User Research Can Help to Avoid Big Design Mistakes
When you design based on assumptions, you risk some (or even all) of those assumptions being wrong. User research is highly valuable both before and after designing a product, because it replaces assumptions with actual insight about your target audience.
Doing research before you start designing can help to ensure that your product and business goals match with the real needs of your customers. Continuing your research after creating the design, particularly with usability testing, can give you insights about whether or not your customers can actually use it.
Failing to conduct user research on your project can have big consequences. Consider the following two scenarios where user research is skipped.
Scenario 1: Not truly understanding your users before designing a product
The Segway, a two-wheeled personal transportation device, was not short on hype or ambition when it was released. Its inventor stated that:
“[Segway] will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy”
In the nearly two decades since it was released, the Segway has managed to carve out something of a niche in malls and warehouses, but it certainly didn’t reach its goal of making a meaningful impact on how people get around.
So what went wrong? It’s actually very interesting technology, and it mostly does a good job of balancing itself when it isn’t wiping out gold medalists.
Its creators had an idea for an innovative product, built the technology to match, and were first to market. But does the Segway match the needs and goals of its target users? Not so much.
I live in a major city, and people ride bikes everywhere. They’re lightweight, you can park them virtually anywhere, and you can even bring them right into the office with you. You can easily find a bicycle on Craigslist or Kijiji for a few hundred dollars or less.
Alternatively, you could drive a car. In a typical car, you can comfortably transport four people with room left over for cargo. There are parking lots all over the place, or you can find a space on the side of the street.
Now let’s think about the Segway. It was far more expensive than bicycles, not nearly as lightweight or portable, and it didn’t give you the ability to carry passengers or cargo like a car. So what problem was it solving?
Some better user research up front could have helped the makers of the Segway to avoid a costly mistake. Research allows you to design from actual knowledge and insight about your target users, instead of relying on assumptions.
There’s a great case study on the Segway and UX research in the eBook Just Enough Research by Erika Hall.
Scenario 2: Failing to test your design
Now let’s consider another scenario. In this case, you’ve got a great idea for a new product, something that nobody else on the market has done yet. You do some research up front, and you feel like there’s a good match between your business goals and what your target users want. The designers create a working prototype that looks absolutely stunning, and you feel like you’re ready to build the thing and go to market.
After all, there’s a big advantage in being there first!
But you’re probably not ready to go to market just yet; there’s still research you should be doing. You still need to evaluate your design.
At a bare minimum, you should always run a qualitative usability study on anything you design that humans will be using. This is so important that the Nielsen Norman Group suggest that if you can only do one activity to improve your design, it should be qualitative usability testing.
Think about what can happen if you don’t evaluate your design before launching.
You release your new product and you’re first to market just like you wanted, but you have a handful of frustrating usability issues that you didn’t uncover before developing and launching. A competitor releases a product that copies most of your functionality, but without the usability issues that your product has. Just like that, you can lose your advantage.
Don’t forget: usability is a competitive advantage.
You also don’t actually have a choice on whether users are testing your product or not. Once you release the product to end-users, it’s being tested. As Ben Ralph puts it:
“Every time a person uses your product, they are forming opinions, getting lost, confused, along with a lot of other unexpected things you might find interesting. Your team only get to decide if they will listen and learn from the user’s behaviour — or not.”
If you choose to listen by conducting user research, you can make positive changes before releasing your product. If not, you can lose a competitive advantage, and customers in the process.
Wrap Up
These are two very common scenarios where doing user research can help you to avoid mistakes and make your product substantially more successful. As a designer, you need to ensure that you understand the needs of the target users, and that they align with the business goals of the project. If you don’t, you could end up designing something that nobody wants.
You should ideally be doing user research both before and after the product is designed. If you rely only on usability testing after creating the design, you can end up testing the wrong thing. You might find yourself testing 10,000 variations of highly usable spoons when what the users really needed was a knife.
If you don’t test your design with users, you can’t know if it really works until it’s potentially too late.
