User research

User (marketing) research is a set of activities that allow you to obtain the basis for better decision-making. It makes sense to make it at the moment when there is some important, expensive or risky decision in front of you that you would otherwise build on your assumptions and intuition.

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45 minutes of user research at Barcamp Ostrava

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I want to help you think better about your next project. User research alone cannot be learned by reading -- the article will give you an overview and allow you to stop and reflect. But it does not give you the competence to carry out the research itself.

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Razor-sharp user research

1. What is User Research
2. Barriers to user research
3. User Research Process
4. Conclusion and sources

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The structure of the article, by the way, is the same as the training Strategic Research. So much for the introduction, let's get to the point.

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What is User Research

Your project must be based on people's needs. If not, it becomes a black hole for money and can damage your brand — regardless of how well it is guided or what methodologies it is based on (agile is divine, but without meeting people's needs, it spins like dirt in a bucket; lean too). It doesn't matter if you're doing software, setting up a coffee shop, or planning a strategy.

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User research is a set of activities that help you peer into the heads and hearts of people out there and reveal to you with varying degrees of certainty their needs, fears, myths, or behaviors. It is a tool through which you can inform your decisions and increase the chances of success of the project.

1. He is at the birth of a new business, a new service
2. It is the basis of marketing strategy
3. Based on insights from research, you can set up brand communication or website
4. Allows you to innovate

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Without user research and its methods, you are blind and can only hope and believe. It doesn't matter if you're a mom at a maternity hospital, a corporate executive, or a freelance marketer. You either have facts or conjecture. As Alberto Savoia, author of Pretotype It, wrote:

• 90% of mobile apps don't earn a duck
• 4 out of 5 startups lose money to investors
• 80% of new restaurants will close within a year

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Without user research, you build your entire investment on assumptions. And as most new business owners have found out -- unless you're in a booming market, faith doesn't work very well.

User research has no ROI (return on investment) per se because it just brings facts to the table. What matters is what you do with those facts.

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People need to be understood because you don't control them

If your business is to succeed, it needs to fit into the lives of customers, help them solve a problem, or move them forward in what they do. This does not mean that there is no need for luck, entrepreneurial willingness to take risks or iterative/incremental approach. But none of that works if the cornerstone is based on faith and not reality. Reality is completely independent of your assumptions.

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Example: Marketing Festival

Jindřich Fáborský wanted to create the largest marketing conference in Central Europe. Before entering the first year, he interviewed more than 140 people via e-mail and 32 people in person on the topic of the ideal conference. And the Marketing Festival was born, which is experiencing its sixth year this year and is the largest and most prestigious marketing event in the region. This does not mean that at its birth there was no need for entrepreneurial acumen, luck, marketing communications or sensible work with cashflow. But user research helped Jindra make the decision that had an impact on the success of the entire project.

Jindra extra shared insights from the research and as a result, he strengthened his authority and credibility. If you want to find out, Why People Go to Conferences and What an Ideal Conference Should Look Like, so feel free to read on his blog.

But not all projects work that way. Why? Let's continue with the barriers to user research.

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Barriers to user research

Did you do user research on your last project? Probably not. A not inconsiderable amount of people would rather slip their pants down than have a chat with a single person out there. What are the most common barriers to user research that I encounter? Part of it is based on overconfidence, part on imaginary pressure, part on ego fear.

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We don't have money

I've met a significant number of people who would rather put a thousand hours of programming and another thousand hours of their own time into an amazing new e-shop/project/web/ “innovation” than put the first hundred hours into verifying that the idea is as good as they assume.

No small part of them did not work out. This is not about money, but about ignorance or overconfidence. You are gaining knowledge by reading this article. We will return to self-assurance.

Well-done user research coupled with a sound design methodology reduces the risk of losing your entire investment and therefore saves you money.

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When in the project money truly are not, that makes it even better. The contracting authority must put in its own energy. So he has no choice but to go research people on his own, which he will pay back many times over — if he invests in building his own competencies before. From well-done user research, his business can benefit for years.

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We are clear

“Our regular customer is a woman, 25-55 years old. “

Perhaps that knowledge is of some use to you. Why did your last 5 customers choose you? Personal recommendations! Alright. Why were you recommended? That's already harder. Okej. How was the decision-making process going? Who had an advisory vote? Why didn't it work out in the other 5 cases? And why else did you fall out of selection before they even approached you? What do they ultimately expect from you? And many other questions...

Are you sure of the answers? For me, this is always a great signal that something is wrong. Either I have purposefully obtained data in my hands, or there is a good chance that I do not know, that I do not know, that I do not know.

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Carry yourself with confidence as you see fit.

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We don't have time

Projects have deadlines. That's fine. Only in an extremely small number of cases do they have fixed and insuperable deadlines. Deadlines can be negotiated and shifted. Since you did not anticipate the need to do any user research, it is logically not in the project plan and risks and impacts need to be discussed.

“In the end, UX research is a business tool to mitigate risk.” — Kelly Goto

If the deadlines are fixed and not exceedable, adjust the scope of the project. In the case of web projects, we typically quickly launch a one-page website based on client assumptions. This buys us the time we need for a total redesign built around user research. Something similar might work in your field.

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We have misconceptions

Some of the clients, under user research, imagine students giving questionnaires to people in the streets and asking them what they would like. Logically, they then argue that it's useless. Or imagine expensive user testing in the lab. Or a cross-population questionnaire.

Throw away your ideas. User research has hundreds of methods through which you can collect data. You need to choose the right ones for your project at the right time. It's not about one method! It's not about one iteration. It's about getting information to make better decisions.

