Book Summary — User Research: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Products and Services

Dr Chloe Sharp
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Stephanie Marsh is the Head of User Research and Analysis at Government Digital Service, working in user research for over ten years. This is a brief summary with a few key takeaways about her book.

Why is User Research so Important?

Stephanie outlines that many businesses do not understand:

  • Who their users are
  • What their users’ needs are and what they are trying to do
  • How their users are currently trying to do things
  • How their users would like to do these things
A crowd of people on a street in a city.
A crowd of people on a street in a city.

When is the right time to do research?

Any time and ideally all the time.

Part One

Part one looks at what good research looks like and focuses on planning, objectives and legalities.

User research is typically done to develop and design products and services and can tie in with agile project management. A style of management which is broken up into small, two-week cycles, with communication and understanding challenges that could impeded product/service development, at its core.

For user research to be useful, it should have clear aims, be carried out in an ethical and legal manner (informed consent is essential!) and be carefully planned and organised. There are options to do face-to-face or remote user research with space for pilot testing either moderated or unmoderated. It gives an overview as to how to recruit participants, involve the right participants, incentivising participants, and allowing people to observing user research sessions as well as outsourcing research to agencies and what to look out for.

Part Two

The second part of the book spans across many different research methods:

  • Usability testing — moderated and unmoderated as well as remote and face-to-face
  • Content testing understanding how people react to copy (words)
  • Card sorting — how people associate and relate things
  • Surveys — widespread user response
  • User interviews — understand people’s experience
  • Diary studies — capture User Research data over time
  • Information architecture validation — does the structure of your information work for your users? An example may be how a website is designed and structured.
  • Ethnography — observing how people behave in the real world
  • Contextual inquiry — interviewing people in their own environment
  • A/B Testing — Comparing different options
  • Stakeholder workshops — building consensus, gathering requirements and sketching initial design ideas
  • Guerrilla research — fast-paced research in the real world

Part Three

Stephanie looks at how to blend user research methodologies as well as how to interpret and present the data. The third part of her book looks at analysing and presenting data in different ways:

  • Catalogue and prioritise issues through content analysis
  • Analysing qualitative data and identifying priorities and needs
  • Identifying themes through affinity diagrams
  • Writing user needs and stories and using video stories, to keep user research alive and actionable
  • Creating personas, mental models, infographics and storyboards to demonstrate findings
  • Writing executive summaries and detailed reports
  • Visualising the customer journey and experience through mapping touch points

Key takeaways from the book

  • This is a detailed ‘how-to’ book for someone looking to do detailed aspects of user research.
  • This is a good book to read alongside Tomer Sharon’s book as he details the timing of when research can be done.
  • Gives a really good overview as to what user research is and what user researchers do to inform a wide range of people, from those new to user research to technical jobs with no knowledge of user research, an idea of how really knowing a user can lead to better design of products and services, save resources and influence key stakeholders.

Dr Chloe Sharp

Written by

MD @ www.snapout.co.uk - a user + market research consultancy powered by design thinking. Grant writing extraordinaire. Listener of customer and user needs.

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