with a user-centered approach, you can apply the Golden Circle model, as discussed by Thomas and McDonough in the Australasian Medical Journal by asking three important questions:
- Why are we achieving a certain goal?
- How are we going to achieve this goal?
- What’s the outcome of achieving this goal?
User research helps to remove bias by learning about the user from their perspective, experiences, knowledge and mental models. It examines and proves or disproves assumptions. If done right, user research is evidence that helps to ground design decisions based on an understanding of user needs.
What happens if you don’t do user research?
A lot of the times, teams or organisations may bypass or rush the process of user research with reasons like, “We don’t have the time or budget for user research” or, “We know enough about our users already to build the product”.
While user research does require upfront time to plan and execute, and conducting it may mean the design process takes longer, neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.
‘Neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.’
So what might be the price of not doing proper user research?
- The product has great features that don’t solve the user’s problem
- The product isn’t user-friendly as false assumptions are baked into the form and function of the product
- The product causes confusion for the user
Making your team and organization aware of the implications of not doing proper user research means that you will be saving time, money and effort in the long run and building a product that actually serves the needs of users.
Getting stakeholder and team buy-in
Great, you’re doing user research for a project or product. While this step is paramount to great UX, unless the research insights and knowledge is shared with your team and stakeholders, no amount of research will be sufficient.
‘Unless the research is shared with your team, no amount of research will be sufficient.’
It’s important to include or engage your team in the research or it may be difficult to get stakeholder buy-in. You may be working with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Engineers, and other stakeholders. Within your team, there are different viewpoints and priorities.
Design is a team sport, so it’s crucial to have your team understand why they are building a product and what problem they are solving before they jump into development.
Get your team and stakeholders involved in the research. Get your team members to take notes as you are conducting user interviews. Hold a workshop session with your team to analyse and sort through raw data from research. If that’s not possible, engage your team by sharing your research findings with them.
By inviting your team and stakeholders to participate and play a part in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user’s needs, making it much easier to work towards the same goal, which is to create a solution that addresses the user’s needs.
‘By inviting your team to participate in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user’s needs’
When you get your team on your side, it makes the process of building a product together with a smoother one where there is less room for conflicts and misunderstandings further down the line. Chances are your team may start to advocate for the user as much as you do!
What user research doesn’t do
The goal of user research is to take the knowledge and insights gained from users to create user-centered solutions.
While user research informs design, it doesn’t immediately provide solutions to problems. There needs to be an exploration of ideas and design iterations before those solutions are reached.
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach
When it comes to doing user research, there’s ‘no ‘one size fits all’ approach. It all depends on the specific user group and context you are solving for.
These are different for every project and it is your job as the designer to define and understand these for every project.
How to approach user research
The first thing to do before doing any research is to ask the right research questions. What is your research goal? What are you trying to understand?
Here’s a set of criteria to help you hone in on your research questions:
- Be specific
- Be focused and relevant to what you’re trying to understand
- Make them practical with the resources you have
- Make them actionable
- Be flexible and don’t worry about which method to use (yet)
The types of research methods and when to use them
Research is multi-dimensional. There are so many different types of methods and approaches that it can be overwhelming if you don’t focus your research. Here, I’ll cover some important research methods and when you might use them:
- Stages of the product life cycle
- Quantitative vs. qualitative
- Attitudinal vs. behavioral
Stages of the product life cycle
Discovery
During the early stages of the design process, the key goal is to do exploratory research. Each project has its own context and specific user group that research should explore. Questions to ask:
- What do users need?
- What is already working and what isn’t?
Appropriate methods to be used at this stage include 1:1 user interviews, focus groups, competitive analysis, benchmark studies, ethnographic research.
Development
Now that you have developed your ideas and built wireframes and prototypes, you need to evaluate and validate whether your designs actually help users solve their problems.
- Do users understand how it works?
- How do users interact with your prototype?
- Can users find what they are looking for?
- Do the features look and feel right?
Methods to use include: moderated and unmoderated usability testing, prototype testing, card sorting, preference testing, A/B testing.
Live
As the design goes live, the goal is to measure how well the product meets user’s needs. The goal here is to measure the performance and aim to optimise the experience.
At this stage, feedback from users is really useful. Things may have changed and the product you created to solve user’s problems in the first place may no longer be the best solution anymore. The key is to proactively adapt and iterate if needed.
Methods include surveys, data analytics, bug reports.
In a nutshell, user research can be done at any stage of the product life cycle.
Quantitative
Quantitative research is used to understand the ‘what’. This type of research can be measured numerically. For example, “How many people visited a store over a week” or “What percentage of users clicked this button”. This type of research explores large sample sizes of data to identify trends and patterns.
Examples include surveys, analytics, and A/B testing.
What quantitative research doesn’t tell you is why particular trends or patterns occur.
Qualitative
Qualitative research uncovers the ‘why’. “Why do users have a particular attitude towards a product?” and “What else do people see on the page?”
Qualitative research explores user’s attitudes, behaviors, and opinions. It provides key insights into understanding the context behind why trends and patterns arise.
Examples include user interviews, field studies, usability testing, and customer calls.
It’s important to use a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative methods to come to a holistic understanding of the user and problems to be solved. Both methods are useful for answering different research questions and cannot substitute one for the other.
Attitudinal
Attitudinal research seeks to assess why users have particular attitudes and feelings towards an experience. For instance, whether users enjoy using your product or not.
Examples include: focus groups, card sorting, surveys, questionnaires and participatory design.
Behavioral
Behavioral research focuses on what users do with the product in question. This could be to find out how users navigate through a site.
Examples include A/B testing, eye-tracking, click-stream analysis and usability studies.
It’s important to know that what users say and do are often different, which is why you should aim to do a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral research.
A note on organizational research
There’s value in understanding the organization, stakeholders in the organization and the business context the product exists within before conducting user research.
Learn about the product and users through existing research your team has conducted. That way, you’ll get a better idea of how to focus your research.
There’s a huge overlap in the different types of research that can be done. Selecting which method(s) to use depends on the research questions you want to answer and the research goals you have.
Conclusion
User research is an integral part of UX design. When it’s done right, user research contributes to great UX.
Remember, it’s all about meeting the user’s needs. As Hoa Loranger, Vice President of the Nielsen Norman Group says:
“UX without users isn’t UX.”
References
Empathic design: The most difficult simple approach to successful design
Empathic design: Research strategies
When to use which user-experience research methods
The biggest mistakes in user research and how to avoid them
10 User research myths and misconceptions
Skip user research unless you’re doing it right seriously
Further Resources
The Nielsen Norman Group has some fantastic articles on user research and UX Design more generally
Thank you for reading! Hope this article has been insightful to you.
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