User research — A good-to-have or a necessity ?
How many times have you, as a User Researcher, been told:
“We know this is how it works because we have built similar products in the past.”
Yes, it is irritating and makes you feel defunct and powerless because these are “words of wisdom” born out of an experience.
Many businesses today fail to understand that their customers are people who don’t live inside a cocoon. People today, are constantly subject to innovations and that ends up influencing their thought process and judging criteria.
The myriads of apps and services that they are bombarded with on a day-to-day basis create newer and higher benchmarks within them. In turn impacting their judgment of what is good, bad, a good to have, a necessity or any such metrics that they may rely on when it comes to choosing or using any product.
With the coming of social media and SaaS applications, even the local diner can compete with McDonald’s and Burger king and give them a run for their money. The same applies to digital products. Users don’t think twice before shifting to an alternate product because of as simple a reason as difficulty in creating to-do lists in the app. Data migration can happen within days, implementation within weeks and just like that, your loyal customer paying you $ 1000 a month is gone.
In such an ever dynamic scenario age-old wisdom can only help you run sprints. But if you are in for the marathon, you better have the understanding of who is using your product and why.
How can you prevent your Armageddon
Suit up!! and go meet your users.
‘Why do you have to talk to customers? we already have so many other teams doing it already….’ will be the first thing that you might hear when you express your intention to do user research. Well, the answer is simple, the purpose of user research is to proactively try and understand users and their problems and avoid last minute firefighting scenarios.
All customer-facing functions (support, customer success, sales etc) in an organization are mostly doing 2 things, either it is firefighting issues that customers are facing or trying to reduce churn by listening to customers constantly complaining about customizing the solution to their specific needs. These teams might help you with information on what “a group” of high paying customers are expecting but never will they be able to provide you with the finer details of a user’s behaviour or their mental model.
User research, on the other hand, renders more qualitative context to the term “users” thus helping us to see them as living, breathing people with individual personalities, preferences, and priorities, reminding us that our product is not their life but just a part it.
Doing user research is not Rocket science
“If done right, even a month-long user research exercise can reap insights that will be useful for years to come.”
Research is generally shunned by product teams because of the misconception of it being a slow, long process that has no actionable outcome at the end. What they are missing is the fact that, User research is very different from traditional scientific research. User research is dirty and may not always follow the strict protocols of traditional research practices. A well-defined objective, 5–6 users and a robust interview protocol topped with good interview skills is all it takes to get actionable insights.
These insights remove uncertainties faced during problem-solving by providing more context about the target user. Helps teams visualize them in their actual setting and prioritise better. Accelerates the solutionizing process and reduces the number of design iterations and development effort needed to build a feature or product, thereby reducing go-to-market time. And last but not the least it helps identify and solve actual pain points of your majority user base and not just a high paying customer.
Conclusion
If you want your products to stand out in the crowd or a new feature is useful for your customers, design it for actual people. If you want to design for actual people, talk to them, meet them and try to understand them better.
User research is not a fancy good-to-have. It is a necessity.
