Qualitative User Research
What is user research?
What all user research methods have in common is that it helps place people at the center of your design process and your products.
The three most common reasons for doing user research:
- to create designs that are truly relevant (empathize)
- to create designs that are easy and pleasurable to use (check usability)
- to understand the return on investment of your user experience (UX) design (measure impact)
It is better to do no user research if no gain can be achieved or the research cannot be done well. Be smart about your research efforts.
Usability tests
Usability tests work best when they are an integrated part of your work process so that you test your product iteratively and from an early stage of development onward.
Analytics
If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you have a much stronger case for investing in UX.
Stakeholders
You need to ensure that you have a clear goal for your user research that is shared by the rest of the organization you work for.
Types of important stakeholders:
- Business (management, marketing, sales): time and resources to conduct research
- Engineering (devs, QA, tech support): tech limitations and possibilities
- UX people: additional angles and context of design
It’s best to talk 1-to-1 informally with the most important stakeholders to gain their perspective about the project.
Reasons to talk to stakeholders
You talk to stakeholders to ensure:
- That you have all the information you need about the project.
- That you do the user research that is most relevant for your project, so that it has the proper impact.
- That your stakeholders are engaged in your user research and care about the results; that way, you can get support for spending time and resources on design changes afterwards.
- That you don’t do research that somebody else in your organization has already done.
What to talk about
If you know what you can’t change, you might as well focus your research efforts elsewhere.
What the project is about
The stakeholder’s role and interests in relation to the project
What has already been decided about the project
Who the users are
Futher reading
It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects by Tomer Sharon