Why Should Early Stage Startups Value User Research?

This article is part of Pensieve AI’s Intro to UX Research series.

User research (UX research), true to its name, is researching your intended users and their experiences. It is the process of understanding the behavior and psychology of your intended users through a variety of feedback methodologies and techniques. This process, also referred to as “Customer Discovery,” enables companies like yours to develop products that are easy to use, reliable, and efficient. By placing your intended users at the core of your product life cycle through the practice of UX research, you prioritize their needs first as you validate your hypothesis and continue to iterate your product.

Whether you incorporate multiple UX research methods all together (here’s a great list from Nielsen and Norman you can utilize), or pick one or two methods from qualitative research (synthesizing descriptive data) and quantitative research (gathering numerical data) for a quick UX research study, your goal is the same: to capture all-round data and insights for informed design decisions by observing the user’s behaviors, understanding why the users are leaning towards a particular way, and analyzing each pattern of the users to generate a better solution.

In order to create a successful product, your company needs to be on the same page with your customers by identifying their pain points, needs, and analysis of behaviors as a foundation for your design strategy. The result of proper UX research will influence the product’s design for the better, assess the solution to the problem you are tackling, and create an optimal product for your users.

Saving time, money, and effort in the long run.

In many cases, especially at smaller or newer companies, the term “user research” is often a “nice to have” that executives and shareholders may neglect, because they are adamant about building a product and shipping it as soon as they can — it’s all about the “get shit done” mentality and so called agile development method that is trending at Silicon Valley companies. While this route may have some success, oftentimes, this means you are skipping the UX research process and guess-working into thinking your idea is what the users want. In reality, you need to be building what the users need.

Another common misconception is that the UX research team is a department that simply costs too much money and resources, causes unnecessary delays for project timelines, and provides countless pages of unsubstantial information. Leadership teams sometimes fail to see the value of investing in UX research because it’s not as tangible as fixing bugs. For example, if you remove an engineer, you’ll immediately notice the consequences right then and there with a broken product; if you remove a UX researcher (or a role adjacent to UX researchers like product designers or product managers who typically also conduct UX research), you will not see an immediate consequence at that moment, but it will slowly creep up when you realize users are not resonating with your product.

When your company invests the time in prioritizing UX research as the foundation of your development process, you will extract high quality insights and recommendations of your intended users’ needs and pinpoint how to address them. This, in return, will eventually save your company’s time, money, and effort from potential product failure and go back to the drawing board for the second (or third?) time.

Would you rather design and create a product with real facts from your users or guess assumptions from your team?

Sneak peek of your product launch.

It’s no secret that a company’s success directly correlates with the number of customers they have — this is especially true when users are successfully able to accomplish their task while enjoying the user experience. By understanding the trend of your users through your UX research especially at the earliest stages of your product life cycle, there are tremendous amounts of value your product team will consider as key assets.

Throughout the development cycle, UX research will help you iterate your product. It will address any issues or accessibility problems before the product launch so you can build a successful product your users will want and continue to use. If you cannot keep up with their increasing demands or if they don’t have a good user experience, your customers could leave you without a second thought to consider other alternative solutions.

UX research reduces the risk of building a complicated workflow and unnecessary features that no one will use, and allows your product managers, developers, and designers to have the information they need to make functional decisions.

If you have the option to validate your product before the product launch, would you consider it?

Removing internal bias.

Let’s think through this scenario: your team has been working hard for 1 month on an exciting project that will disrupt the market, equaling to at least 400 hours. During these 400 hours, they will know the ins and outs of the product and all the new features around it — which is a good thing because they are the product expert. However, at this rate, because your team has a vision of how your product should operate, they start designing and building a product from their presumption by assuming what their users want (not need) and design for one group of users: themselves, as the product owners. The entire purpose of UX research is to put your end-users in mind, not the great people behind the product, about their needs and context of how they’ll use it.

You do not want to become blind to the functionality of your product because of the product knowledge you have accumulated throughout the development cycle. By collecting real user data, product teams can justify their feature choices while the broader stakeholders can justify their decision outcomes. In addition, you can prevent the majority of the bugs and design fixes earlier on. It’s always easier to change the design before the development cycle than change the design during the development cycle.

Who’s usability trend and behavior is more valuable: your users or your product team?

Ultimately, user research is a mindset. When starting a company or launching a new product, one thing to avoid is serious repercussions from ill-designed solutions. And one way to avoid them is not skipping the UX research stage even if you’re on a time or budget constraint. UX research informs your work decisions, improves your understanding of the users, and makes you find better product solutions. Not to mention, when your stakeholders want hard evidence on a certain feature, you’re ready to present it.

UX research, quite frankly, is the only way to actually understand your target group’s needs and even help you find early adopters. If you can make products that solve a real user problem, your company is on the pathway to commercial success. How often have you given up on a platform or product because the usability was not up to par?

Interested in joining our effort to democratize user research? Check us out at pensieveai.com or on social (LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter).