Conducting a user research
We don’t have time to learn about our actual users and maximize the chances of success. We're assuming that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.
Let’s be brutally honest about this:
We don’t have time to learn about our actual users and maximize the chances of success. We're assuming that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.
That sounds awful. That's because it actually is. You do not want to find yourself in this kind of situation. And you will not if you follow the process.
This guide is exactly what you need to conduct user research to become your guiding star during the product development process.
Why is user research so important?
The term "user research" can be intimidating. It may appear that you don't have the budget, time, or expertise. That's why some people convince themselves that user search doesn't matter.
But this is a huge mistake.
Without user research, you'll waste your energy, time, and money on a product that is based on false assumptions that won't work in practice.
How to conduct a user research
Never forget – you are not your user. This is why you need proper user research to understand your user’s problems, pain points, needs, desires, feelings, and behaviors. Let's break down the process.
Define research objectives
Before you meet your target users, you must first define why you are conducting the research in the first place.
Establish specific goals and agree on your exact priorities with your team. This will make it much easier to gain valuable insights. Otherwise, your findings will be disorganized.
Here are some questions that will help you to define your objectives:
What do you want to learn?
What are the knowledge gaps you must fill?
What already works and what doesn't?
Is there an issue that needs to be addressed? What exactly is the issue?
What will the research mean for your company and/or your customers?
Once you've started answering questions like these, it's time to create a list of goals. These should be precise and simple.
It's better if you prioritize your objectives and create a Notion table. It will come in handy later.
A useful exercise for you to do at this stage is to write down some hypotheses about your target users. Ask yourself:
What do we think we understand about our users that is relevant to our business or product?
When you're finished, validate every statement, need, and desire with real people.
It's a quick and easy way to generate questions for some of the research methods you'll be employing.
Pick your methods
Here is the key question you should be asking yourself at this point:
What methods should we choose based on our time and resources?
It is critical to select the appropriate method at the appropriate time. We'll go into greater detail on specific methods. For the time being, let's take a quick look at the categories available.
The WHY — qualitative methods
Qualitative research tells you ‘why’ something occurs. It tells you the reasons behind the behavior, the problem or the desire. It answers questions like:
“Why do you prefer using app X instead of other similar apps?”
or:
“What’s the hardest part about being a sales manager? Why?”.
Qualitative data comes in the form of actual insights and it’s fairly easy to understand.
The WHAT — quantitative methods
Quantitative research helps you to understand what is happening by providing different metrics.
It answers questions such as:
“What percentage of users left their shopping cart without completing the purchase?”
or
“Is it better to have a big or small subscription button?”.
Most quantitative methods come in handy when testing your product, but not so much when you’re researching your users. This is because they don’t tell you why particular trends or patterns occur.
Behavioral and attitudinal methods
There is a big difference between “what people do” and “what people say”.
As their names imply, attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure and observe behaviors.
In general, if your objectives are specific enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to see which methods will help you achieve them.
Let's go back to our Notion table. Choose a method or two that will fulfill each objective and type it in the column beside it.
It won’t always be possible to complete everything you’ve written down. If this is the case, go with the method(s) that will give you most of the answers. With your table, it will be easy to pick and choose the most effective options for you.
Find your participants
This stage is about unleashing your inner detective and finding the people with insider information regarding your product's success.
Consider your niche, goals, and methods; this should give you a rough notion of the group or groups you want to talk to and further investigate.
Here’s my advice for most cases:
If you’re building something from the ground up, the best participants might be:
People you assume face the problem that your product aims to solve
Your competitors’ customers
If you are developing something or solving a problem for an existing product, you should also take a look at:
Advocates and super-users
Customers who have recently churned
Users who tried to sign up or buy but decided not to commit
How to recruit participants
There are numerous methods for attracting people, and you may be creative if you keep your ideal target demographic in mind.
You can find them through social media, online forums, or specialty community sites.
You can place an ad with specifications and give an incentive.
You can also use a recruitment agency. This can be expensive, but it is also efficient.
You can find your participants in a user database if you have one, and are improving your product. Make sure to contact many of your current users, as most of them will not answer.
You can even ask your friends to propose potential folks who you would not have met otherwise.
How many participants?
That is determined by the procedure. If you are not conducting a large online survey, you can usually begin with 5 participants in each segment. That is sufficient to obtain the most essential unique insights. You can then examine the scenario and decide whether or not to expand your investigation.
Conduct user research
Finally! Let's go through some of the more typical tactics you'll be employing, including their advantages and disadvantages, some pro tips, and when you should utilize them.
Interviews
Pros:
Engaging in one-on-one conversations with users allows you to learn more about their opinions, desires, and experiences.
Individual problems and misunderstandings can be addressed and resolved immediately.
Cons:
Interviews take a long time, especially for each participant. You must prepare for them, conduct them, analyze them, and occasionally record them.
They also limit the size of your sample, which can be problematic. The quality of your data will be determined by your interviewer's ability, and hiring an expert can be costly.
Tips:
Prepare questions that are related to your key points. Include follow-up questions for when you wish to delve deeper into a certain topic.
Take notes during the interview. Don't rely just on your notes. You don't want to disrupt the flow of the interview by frantically jotting down your responses, and you'll need the tape for any further in-depth analysis.
Conduct at least one trial run of the interview to ensure that everything flows smoothly and feels natural. Create a "playbook" for how the interview should proceed and keep it up to date with your findings.
If you are uncomfortable conducting interviews, delegate the task to someone else or hire an expert interviewer. You want people to feel as if they are speaking to a friend rather than being interviewed. Psychologists, in my opinion, make excellent interviewers.
