How we do Guerrilla Research at Cuddle.ai

🚀 Conference workshop notes from DesignUp, 2018

Aayush Jain

Published in

Crux Intelligence

4 min readNov 16, 2018

So, what’s Guerrilla Research?

Research is a wonderful thing. It gives us the ability to inform our designs with reality. Through research, we find out what real users think and how they behave when they’re in certain scenarios. We find out how right or how wrong our assumptions are. Research provides direction in place of guesses, and data rather than opinion or speculation.

Let me start by asking a question — Have you found yourself working on a project that had so much potential to be great, but didn’t have enough time or budget to do the research needed to inform the design? If yes, guerrilla research is there for you!

The word ‘Guerrilla ’ means ‘impromptu’. Guerrilla methods are faster, lower-cost methods that provide sufficient enough insights to make informed strategic decisions.

🙈 It’s an alternative, not a replacement

Guerrilla Research enables you to plug-in some research where there is scope for none. It will help you create outcomes that are based on some evidence and not just assumptions. It brings research and its value to the forefront after a few cycles and starts a culture of research in organizations.

When you should conduct Guerrilla Research and when you should not?

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An important requirement for Guerrilla Research is to have a widely defined sample set. One of the primary things that make Guerrilla quicker and cheaper is the nature of recruitment — which is to identify some basic parameters to pick relevant enough respondents.

At Cuddle, we reach out to people from different offices near us and make them participate in our testing. Cuddle is an enterprise product. We just need employees of companies who can relate to our product.

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Guerrilla methods won’t come in handy:-

When you need very specific user profiles with some pre-defined knowledge.
When you need to do the study in a specific environment. The context in which someone will use your product will greatly impact their usage and you can’t talk to people in context.
When you’ll be researching sensitive topics such as health, money, sex, or relationships.

How to conduct Guerrilla Research?

1. Walk the walk, talk the talk

Specifically for Digital UX research, having a working prototype is very helpful in noticing behaviors that form the source of your insights. This prototype can be your own or even a competing product out there! While using the prototype, encourage your respondents to think out loud along the process of finishing a task.

At Cuddle, we make high fidelity prototype using principle which is sufficient for the specific task we need to test. During our sessions, we ask the users to tell us what they are thinking and not just use the product silently.

2. Narrow Objective

Guerrilla Research is all about finding focus in your research. It is about filtering through the ideal set of questions and asking the ones that are most important at any particular stage in your project.

At Cuddle, we don’t ask our users to edit, delete, share, rename dashboards all at once. We just ask them to delete it and see how they are doing it.

3. Five is enough

Talking to just 5 people will help you cover 85% of the insights out there! A good way to find relevant respondents is to go to relevant locations. However, try making these locations a little diverse to overcome bias.

At Cuddle, we don’t test a specific task with more than 5/6 people as things start repeating after that.

4. Make them Imagine!

Scenario Creation is a critical element of designing a Guerrilla Research. Scenarios are simple, relatable tasks, the kind that are easy for a respondent to imagine and relate with. For designing the scenario, use the information that is simple, clear, short and enough to perform the task.

At Cuddle, we ask our participants to imagine themselves as Regional Manager who recently learned that sales in his/her region were down, and then how would they go about finding the reasons behind it.

5. Use the user’s language, not the product’s

Try to see the product from user’s eyes, not yours.

At Cuddle, we don’t ask users ‘how you would add something to the dashboard?’ Instead, we ask, ‘how would you go about bookmarking an answer you’d want to see more frequently?’

🎉 Bonus

Here’s the exercise we did at the workshop. We had to choose an app of our choice and write a plan to improve any one of its feature. Our team came up with a guerrilla plan to improve consumption of Instagram stories. (Image below)

👀 TIP : Answer the 7 questions to prepare for the guerrilla test on one of your product’s feature.