Start with users and their needs so your [service/product/idea] doesn’t fail
You wouldn’t dream of writing a presentation without first asking — who is the audience? Or buying a pair of shoes for someone without knowing their shoe size. Yet many organisations still build services and products that don’t start with user needs (e.g. buying car insurance, doing a food shop, renewing a passport). Instead, they put organisational goals at the forefront (saving money, increasing profit margins, growing by 15%) — forgetting that ultimately, they exist to serve their users, not the other way round.
Google’s first point in its guiding philosophy is “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. With hundreds of user researchers working for them across the world, their job is focussed on making sure that all of the products Google develops are actually meeting a user need.
We can all think of services we interact with on a daily basis that don’t put our needs first — the ones that frustrate us, the ones we rant about to our friends and family. The ones we ultimately decide to avoid to search for a better alternative.
“But we don’t have the money”
Yes, but we aren’t Google, I hear you say and we don’t have the money to invest in user research. It might be helpful to turn that around and consider that the less money you have, the more you can’t afford not to do research. Without it, you are likely to make even greater losses. You only need to speak to 5 users to start to get useful insights and Erika Hall gives other tips on getting out there and finding out what people need for little or nothing.
“There isn’t enough time”
At times there are projects that need to be delivered quickly, and although there might be available budget, there might be the notion that there is not enough time — often because research is seen as a nebulous task, stretching over an indefinite number of weeks. The option shouldn’t be either ‘do research indefinitely’ or ‘not at all’. If you don’t find out what people need first, all you will deliver is something useless, fast. The sooner you go out to understand the unknown in a discovery, test assumptions or check usability, the sooner you can start to make something useful.
Excerpt from Will Myddleton’s Better Discoveries blog
Research is a team sport
While it’s a researcher’s job to say ‘needs are not met’ it still requires team members to support a user focussed approach by making all their design decisions based on the research evidence. There is no point spending weeks doing user research only to then ignore what you found. A good multidisciplinary team will be led by user research findings and make it’s decisions accordingly.
Where we are now
For our work on the community based approach, we are at the beginning of our research in Neath, South Wales and Nelson, Lancashire, where we are interviewing residents young and old, working and retired, disadvantaged and wealthy to understand what they believe their communities strengths and needs are. We will soon be meeting with members from a community in Cornwall too. You can find out more about how we picked our locations with insights to follow.
The guiding principles above have helped us to explain to others why research is important and we welcome further input from our readers. Get in touch!
