Researchwise

What is UR?  

User research makes use of a range of research methods to understand the motivations, behaviour and needs of users.  

User research plays a key role in user experience (UX) design. It can be said that you’re not truly doing user experience design if there is no user research. I wholeheartedly agree. How can we truly design for users if we don’t understand them? 

It’s often used in the world of tech for digital products and services, but it can be used in any context where there are people using a product or service. 

Why do UR? 

 User research allows us to design products and services with real people in mind. The alternative is designing based on assumptions – what we think people need. This is likely to lead us down the wrong path and mean we miss the mark with our solution. This is usually a costly mistake. If users aren’t able to do what they need to, it may become necessary to change the product – or even start again. The time, effort and cost taken to do research before releasing a product or service is often much less than what it takes to fix the wrong thing. 

How to do UR? 

There are two umbrellas that research methodologies fit in to: qualitative and quantitative. The methods used for research should be determined by what needs to be learned and the phase a project is in. 

Quantitative research 

Quantitative research methods use number-based data to show what is happening for your users. These methods usually need more people to give confidence in the data. Surveys, AB testing, performance analytics are examples of quantitative methods. The benefit of these methods is being able to gain insight into what is happening with your users at scale. However, quantitative methods won’t give insight into why users are behaving in a certain way. You can take a guess or create a hypothesis, but this could be wrong. 

Qualitative research 

Qualitative research methods can give you in-depth detail about user behaviour, motivations, barriers and needs. You don’t need many people to start seeing patterns and trends for your users. Interviews, usability testing and contextual inquiry are examples of qualitative methods. 

It’s always struck me that you can uncover most of the problems users will have when you test a user interface with 5 people. Of course, there are some slight caveats to this  but it illustrates the potential impact of a little, well-conducted research. Qualitative methods however, won’t always tell you what is happening with users at scale as they  independently use a product or service. 

Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods will give you a fuller understanding of your users. 

Who should do UR? 

I once heard someone say that “user research is easy to do but hard to do well”.  

It can be easy to build a survey or ask people some questions, but valuable and insightful research takes a level of expertise. A user researcher should know which methods to use to answer the questions you have. They should also know how to make efforts to avoid bias in conducting and interpreting research findings. 

There are many resources online that give you some key information about user research as a starting point. However don’t assume that because doing research might look easy that anyone can do it well.

If you want to do user research to work towards a product or service that works for your users, I recommend working with a user researcher who can guide you to do this well.