How UX Research can blast the riskiest assumptions in 7 steps

Building a product is like building a spaceship. Still many companies ignore the dangerous asteroids out there.

They are called guesses, and can cost a lot of money.

Why not send out The Research Rocket to BLAST those BIG RISKY ASSUMPTIONS.

Let’s start.

For too many non-designers UX Research is abstract and of unclear direct value. In my work I have realised how important it is to evangelise around the processes and the quality of the outcome from good research. Research is simply about making a product successful. And when a product is left unvalidated there are always a lot of guesses flying around.

Where does the job start? Here’s the space quest, in seven steps.

Detailed version:

1. Start at the idea. In the backlog of a company there are many ideas. To take an example: let’s say someone has lifted the thought of “Creating a LinkedIn forum for nostalgic gamers”. This is something that could be initiated and released, it would take some time and resources and we would maybe not know before how it would be received.
2. Turn it into a research question. Reframe the idea and make it more open by first asking Will the nostalgic gamers want to take part in a LinkedIn forum? We are accepting that we might have a knowledge gap and can use it as a starting point for a research process.
3. What do we know from before? The question can be answered by an assumption. It can be a guess, or a validated fact. The outcome will be very different from those standpoints and will also decide the level of confidence we will have in the future progress. Well established Research teams have a repository of facts and insights that will be a good help, but others will have nothing.
   Let’s say we don’t know anything in this gaming community case. We can then choose different routes and base the assumption on…

The route decides the confidence level.

…or something else. As long as we are aware of what we are basing the assumption on.

4. How confident are we? We had the research question of Will the nostalgic gamers want to take part in a LinkedIn forum?. Here are three assumption-asteroids we could be facing:
1. People want to socialize in an online work environment
2. LinkedIn is considered to be a place to go to for nostalgic gaming
3. The communities that are out there right now are not appreciated.

There is an unlimited amount of assumptions out there.

Let’s say that we had made those assumptions based on one single interview in a previous research project in August the year before. We had an indication, but not solidly confirmed.

5. What data do we need? There are lots of different research methods and which to choose depends on what we want to get out. In this case it could be asking many sustainable LinkedIn users in a survey, or asking a smaller amount of gamers in an interview. It could also be doing desktop research to see how much community alternatives there actually are out there for this target group. And maybe look at reactions in their forums.

Let’s say we go for qualitative data and 45 minute-interviews with six gamers born before 1990.

6. Test the assumption. Apart from our three assumptions about the community question we might brainstorm more assumptions and research questions that would be related to the same topic and that can inform the product development. We then bring it to the users in an interview that tries to validate or invalidate those assumptions. We will try not to ask them the research question explicitly but finding ways to learn the answer through the reasoning.

7. Analyze and report. After having done all six interviews we can start looking for patterns, create insights and facts. A result might be that the assumption is false, and that is just as much of a win as if it is true. Identifying a false assumption can save a company a lot of cash.

Asteroids — also available in Figma now.

Done for now!

We now have insights from a good research process (which you can bring into Figma, where you ALSO can play Asteroids!!). It will not be the one truth, but compared to a Wild guess it is super good, compared to One client feedback it is more solid, and could also possibly inform an Internal persona work.

So, Will the nostalgic gamers want to take part in a LinkedIn forum? The answer will seldom be black and white.

But for every blasted assumption we are one step closer to an insight driven company.