User Research Hacks — More ways to know your users

I am a strong believer in user research in any design process. For me, nothing is better than going out and spending time with your users before contemplating a solution for them. This not only helps us to uncover our user’s identity and pain points but also results in formulating empathy towards them. We feel inspired and motivated to solve their problems and confidence in generating solutions that resonate with their needs. But most importantly once we understand their behavior we start relating the contexts and situations they will use our solution. All this might not occur if we rather chose to take out our laptops and start thinking about solutions or interfaces without bothering to know the unknowns about our users.

But let’s be practical, user research is a time-consuming business and no doubt many studies require a notable amount of funds that your organization should be willing to pay. And what if it’s a worst case scenario for you– a fast-approaching deadline and even the fastest research method requires a good amount of budget (Here I am assuming that you can’t perform Guerrilla research- a fast and low-cost method, as your users are no common people). Also, gaining a basic knowledge about your users is seldom a purpose of the research instead it is to validate if the proposed product or feature certainly solves an actual need or pain point of your user segment.

Here are some hacks that I have learned over time to know my users when I am unable to perform in-person user research. It totally depends on the nature of the project which method I will pick and almost every time I use a combination of two or more. However, these are not a replacement for the conventional qualitative research methods that should ideally be part of your design process as and when possible.

1. Research with Data — The very first one on the list is data. Data is a key that unlocks the crucial information about my user’s interaction with the product. Through those numbers, I can unravel behaviors that might be difficult to discover during an in-person interview as most of the time user’s narration of his action is influenced by his thought process and actions might be different when they are performed in the real world.

Your users might tell you in an interview that ‘x’ feature is very helpful for them but when you check the analytics the feature might be among the poor performer.

So for any given problem, I start by looking at the data and forming assumptions about existing user behavior. I then reinforce those assumptions by other methods in the list.

2. Rendezvous with SMEs — Accept it or not, any idea/concept/problem travel through a line of people in the organizational hierarchy before ending at you. These are people that decide on ‘what’ to make and rely on you for ‘how’ to make. The ‘why’ is somewhat the responsibility of both sides. They answer the ‘why’ from a business perspective and want you to find the ‘why’ from end users point of view.

A starting point for me is engaging with these people in the organization and learning from their experiences. I always attempt to frame the right questions to understand what they know and have observed the customers. This one is my go-to method as it helps me to strike the right balance between business and user needs. I also ask about any market research and surveys that they have done as a part of the project that can help me gain more insights.

3. Go for a Survey — Draft a survey and send it to the segment of the users(as many as you can) whom you might have interviewed given a chance. I try to be precise and always include some open-ended questions to receive qualitative feedback that can answer the ‘why’ for me. If you think some freebee may attract them and can result in a faster turn around, attach that to your survey e.g if you are sending your survey to a segment of users who have bought TV recently you can attach a free one-month subscription to a popular TV service. Again, one has to be very careful while making such decisions and try not to imbalance the budget fulcrum.

4. Over-the-call user interview — This is an equivalent of an in-person interview but it saves you from– the expenses incurred in traveling to meet them, lab set-up to conduct an interview or even the awkwardness and nervousness participants face when you are continuously staring at them.
Talking to my users over the phone often gives me valuable information about their behaviors and needs, what difficulties they are facing in the existing situation and what will motivate them to use a possible solution.

5. Look for research studies online — There are many studies conducted by the various organizations including N&N group for popular products like e-commerce that are available online. These studies cover exhaustive learning about how users interact with these products, what drives them and what not. The good news is many of them comes with feedbacks and recommendations. So if yours is not a completely new idea there are chances that your competitor might be in the list of some of these studies and you can start by learning from their user experiences.

6. Previous researches — You can’t be in a better place if your design team has maintained a record of all their past studies. These can not only help you to get familiarize with your users, especially when you are new to the team but some of the specific ones can help you answer explicit questions about the users of the feature you would be working on. I always try to get hold of any previous research that has been conducted to discover early and swiftly.

7. Assume now test later — This last one is not a method but more of an approach. There are situations when I am not able to find out any substantial information about my existing users because of different reasons (like it’s a brand new concept or in most cases, it’s a B2B product). I work on tackling them by building assumption with my product counterpart and by making sure that we will definitely test them later in the process(not too late :)).

You are definitely lucky if you are getting a chance to meet your users at the very beginning of your design journey and you should take most out of the opportunity you are getting. Yet most of the time we have to move the needle with limited pieces and therefore learning a few tricks to attain the confidence to do so is always good.