Who is the user researcher?
My family and my friends keep asking me what is my job and what is user research. So, I rehashed an old note about user research written a few months ago and decided to share this with you. I’m pretty sure that user research is much more than just a “half-page summary”, but at least, it could be a good start for discussions.
“For me, a user researcher is interested in people, curious, open-minded, loves analysing the “complexity” with multidisciplinary skill set and passionate to build valuable, usable, feasible and ethical products.”
So on 11th January, 2016, what does user research mean to me?
The user researcher’s primary focus is on listening to people and understanding them — their personalities, their needs, their emotions, their dreams, their behaviour and their context. This can happen in many different ways, using a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. With the combination of rational and intuitive approaches, the user researcher fuels the innovation process of the product discovery team with information gleaned from his / her understanding of people. Close collaboration with the product manager, the designers and the developers transforms people’s needs and emotions into products which people love to use and which make their lives happier in an ethical way. It’s important to highlight. Although, user researchers work alone / independently most of their time, the main question is how they are able to collaborate & work together with team members. The success of the product is significantly determined by the atmosphere in which the team members collaborate, significantly determined by the relationship which exists between the team members and significantly determined by the team members’ EQ.
At the end of the day, the user researcher is an explorer…
… whose main goal is to bring people’s voices and mindsets into the product innovation process, to add thoughts and ideas to inspire the product strategy and also pull in the latest solutions from the creative / tech industry — all-in-all, in order to shape cool products for people.
What to cover with multidisciplinary skill set?
- understanding people: their personalities, their needs, their emotions, their dreams, their context, who they are, why and what they do with the product / want from the product
- curiosity: forming and asking questions, listening to people to be able to shape the product vision together with the product discovery team
- mental models: identifying jobs & patterns, building up mental models and sharing these with the product team
- data: analyzing all kinds of data, setting up hypotheses and validating while always aiming to answer the “why” question
- collaboration & prototyping: collaborating closely with the product manager, designers and developers to transform mental models / insights into working prototypes (hacking in Sketch and even building a proto can also happen)
- valuability & usability: conducting user tests (on-site or online) to figure out, together with the product discovery team, what is valuable and what is usable for people and iterate to find solutions that people will love
- vice versa: two different approaches which can be used in parallel — digging deep into data, discovering “pain points” and asking people about the “why” or learning from people and using numbers to scale a concept effectively
- methods: using a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, continuously hacking the product discovery process together with team members.
László Priskin, User researcher at Skyscanner, based in Budapest, Hungary, working as a team member on Skyscanner’s renewed mobile app available on Android & on iOS. Started sharing his thoughts, because passionately believes in discussions. He thinks whatever is written above will be outdated in a few weeks’ time, because building products means that we inspire each other, criticize each other and continously exceed our way of thinking. László is happy to get in touch with you either on Linkedin or Twitter. Views are his own.
