How do you involve users in your day-to-day work?
Hand on heart: How often do you talk to your users?
According to books like “Continuous Discovery Habits” by Teresa Torres ideally, we should do that every week. That’s very often. If you do so: How do you manage that?
I am torn: On one hand, sure, it is very important to talk to users — I get it — but all in all with preparation time, the actual interview, the documentation, and the follow-up it takes half a day minimum. When talking to other product managers and UX/UI designers about the feasible regularity it seems there are a lot of opinions in the room.
So, I thought: Hey, why not open the room of opinions even wider and use the intelligence of the network.
I am curious about your way of handling this topic:
- How often do you talk to users?
- Why is that?
- What experience did you make?
- And which formats do you use?
My own experience
In fairness, I will share my experience as well. 😉
Working for XING we have the opportunity of talking to users every Tuesday and Thursday bi-weekly in a so-called User Feedback Coffee (UFC). In the UFC we meet up to 4 people and can talk with each of them for 13 minutes — since the Corona pandamic we are doing this via Zoom. All in all, we have the option to spend about 2 hours talking to users every second week.
Personally, I use this opportunity very often. But I can tell that using it every second week will keep you busy. So, I found my personal north star in between: Every time we have an assumption that we need to verify or when we build a new feature, product, or iteration, we use those UFC slots.
On top of that our dear colleagues from the User Care department ask users if they are willing to speak with us product managers about their struggles and general usage of our products. This also helps to understand our users better.
I lack an excuse not to talk to users
Every department, every product and every person is different. So, I asked some of my colleagues.
Lennard Maronde for example gave a very sincere answer:
I’ll be honest — I don’t speak to users often enough.
But to be fair to myself, I think it depends on the type of product you own and the part of the product lifecycle your product is in, as to how much user testing you need or even can do. When working on tech debt for example, improvements under the hood, the users might experience a decrease in page loading time — at most. I don’t think you need to do user tests. However, I like to use the time the developers focus on tech debt, to do some larger pieces of user research like ensuring the value proposition is still… well, creating user value.
I notice that I also catch myself thinking: ‘oh this little improvement doesn’t need to be tested’ when working on a feature. It’s not arrogance, more like the time pressure to get stuff live outweighs the need to do user tests. Here’s where that all important Product Manager ‘No’ comes in — the right to push back.
In my experience, setting up user interviews for start-ups and small companies is a tough task. Having the UFC here at XING is a luxury. Now I lack an excuse not to make use of it. Like anything, when you get into a rhythm, it becomes a routine and then it’s like breathing — a part of everyday life. So, my first step towards increasing user contact, is to speak to Svenja and see if I can reduce some of that setup time. 😉
I hope you got some inspiration from our side. And now, dear network intelligence, I am curious about your way of talking to users and your experience! :)
Feel free to share your insights in the comments!
I would appreciate a discussion about this topic.
Thank you!
And happy interviewing! 🙂
