Driving business value through collaborative user research
Does this scenario sound familiar? Your team develops a product that meets a long list of business requirements and stakeholders are excited. The product goes public. Soon after, you receive feedback which suggests that users are confused and struggle to complete their most important tasks. Ultimately, the product fails. In stressful meetings that follow, someone soon asks, “How could we have prevented this from happening?”
The ROI of excellent user experience
The key to being successful with digital products means understanding that users are your most important asset. When a frustrated user abandons your site or deletes your app it ultimately affects your business objectives and brand perception.
Fortunately, collaborative user research can support your team by creating collective understanding of potential areas of user struggle. In addition, by testing concepts and prototypes with real users, you can learn how a future audience may perceive your product before it launches and if they will find value in it. Using this feedback and foresight, you can refine minor details or pivot if required.
This investment of upfront and continuous research time may seem uncomfortable at first. However, it can greatly drive future business value by:
- Reducing support costs through ensuring ease of use to achieve key tasks
- Increasing confidence in potential user adoption and engagement
- Increasing the number of new and return visitors through a positive user experience and word-of-mouth
- Reducing development rework as only your most successful design concepts will go into production
What is user research in general?
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, user research is the pursuit of understanding how someone may interact with or interpret your product through various techniques such as card sorting exercises, focus groups, one-on-one discussions, surveys and usability testing.
The technique most appropriate for your product will depend on exactly what you are developing and at which stage you are in your project plan. For example, you may want to show a simple pencil sketch to someone over coffee during the first phase of design or facilitate a full usability test with a clickable website prototype before handing it over to your development team.
The most important takeaway is that user research means putting your work in front of real people who are not part of your project team and asking for their unbiased opinion so that you can use that feedback to iterate and refine.
“We have analytics, why do we need to do user research?”
Analytics on their own can only tell one part of the story and are usually installed near the end of a project plan once a concept has already been fully developed. For strategic insight, and to understand if you are making the right design decisions upfront, you need both quantitative data plus qualitative user feedback to connect the dots.
Ask yourself – does a higher “time on page” mean that a new website design is more effective? Or is it possible that certain design decisions were actually less effective and users required more time to achieve key tasks? Without truly listening to users, a single metric is meaningless without context.
So, what is collaborative user research?
Hopefully, you now understand the value in performing user research and you may be wondering how to begin integrating it into your project process. Happily at the end of this article you will find a list of valuable resources you can use to learn more about it. However, there is one method that our team has begun experimenting with over the last year called “collaborative user research” which has not only proven to be extremely effective but can also be performed very quickly.
Each session involves only our existing project team and approximately one day of everyone’s time. Using simple screen sharing software and a conference line, our entire team (from developers to project stakeholders) remotely observes a user research session where 3–4 participants are individually asked to complete specific tasks or scenarios. As previously mentioned, this can consist of providing feedback on a pencil sketch or attempting to complete a scenario using a clickable prototype.
The facilitators of these sessions are actual people from our project team who use a simple script to walk a participant through each task. While the session is occurring the project team takes notes and records key insights.
Afterwards, our team quickly debriefs and determines the top actionable usability challenges. We try to only identify the most significant issues and not get bogged down in details which can be refined as we iterate. Since our team collectively observes the sessions in real time, it results in a shared understanding and improvements are typically easily determined. As a bonus, the entire process is highly engaging for team members and provokes creative thought and collective problem solving.
Shedding bias and project assumptions
More bias is carried into a project than you may believe. As someone immersed in the digital world, you may carry the bias of known interaction patterns and modern interface symbols. You may believe everyone is “just like you” and perceives the digital world in a similar way. It is easy to forget how Aunt Mildred perceives the digital world and that a hamburger menu symbol may not be a familiar icon to her.
In addition to personal bias there is also project bias. This is where a team can fall victim to the effect of “groupthink” (where creating harmony amongst team members can outweigh more strategic decisions). These types of bias can negatively impact the end user experience.
Collaborative user research can help shed these biases with fresh perspective. When an entire project team witnesses a user struggling with a product, it can rally them together to champion the user’s cause.
What types of issues are determined during these sessions?
One of the most interesting outcomes of user research is the importance of simple content and clear direction. Most of the feedback we receive is around confusing instructions or unclear terminology. This has gone a long way towards incorporating content writers into our design process from a very early stage.
Other usability issues that are commonly discovered include:
- Poor user experience issues leading to critical points of failure
- Inefficient flow of information gathering
- Unknown user preferences or key needs such as missing options to select from
- Unclear placement of call-to-action indicators such as buttons or links
- Understanding device preferences such as use of mobile vs. desktop for particular tasks
“You only tested this with four people. How statistically valid can it be?”
The question around scientifically valid research arises often when discussing user research with project stakeholders. While strict academic research absolutely has it’s place, as humans, we’re good at ignoring data we don’t want to hear or that doesn’t align with our initial vision. Once we entertain the concept of creating rigorous, scientifically-based and user research scenarios, the process becomes much more complex. This increases the resources required which affects the ability to perform research frequently. However, it doesn’t matter how statistically valid or rigorous any research is if it can’t influence the project’s direction due to poor or infrequent timing. It is important to set this expectation up front with your entire project team and stakeholders when determining your user research strategy.
We have found that the single most powerful reason collaborative user research is so effective is how it can tell an undeniable story witnessed in person by every team member. Ultimately, this style of research employs the power of human empathy which is the heart of user-centric design.
Our experience so far
The overwhelming feedback from this process has been extremely positive. It has also helped us to further incorporate project stakeholders into the design process which has created stronger business relationships and facilitated easier project milestone approvals. In summary, our work has become much more efficient and successful and we look forward to the exciting new challenges ahead.
Usability research references
For further reference on user research and usability testing, please check out some of our key sources of inspiration including, Steve Krug’s excellent book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Jared Spool’s podcast UIE Brain Sparks, the usability.gov website and Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research.
In addition, I would be happy to answer your comments and questions (or read about your personal experiences with this approach) via the comments below or on twitter @ashk3l.
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