When:
Interviews are not particularly time-sensitive as long as they are conducted before the development process.
They can, however, be an excellent supplement to online surveys and vice versa. Conducting an interview beforehand aids in creating a more focused and relevant survey, whilst conducting an interview afterward aids in explaining survey responses.
Surveys
Pros:
Surveys are typically done online, which allows for collecting a large amount of data in a short period at a minimal cost. Because surveys are frequently anonymous, consumers are more candid in their comments.
Cons:
It is more difficult to obtain a representative sample because it is difficult to regulate who participates in the survey, especially if it is distributed through social media channels or general forums. Surveys are fairly strict, and if you don't account for all possible responses, you may miss out on vital data. You must exercise extreme caution when crafting your questions; badly phrased or leading inquiries might have a detrimental impact on how consumers answer. Many individuals dislike taking lengthy surveys, which can be an issue.
Tips:
Keep your surveys concise, especially if participants will not be paid for their time. Only concentrate on what is genuinely essential.
Make certain that the queries are simple to understand. Uncertain or confusing questions yield data on which you cannot rely. Keep the language as straightforward as possible.
Use of leading questions is discouraged. Don't ask presumptuous inquiries like "What do you dislike about X?" Replace this with "How long have you worked with X?"
Find active, niche online communities that correspond to your user profile. These will provide you with more relevant information.
When:
Similar to interviews, it depends on whether you want to utilize the survey as a preliminary strategy or if you want many responses to a few specific questions.
Focus groups
Pros:
Because focus groups comprise a large number of people, they can swiftly expose your target audience's desires, experiences, and views. They come in handy when you need a lot of precise information in a short period of time. When done appropriately, they can function similarly to interviews on steroids.
Cons:
Focus groups can be difficult to organize and maintain. If the moderator is inexperienced, the discussion can quickly deviate from the topic at hand. There may be an alpha participant who dictates general opinion, and because it is not a one-on-one situation, people may not always speak up.
Tips:
Choose an experienced moderator to guide the debate. Another person observing and taking notes is also recommended since he or she can highlight practical insights and spot nonverbal cues that might otherwise be overlooked.
Define the scope of your investigation. What questions are you going to ask? How detailed do you want the answers to be? How long do you want each conversation to go? This will decide the number of people and groups who will be evaluated.
If possible, find new or present users who are likely to provide useful feedback while also allowing others to speak up. Most of the time, you won't know the participants; therefore, having an experienced moderator is essential.
When:
Focus groups work best when you have a few clear topics that you want to focus on.
Competitive Analysis
Pros:
A competitive analysis identifies the advantages and disadvantages of existing products. It investigates how successful rivals behave in the market. It provides a solid foundation for other user research methods and can also reveal business opportunities. It assists you in defining your competitive advantage and identifying different user types.
Cons:
A competitive analysis can tell you what exists, but it cannot tell you why. You can compile a long list of features, but you won't know which ones users value the most and which ones they don't use at all. In many cases, it is impossible to determine how well a product is performing, making the data less useful. It's also of limited use if you're creating something new to the market.
Tips:
Make a list or table of the facts you wish to collect - market share, prices, features, visual design language, content, and so on.
Don't let it go to waste. It should be updated when the market changes to accommodate new rivals.
If you discover something intriguing but don't know why, conduct research among your competitors' users.
After you've completed your initial user research, review the results of your competitive analysis to see if you've discovered anything missing from the market.
When:
It can be a great first method, especially if you’re likely to talk to users of your competitors’ products.
Field Studies
Pros:
You get to view the broad picture - field studies allow you to get insights that will significantly impact the design of your product. You see what people do rather than what they say they do. A field study, more than any other method, can explain problems and behaviors that you do not comprehend.
Cons:
It is the most time consuming and costly method. The results are more dependent on the observer than on any of the other options. It is not appropriate for products used in rare and specific circumstances.
Tips:
Establish specific goals. Always keep in mind why you are conducting the research. Field studies can yield a range of insights, although it can be difficult to keep focused at times. This is particularly true if you are taking part in the observed action.
Be patient. It may take some time to observe. If you rush, you can get skewed findings.
Maintain an open mind and refrain from asking leading questions. Prepare to let go of your preconceived notions, assumptions, and beliefs. When doing interviews, strive to leave any prejudices or biases at the door.
Be friendly but professional. You don't want people around you to feel awkward or tense when you conduct interviews or participate in an activity. Instead, you should observe how they behave in their natural environment.
When:
When no other way will suffice or it becomes evident that you do not truly understand your user, conduct a field research. If necessary, you should do it as soon as possible because it can have far-reaching consequences.
Personas
Pros:
A persona is a succinct and clear description of your ideal user. It contains the most crucial discoveries you've made. It makes it easier to design products for real people and speak their language. It's an excellent way to introduce new members of your team to your target market.
Cons:
A persona is only as good as the user research that goes into creating it. Many businesses create a "should be" persona rather than an actual one. A persona like this can be both useless and misleading.
Tips:
Keep personas to a minimum. Avoid including unnecessary details and omitting information that will not help you make a decision. A persona document that is too long will simply not be used.
Personas should be specific and realistic. Exaggeration should be avoided, and sufficient detail should be included to assist you in locating real people who represent your ideal user.
When:
Create these after you’ve carried out all of the initial user research. Compile your findings and create a persona that will guide your development process.
What’s next?
You know who your product is for, and you've defined their problems, needs, and desires. You've established the groundwork; now it's time to create a product that will wow your target user.