A brief study on User Research

Why User Research?

The more a designer knows about its users, the better of a product he is going to make for the users.

Why Extensive User Research?

In-depth/extensive user research helps the designer in the long run because products and the type/style of products changes way too fast but the users are going to be normal people at the end of the day and they don’t change that fast.

So, this is one of the key factors of a UX designer to transform these fast-paced changing products into user-friendly products which are at the same time very minimal & optimized.

Problem

What is the problem?

Understand the problem your users are facing, understand it very well. Before designing anything ask yourself how is adding this feature will help my users or how will it solve the issues my users are facing. Any designer can do this by empathizing with their user, understanding their perspective, and observing the problem from their point of view will definitely help your design process.

Testing

Now you know the problem, you start working on solutions and you find a lot of solutions or you “assume” that you have the solution but in reality not every solution you find/think of is the correct way of approaching that problem. So what do you do?

One of the important things for doing a successful user research is “testing”. Testing is a very powerful tool when it comes to solving the designer’s problem, it helps you by eliminating all the unnecessary assumptions that you had for solving the problem and that also gives you much more clarity on the user’s expectations.

Design Feedback Loop & Scientific Method

Designing a User Experience and doing a Scientific Research is very much similar.

Scientific Research

💡 Observation — Hypothesis — Prediction — Experiment

Design Feedback Loop

💡 Observation — Assumptions — Design — Iteration

In both cases, you experiment/iterate, again and again, to find flaws in your prediction/design.

Prototype

Prototypes play a bunch of different roles in User Experience design, it can work as a vision for your ultimate product, it can speed up the testing process but out of all this prototyping helps in user research as well. Researching on the product or the users while having a prototype gives you definite answers on which method is going to work out at the end.

Pitfalls of User Research

• “The place” where you going to take interviews is going to affect the users, make sure you are in the right environment with your user before interviewing them. For example, if you are designing a product that is going to be used by professionals at a workplace then you shouldn’t take interviews at a coffee place or at home on the other hand if you are making a product that is going to be used when the user has some free time or making a social interactive product then make sure you are not taking that interview in a conference room or at a workplace.
• Don’t just give your product/prototype and see how that goes, having a plan already in mind will help you to build a model and improvise your future design process.
• First, learn about your users by asking them questions like who are they, what do they do, what are their hobbies, etc, learn about their life. Knowing your users firsthand then asking questions about your product from the users will help you evaluate your work.
• “Tell me what are your problems? What is bugging you? You can’t hurt my feelings” by just saying this to your user they feel a lot more comfortable and they give you some valuable feedback.
• Talking to the right set of people. For example, if you are building a product for old-age people, then you can’t go on and ask questions from a 17-year-old.

Tips for User Research

• Managing stakeholders is very important, aligning your plan/script with stakeholders will build reliability and will also keep you on track
• Figuring out what GOOD actually is, what you think is good might not always be right, but what’s good as in the context of the user is actually right.
• Take notes very carefully, stick to the real statements user says and descriptions of what they did.
• Do quantitative and qualitative research because quantitative research will help you to understand “what” and qualitative research will help you to understand “why”.