by Omar A
There comes a time in the startup world where you wonder, “Am I missing something?”
You can have internal debates within your team and come up with some ideas of what YOU want. But how about actually figuring out what your USERS (customers) want?
After all, they are who you’re catering to. They are the big boss and will make or break your product. Don’t blame millennials for killing certain industries, blame the industries for not doing their research.
At ProjectUX, although we’re quite happy with our YouTube show and what it provides to the UX community, we started pondering what else is out there for us to tap into? So after some brainstorming within our own team, we decided to…
Do the Research
Research shows that research is vital to figuring out what the hell to do. Meta, right? And quoting Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO:
“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”
But it goes beyond just the physical or digital design of a product. You can get an idea of what to provide in the first place with user research.
I’m going to go through the simple process our UX Research squad did at ProjectUX to find out more about our users and what they wanted.
User Groups
So far we had a general idea of who our users are based on our observations and who we’ve interacted with during the course of the show:
- UX Pros (Or UXperts as we endearingly call them)
- UX Newbies
- Startups
Then we thought who else do we need to focus on from a business standpoint? So a 4th group emerged:
4. Sponsors
We had some ideas about what we THINK they want, but for those ideas to be valid we had to actually go and talk to these groups.
User Interview — Questions
Before diving into the actual interviews, having a script to fall back on is always a good move. But just use it as guide rather than a crutch. More on this in the User Interview — The Interview section.
So to help us with a starting point, we used this excellent empathy map of questions from gamestorming.com
User Interview — Contacting
Since some of us have been in the UX industry for about a year or so and because ProjectUX’s name has been out there, we were able to round up and reach out to potential participants.
Networking events also helped. To quickly paraphrase from Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People:
People would rather talk about their toothache than a drought in Africa.
In other words, people love talking about themselves and their problems — it’s human nature. So presenting the interview in such a way helped get participants on board.
We were really flexible with our days, times, and whether it was face-to-face or online which made scheduling easy and put the importance on the participant’s schedule.
As a bonus, participants are also likely to recommend their colleagues for interviews. So now you have user referrals which makes a researcher’s job way easier.
User Interview — The Interviews
It’s helpful to start the interview with some chit chat and small talk because you want this to feel more like a discussion than an actual interview.
After that, we clarified what ProjectUX does and what we’re hoping to accomplish with this interview. We don’t want to lead them, so we don’t say TOO much information.
Starting with the script is good, but as I said in the earlier User Interview — Questions section: don’t use it as a crutch, just as a backup.
For example:
Researcher: What challenges do you face? (on script)
User: Usability testing is really expensive and I don’t know how to get it done.
Researcher: Oh, I’m sure it’s expensive. If testing were more affordable, how likely would you invest in it? (off script)
User: Oh! I’d totally be down for affordable user testing.
Honestly, it’s kind of like a 1st date. Maybe you have some questions prepped in your head, but if you just keep reading off a list of questions without going off their responses, you’re a robot.
As you go through the interviews, you’ll start to hone in on specific questions to get specific answers to validate what other users’ have said.
It’s quite cool when this happens because you’re basically having users validate themselves and doing the work for you.
For example:
User 1: Usability testing is so expensive!
Hmm…so let’s focus on this topic. As a researcher, I’ll be focusing on this question with something like:
Researcher: So, tell me your thoughts on usability testing.
User 2: If it wasn’t so costly, I’d do it more.
User 3: It’s way too expensive and I wish we could afford it.
Major Themes
After a couple of interviews were done with, we started a spreadsheet and brain-dumped any major themes that we were starting to hear. It’s REALLY helpful to do this towards the beginning while the interviews and notes are still fresh in your mind.
Another important reason is these themes can help shape the questions and answers you’ll be validating from later participants.
Affinity diagramming is the king tool/process for discovering major themes and ideas, but since our study was relatively small we were able to compare and contrast the notes with the spreadsheet.
Personas
After completing all the interviews and listing out the major themes, we started making some rough personas.
With the personas, we now have a great visual and personification of who the users are, what their goals are, their challenges, and their story.
What to Offer
The title of this blog was our research question — What to offer?
Here’s what we discovered so far at the time of this blog post:
- Have the panel of UXperts spend some more time on the app so they can offer deeper critiques.
- Recruit more users from the startup’s user base to conduct more usability testing.
- Offer affordable design, research, and marketing consultation to these startups as an agency-type set up.
- A one-stop shop for UX education: blogs, podcasts, tool reviews/demos, and portfolio help.
- Get sponsors on board by pitching how beneficial ProjectUX’s mission is to the community.
- Pool of interns or temps that startups can hire .
- A source for UX newbies to find mentors.
TL;DR
User research can help any business figure out not only how to design a product, but also what their users want in the first place. And remember, users = revenue.
Have a good blueprint of questions to ask your users at first but customize the questions based on the user and their responses.
Pull out major themes you’re noticing as you’re going through the interviews and have them in some sort of visual.
With all the information gathered, you can now have a validated understanding of what to provide so you won’t waste time and money on pushing out something that nobody wants.
This article was written by ProjectUX contributor Omar A
