Five Easy and Inexpensive ways to jump start your User Research

I’ve had the pleasure of working for a variety different companies throughout my career. Each of them were unique in terms of size, team culture, work process and budgets. But the one attribute that they all had in common was their desire to improve their products. Sometimes these improvements were done with careful planning and expensive research. Occasionally a key stakeholder or team player had to be involved for proper alignment.

Well, not everyone has time for that. As interaction and user experience designers, we are always looking for ways to test our products, with or without approval or budget. Here’s is my own approach for getting low cost usability research into your work process.

1. User Interviews

If you are new to a project, the best thing you can do is start learning about your product directly from your users. If your users happen to be a subject matter expert (SME), whose calendar is always “busy”; you might want to start with someone in your team that has a familiarity with the industry of your product. If your product is a consumer-facing one, the try approaching a family member, or a friend that matches your target user profile.

Conducting an interview is fairly straight forward. You might want to know what’s the most used feature in your product, or maybe you just want to know what users are typically looking for when they are using it. For questions that my elicit complex answers, consider using a recording device (or an app) and document the session responses for analysis after the interview ends.

You can read this article from the Interaction Design Foundation on how to structure your user interview.

I have a personal preference for interviews, particularly because thanks to technology we can interview participants even in far away regions of the world. A variety of software products allow for remote interviews and some even allow for recording in real time, such as WebEx and GoToMeeting. You can also use other software to record your participants, as long as they agree to have their session saved for posterity.

Let’s explore a little more this “remote testing”

2. Remote Testing

You might not have budget to fly users, designers or researches around the world, but you might not need to. As I said at the end of “user interviews” with remote meeting applications you can conduct an interview with someone located in another region. Google Hangouts for example allows you to have a conversation with more than one person at the time. You can have your entire project team collaborating in a video call while considering prototypes, wireframes and sketches, and you can present them to an user and gather feedback in real time.

I have personally conducted remote user testing, particularly with users in Central Europe and Asia Pacific. The time difference does present a challenge when you are living in Central US or the West Coast, but is a rewarding experience. Watching users interact with the designs and gather design validation insights helped us propel conversation forward about the future of our products. These sessions provided the entire team with a proper perspective about our design work, and even gave insight to the business managers about where to take the product next.

3. User Surveys

Another mechanism that I found particularly helpful is a survey. There are multiple survey methods that are also free (just take a look at SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Google Forms). Thanks to these free survey tools you can gather information from your users no matter where they are. Sometimes you have to push a little to get their responses, you are only asking for a few minutes of their time and consideration. Try to keep the survey short though. Don’t ask them one hundred questions.

If you are interested in gathering more insight in some questions to ask in a survey, take a look at this article: http://www.uxforthemasses.com/online-survey-questions/

I usually use the free version of SurveyMonkey for small surveys with larger audiences. Their data analysis tools are very helpful for uncovering trends and parsing smaller groups of user responses within the overall data set. Remember to keep it short, users don’t usually want to spend more than five minutes answering questions.

If you think you have a lot of material and need to prepare an extensive survey, you might want to consider breaking the survey into several parts. Using the same group sample you can identify users who are comfortable answering your questions on a weekly basis, or who would rather answer a long survey one time only. Having this information allows to cater to audience preferences, and create a pipeline of continuous feedback over a period of time.

4. A/B Testing

Another technique that I particularly like is AB Testing. The concept is very simple, take two sample screens with similar goals but different flows and calls to action. Present them to two user groups with similar characteristics, and analyze which had the highest acceptance rate. We’ve mentioned some tools that you can use to do this, Google Hangouts, SurveyMonkey, etc.

I particularly like the concept of A/B testing because I think is the fastest way to having design validation, it is also effective when there’s different view points in a team. Both might be valid, but one will have the higher conversion rate, or the highest score in testing. That will help you come to an agreement with your team members. Why guess when you can test a hypothesis about your design before it gets to development? Don’t waste development hours and resources, quick A/B might be what you need to do.

5. Observation

The final technique that I want to talk about is Observation. This one is fairly basic and you can do without any guidance. Sit, watch, open your eyes to what users are doing. I personally enjoy this technique the most. Is easy to do, does not really require you to travel, if you have a consumer-faced product remember what I said about conducing user interviews. Get a family member or a friend and sit them right next to you while they are using your product. Try not do to this with strangers walking down the street though. It might not always provide you the answers you need.

With simple observation you can instantly gain clarity on improving features or validating particular design elements that are trapped in endless debate. You can also develop a rapport within your users, opening the door for more intensive inquiry techniques such as ethnographic studies and the next level of usability testing.

Now, if there’s no budget for you to travel to where your users are, in case they are not local. Then you can go back to Remote User Testing, and apply any of the tools we mentioned, WebEx, Google Hangouts, Skype. Have a video call with them and observe while they are using your product. Understand their experience and their mind set for what they are doing. Get to know your user!

Know other easy and inexpensive ways to conduct user research? Share them with me! Hope to hear from you, and thanks for reading!