How to do Research
Get Out of the Building.
Get Out of the Building is not an admonishment to exercise more. It is simply a reminder that you have to get out of your office, workshop, garage or wherever you are and talk to people.
So, as a method for research, get out of the building. You have to talk to people. You have to engage the actual human beings that will be using your product. Even as a developer, you need to look another human in the face and talk about the product with them. It will change your life.
On any large product that I’ve worked on, I have learned more from the intended audience than from anyone else. The content experts are great, the design experts are great, but the people that will use the product are the ones that you need to collaborate with. Their input is what will give you deeper insight into what you are trying to do. And that insight might be what you need to take the project to the next level.
There are several different ways to do this research. And I don’t care what method you use. They all have pluses and minuses. As long as you are talking to actual humans.
On one project that I worked on, I had designed a beautiful set of icons for the product. They were clever and insightful. I spent a good month with them and the design team honing what they were and what they meant. Then I brought them to my user group for feedback. They hated them. Not a single user understood what they meant. Completely visual navigation was not going to work.
From that feedback, we went back into the studio and redesigned the navigation to be completely text based. It was so much more elegant and intuitive. And if we had just launched the project without that feedback, our project would have suffered.
Yes, of course, I’m oversimplifying. Without the actual feedback of real people, you are headed to potentially huge mistakes. It’s that simple.
This also applies to your back-end tools as well. Be that where you host your code, how you track your project or what the project admin will be. I always work with the folks on my team to make sure these tools are understood and to find out if they know a better way of doing things. Afterall, I’m not perfect!
If you’re feeling brave, you might try a little experiment. Take a laptop to your local coffee shop. As the barista, if you can do some testing and buy $20 of coffee. If it’s cool, take a table in the front of the cafe and ask put out a little sign that says “FREE COFFEE” in big letters. When folks approach you, tell them that if they spend a few minutes talking about your app, you’ll give them free coffee for there time. Then take a bunch of notes while they give you feedback.
Sure beats sitting in the office all day.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
