User Research (Customer Development) — a key element for making informed decisions in product development and marketing
User research is an essential element in product development and marketing. It involves two main directions depending on your product’s development stage. These directions differ not only in their goals but also in the methods used in research.
No Product, just an Idea:
Understanding your target audience's needs is of utmost importance at this stage. With this understanding and empirical confirmation, you can create a product relevant to the market. It is crucial to use qualitative research methods such as interviews or surveys.
The product exists and has paying customers:
Here, it’s essential to understand your paying audience and why they choose your product. Also, pay attention to those who actively interact with the product but are not paying customers. This data will help you optimize resources and focus on the most profitable segments.
If you are only at the initial stage:
1. Formulate an Assumption: Identify the need you plan to address with your product.
2. Describe the Audience: Find out who has this need and how they are currently solving it.
3. Assess the Strength of the Need: Research how many resources (time, money, etc.) the audience spends on solving this need.
The most transparent and most convenient way to describe your audience’s needs is through the Job Stories framework:
When I ___
Want ____
To _____
Once you’ve described the Job Stories, you can move on to the validation phase — by conducting interviews with representatives of each segment for which you’ve described Job Stories. The Jobs To Be Done framework is excellent for researching audience needs.
Frameworks and Methods:
1. Job Stories: This framework helps describe the audience's needs in the format “When I ___, I Want ___, So That ___”.
2. Jobs To Be Done: This framework is also excellent for researching the audience's needs. It is beneficial when you need to understand what “jobs” users want to accomplish with your product.
Interview questions can be created based on this information.
1. What problems and needs does the audience have?
2. Who are the competitors: direct, indirect, and tangential?
3. How do users compare us with competitors?
4. What needs do we satisfy, and which do we not?
5. How to develop the product to beat competitors?
6. How to convey the value of the solution to the audience?
7. What affects the level of customer satisfaction?
8. What are the potential opportunities for product expansion or entering new markets?
With the help of these questions, you will find answers to your queries.
Benefits from user research programs for marketing and communication of the product:
- You will understand why customers choose your product. This will help you market it effectively to new audiences.
- You can find problems that customers face when choosing your product or find barriers to using the product.
- You will have an extensive database of messages that can be used as hypotheses in product communications.
Feel free to contact us if you need any help with user research.
Learn more about how we conduct UR.
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In the following posts, we will delve into the questions:
1. How to recruit respondents by yourself
2. How to conduct interviews
3. How to record and analyze results
4. What to do after the analysis and summarizing the research findings
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