What is User Research?
We understand that wrapping your head around the differences between User Research, Market Research and Design Research can be a challenge. They are all vital parts of a product development journey, and each have unique characteristics, but they can all very closely align which makes differentiating them a little harder. You can see our post on Design Research and in this post we’ll be focussing on User Research.
What is User Research?
User Research ultimately seeks to understand what your users want and need, what their problems and challenges are and what can help them solve these challenges. As explained in more detail in our post Users vs Customers, users are those who will actually be using your product or service once it has been built, so it’s really important to understand from the offset whether or not they’ll actually see a need for your product or service.
Conducting User Research
To gather these insights, you first need to look at how your users are currently behaving, and what their motivations are for doing so. What products or services are they currently using to solve the problem that your innovation hopes to, and how do they feel about this current solution? How can your innovation overcome these challenges and provide a better solution?
One of the most important elements of user research is the need to empathise with your users. You need to really immerse yourself by putting yourself in their shoes, in order to understand the world from their perspective.
Methodologies
Common methods for conducting user research include interviews, focus groups and ethnography. These methods tend to require a smaller sample size - typically 5 people per user group - which allow the researchers to dedicate the time and resources needed to get the level of detail that they require. User researchers are more interested in quality than quantity, but they gather far deeper insights as to who their users are and how they behave. Because user research is ongoing, you may find that you’re doing rounds of testing with the same user groups, or you may introduce new user groups into the mix as the product develops.
User research is an iterative process, meaning that you work in stages and test each version known as an iteration, it’s where you may prototype and test each significant development of your product with your users before moving on to the next stage. It’s common for very early stage product concepts to move back and forth between each stage of iteration; feedback may mean revisiting different areas of design at different stages of the journey. For example, you may have had a hunch that user group x was going to be a significant user group for the product but when testing the idea, it isn’t as big of a problem as you’d anticipated. You may need to try another user group to test and go through that part of the process again.
Keeping your users in the loop throughout the development process means they can advise how closely it meets their needs at each step, it can’t be retrofitted very well or done as an exercise just at the start and forgotten about. The alternative could be investing time and money in a product only to find once you take it to market that it wasn’t what your users had in mind.
Limitations
User research has its limitations. It is not supposed to be used as a tool for testing all possible users in one go, or all possible markets. It is a starting point to learn more about your users where you may have prioritised one or two user groups to focus on. It’s not a comprehensive map of all possible markets or verticals that may use the product. It is assumption-based and can validate your assumptions of user needs and use cases.
Prioritising user groups for user research
You can prioritise your user groups for user research based on:
Feasibility
What’s feasible to achieve in the project constraints?
What’s feasible for your business to deliver?
Desirability
Which market do you want to test first?
Should this be broad or very focused?
Where does your biggest opportunity lie?
Viability
Should you be focusing on one user group over another in line with the project or your business plan?
Once you’ve mapped out your assumptions, that helps you to identify the user groups to prioritise but also your main assumptions using the Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT).
The Riskiest Assumption Test allows startups to test their idea and validate whether their product will solve their customers' problems, whether it's a big enough problem to solve, and whether it's a viable business model.
What insights can User Research provide?
Once you’ve conducted your user research and have hopefully identified that there is a need for your product or service, it’s time to put these insights into action.
The findings from user research should steer the design and development of your product or service. Having identified what your users’ problems are, it’s vital to address how your innovation will be solving these. Particularly where there are other products or services currently on the market, how could yours improve on these? What would your users like them to do better/differently?
You’ve essentially been given the key to knowing exactly what your users want and need in a product or service, so put that vital information to good use and ensure that you are designing for your users.
User research can also help identify and test use cases (scenarios where it may be used in one way or another) and personas (initially based on assumptions and customer data but later iterated to be based on insights and evidence) for understanding who is going to be using your product or service once it’s finished. These insights can be really beneficial when looking at how you’ll market your product or service, ensuring that your messaging and communication is in line with your insights from the user research.
The takeaways
User research is a vital step in the product development process; understanding whether or not there is a requirement for your product or service before building, can prevent time and money being wasted on something that ultimately isn’t going to be used. Ensuring that you take into account your users’ wants and needs at each step of the design process, and including them by having them test iterations of your design, should lead to your innovation being a huge success.
