User Research is the Core of UX Design

UX Design is all about getting better based on feedback.

This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.

Aiming for “Happy Customers”

In my personal and professional opinion, user research is the core activity of user experience design or any product development process that aims to optimize towards a satisfying or even great user experience.

This means you want to get to the point where you get mostly positive user feedback or “happy customers” as they say. Well, in general, I believe that you can only make someone truly happy if you know their needs, frustrations, wants and preferences.

So, if a team or an overall organization does not know very much about their end-users and accordingly does not have the confidence to make clear and fine-grained prioritizations for product development, then I would argue for the following conclusion or UX formula for dividing your own time budget.

“User Experience Design = 2/3 User Research + 1/3 Developing Stuff”

And in my experience, with every new project you tend to fall back more or less to a state where a large part of precisely this confidence in your own user knowledge is lost or no longer applicable. And this tendency is additionally reinforced by a basic (but probably completely normal across most companies) turnover of employees and an accompanying loss of user knowledge.

Now, what do I mean here by 2/3 User Research?

Well, first of all, I see 1/3 of User Research as exploration (figure 1).

Figure 1: User research as exploration or (continuous) discovery.

Secondly, I see 1/3 development and design. By this I mean programming, user interface design, screen design, visual design, or whatever you want to call the creation of an installation, layout or any visualization that provides users with potential inputs and outputs for operation (figure 2).

Figure 2: A simplified representation of the process of User Interface Design.

And third, there is another 1/3 user research, but this time as evaluation or assessment (figure 3).

Figure 3: User research activities like usability testing to evaluate stuff.

So, when I talk about defining UX Design by committing time to 2/3 user research activities plus 1/3 development or creative design activities, I mean that you spend 2/3 of your time understanding and specifying the actual problem from the perspective of the users in question. And that you then spend a total of possibly only 1/3 of your time working out product specifications or design patterns, which in turn reflect your own understanding of what you have learned about the user perspective.

So, 1/3 of your time is spent gathering and reviewing basic user needs and deriving appropriate requirements for your product. Then you spend 1/3 of your time creating and working out design variants in the hope of reflecting these requirements. And then you spend another 1/3 of your time collecting feedback to check whether you really meet the requirements of your users with your design variants (figure 4).

Figure 4: Three parts of designing for a user’s experience.

You could also generalize this far beyond UX by saying: If you have to deliver a solution to someone’s complex problem (rather typical in B2B), you probably spend the majority of your time investigating the actual problem as well as your client’s perception of it — that is, understanding and specifying how that client perceives that problem and your solution, while you spend only a comparatively small portion of your time developing the solution that fits it (figure 5).

Figure 5: Complicated things require great investment in understanding the problem.

But back to the topic of UX design…

Human-Centered means User Research-Driven

UX design has its roots in so-called human-centered design, which is clearly defined within the framework of international standards (e.g. IEC or ISO) and is based on a process that requires you to conduct user research at the beginning, in between, and at the end of a project.

In general, the international standard for human-centered design “provides requirements and recommendations for human-centered design principles and activities throughout the life cycle of computer-based interactive systems” and “It is intended to be used by those managing design processes” (Technical Committee ISO/TC 159/SC, 2019). One key aspect is to continuously generate user-related data to support product design decisions.

Here, I highlighted user research activities as part of the general process diagram for human-centered design of the ISO standard 9241–210:2019 (figure 6).

Figure 6: Human-centered design contains roughly 2/3 of user research activities.

For international standards check out the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

No Research? Then you are just guessing and gambling…

This means that if you claim to be designing a user experience, but do no user research whatsoever to understand the actual experience users might have when operating a prototype or final product, then you are really just freely designing a product and hoping for the best. You are guessing and flying blind. You are gamling (figure 7).

Figure 7: UX design without user research is just guessing and hoping for the best

So, you could say, user research institutionalizes an organization’s capacity to learn and adapt to the end-user’s reality. And this is why it is so important to promote user research as the central and fundamental core activity of UX design.

In this context, at some point you may benefit from looking at the fundamental hiring patterns in your company to discuss whether you should perhaps hire more user researchers instead of focusing primarily on recruiting designers or developers (figure 8).

Figure 8: Most companies hire relatively few user researchers…

Continue Reading…

Check out my other articles about UX in B2B here or get the eBook, if you are interested in even more more content like this.

Otherwise find me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think — you know, everyone needs feedback to improve :-)

This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.