What I learned from conducting user research
Designing a relevant user experience involves understanding what users need. People use products, therefore a solid understanding of the users will guide your team along the design process and help them make user-centric and data-informed design decisions that improve the user’s experience.
What is User Research?
User Research represents the insights gathered from users and customers that are leveraged to help make product decisions at any stage of the development process. Sinéad Davis Cochrane, UX Manager at Workday.
By conducting user research, we can discover and understand users behaviours, pain points and motivations and use these findings to identify insights that guide designers in making human-centred design decisions. The user should be at the centre of your research and every decision made to improve the experience.
What is the purpose of User Research?
The purpose of user research is to put your design project into context. By conducting UX research we empathize with the users to understand who they are, what their problems are and also understand the problem we’re trying to solve. This helps us understand the users' needs, identify design opportunities and validate solutions with users.
Without UX research, you are essentially basing your designs on assumptions.
By humanizing the data collected about users, designers can identify the problems users face during an interaction, turn them into actionable insights and create meaningful user-focused experiences.
What did I learn from the process?
- Identify key goals and objectives by defining the problem.
- The research method used depends on the problem identified.
- The quality of your questions affects the quality of your user research data.
- Proper analysis of research findings provides valuable insights and opportunities.
- The importance of storytelling
1 — Identify key goals and objectives by defining the problem
Setting clear goals and objectives for your design process helps you gain clarity and keep the team on track. By understanding the problem you’re trying to solve, you can design products that focus on providing relevant solutions.
Secondary research involves exploring the problem that exists in a space, establishing the context, answering questions that help us narrow down the problem to what matters and provides clarity. Conducting secondary research will help you get a better understanding of the problem space and define the problem you want to solve in that specific area.
After getting information via secondary research it is worth framing the problem carefully to gain clarity and establish a goal. A way to do this is by writing a “How might we” statement which helps you specify the problem you’re trying to solve.
Secondary research builds a foundation for your research plan and should inform your primary research in terms of building an understanding of the problem, the target users and using the information gotten to conduct primary research on those specific target groups.
2 — The research method used depends on the problem identified.
After defining the research problem and setting goals for the research, we want to get more information on the problem identified. Understanding the research goals and objectives will help you understand the information you need to get from the target users.
Primary research is research done to directly understand users behaviours, needs and motivations. Primary research include:
Qualitative Research. This includes insights that are gotten by directly assessing behaviours and understanding peoples beliefs and practices. They include contextual observation, ethnographic studies, user interviews, focus groups, field studies, and usability tests.
Quantitative Research. This is used to quantify the problem by generating numerical data or data that can be transformed into usable statistics. They include surveys, A/B testing, tree testing, web analytics.
Mixed Methods Research. This involves a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods into a single study.
It is important to note that there is no such thing as too much research. The more information you have about users, the better.
What is Mixed Methods Research? A Definition and Why It’s Becoming So Popular.
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
User Research: Best Practices and Methodologies
The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods
3 — The quality of your questions affects the quality of your user research data
The research questions formulate a research problem you want to investigate and the scope of the question is informed by your research goals and objectives.
The success of the study hinges on asking the right questions. Clearly defining and understanding the research goal can guide you and your team in creating questions that will get accurate data for the study. The right questions can help you understand the problems users are experiencing and identify underlying needs and motivations.
Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing
How to ask good questions and level-up your user research skills
Are you asking the right questions?
4 —Proper analysis of research findings provides valuable insights and opportunities
In design research, analyzing data is where we can distil user research data into insights and opportunities. When analyzing user data it is essential to discover how the user data gathered during the research will inform the design process and decisions. The first step will involve making sense of raw user data by using any of the following methods:
- Affinity mapping
- Jobs to be done
- Lean UX canvas
- Value proposition canvas
- Journey maps
- Empathy maps
- User personas
By organizing and making sense of user research data, we can discover themes, patterns and stories that make sense of users’ needs and motivations, help us create concepts and ideas based on findings and turn these findings into actionable insights and design opportunities.
How To Analyze Your UX Research Findings
How to Analyze Qualitative Data from UX Research: Thematic Analysis
5 — The importance of storytelling
Storytelling is a communication tool used throughout the design process to convey information about the users and problem in a way that enables the audience to empathize with the users and understand the problem identified.
After analyzing research learnings and identifying key insights, we may need to communicate these findings to people that weren’t involved in the user research process such as stakeholders or other team members. At this stage, it is essential to pass information across in a way that builds empathy and establishes a connection between each step of the research process. This way the core audience can connect with the users emotionally, understand who they are and their needs, and the opportunity to explore further actions that inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions can be identified.
It is important to note that not all research findings should be included because not all information gotten is important or insightful. As a designer communicating research findings succinctly can help you and the audience focus on the most valuable insights that inform the design process and provide meaningful solutions.
Communicating user research learnings is a storytelling exercise
What is storytelling in design?
The Power of Storytelling in Product Development