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We do not give importance to research

User research has a fundamental problem -- it can't be seen. We all see at first glance that the web has graphics or content... less behind them we perceive the editorial system. Everything is created on the basis of an assignment that is directly based on your strategy and understanding of people through user research.

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User research is invisible, so it is possible to skip it. The opposite is true — many parameters of your website depend precisely on the quality of user research...

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Steve Jobs

But Steve Jobs didn't do user research! Seriously? Let us allow the most qualified to speak for a minute.

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Steve already admits in the first minute that he does user research. Steve Jobs not only did user research, but even gleaned insights from it! Do not believe everything that is said — a brilliant designer who somehow invents everything is only in fairy tales.

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We are in B2B

That's great. You trade with people, not companies and that's why it's key to understand them. In the case of B2B, some part of the people will decide whether to cooperate with you and another part will actually use your services. You need to know both groups and recruiting respondents can be a bigger hassle than in B2C.

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We are a corporation

Congratulations, you have the money and time to research! Your stakeholders probably don't want it (yet). Your first task will be to convince them that it makes sense. To do this, you need to understand them and give them what they need... for example through user research methods!

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Our customers are too posh

Even classy people want to be heard. Yours don't want to? In principle, it does not matter — sometimes a person does not have good access to people, sometimes he does not have time, sometimes quantitative data is poorly sought. There is no point in whining about it — you need to work with what is available.

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We are “Other League“

Probably the worst excuse to user research I've heard. User research is just for the Cutters because it's a different league. Do your clients really want to throw money out the window for a dysfunctional solution? I keep my fingers crossed.

Do you know other barriers? I'll be glad if you share them with me. I'm becoming a collector of user research barriers.

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User Research Process

I've done 35 interviews with potential clients. I'm still going to make 15 of them because 50 is a nice number. I ask people how it works for them, present them with my idea, and ask them if they would buy it and how much they would be willing to pay for it. Parts of them like my idea. Part of it tells me she wouldn't use him. I have not recorded any of the interviews, I do not have a plan for how to analyze them, I do not know what type of information I need to obtain and how much I want to be sure in order to continue with the project. What now?

And now you are in a situation where you have put out a large amount of energy and it is for the most part useless to you. The story above is by no means alone — it is a story of user research carried out by self-help without knowledge and competence by an enthusiast who wants to succeed but does not know that he does not know that he does not know.

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How does user research work?

Different projects require different approaches to research, different methods of data collection, different levels of cooperation with contracting entities. However, the structure of user research is generally the same:

1. You set the intention
2. You collect data
3. You analyze them

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That's it.

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Let's go through one point at a time and start with intent. What do you want to find out by user research? Your intention determines not only what you research, when you research it, but also who you need to recruit and what data you need to obtain. The intention may be to list your hypotheses about your new site. Or a research question. Just write a sentence in the form:

I want to find out _____________________.

I want to find out how people choose cell phones online. I want to find out how high school students make decisions about choosing a college. I want to find out which factors affect a repeated visit to the hairdresser. I want to find out why people go to coffee shops. I want to find out if people have a problem using this mobile app.

Generally you want to find out something about some group of people out there. It's a good idea to find out what's bothering you -- the moment it's bothering you -- rather than just digging into stock or doing regular Friday interviews. As soon as you have a clear intention, you can decide on the choice of methods for data collection.

User research without intent makes no sense. One consultant asked me at the training if he had properly composed questions for the interview. I asked him what he wanted to find out. There was no need for further dialogue. No matter which research method you use, no matter how well you ask questions, you are lost without intention from the start.

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Data collection methods

Do you have an intention? It's time to explore! User research includes hundreds of methods through which you can collect data. You can find some of them in Czech on the website 100Metod.cz, which is managed by KISK ARTS MUNI (people from Masaryk University). I often encounter the following methods:

• Secondary research
• Customer Support Analysis
• Online Questionnaires
• Sociological questionnaires
• Interviews
• Pop-up research
• Observations
• Focusgruppe
• Diary Studies
• Safari service
• Pretotypes and experiments
• A/B tests
• User testing
• Analysis of people's behavior
• Mystery shopping
• Flask tests
• Heuristic analysis
• Benchmarking

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Each method has its pluses and minuses. None is primarily good or bad. Your goal is to combine methods so that you get data that will help you with your intent while staying within the project limits. Sometimes there are seriously no people, time or competence.

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The methods can be viewed from several angles, the basic division is a quantitative and qualitative approach.

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Quantitative methods

• They say how much is of something
• You measure the things you know about
• You need at least hundreds of respondents
• They are statistically conclusive
• Example: questionnaire

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Qualitative methods

• It tells you WHY something is happening
• You find things you don't know about
• You only need units of up to dozens of respondents
• Statistical conclusions cannot be drawn from them
• Example: in-depth interviews

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A portion of people do not recognize qualitative research because it is not statistically conclusive. meh. As I wrote before, no method is universally good or bad. A well-conducted conversation reveals to you things you don't know that you don't know. And when you don't have a clue about something, you can't quantify it. On the other hand, if you do 10 interviews and 5 people tell you X, that doesn't mean 50% of people say X. You can't make quantitative conclusions from such a small number. How correctly you guess quality and quantity must be combined.

But this is not the only division. Let's move on to the next one — finding out reactions or attitudes.

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We find out attitudes

• People tell us what they think
• We have to ask them correctly
• Potentially there is a big distortion
• Surprisingly, people lie often
• Example: in-depth interviews

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We observe the reactions

• People show us how to do something
• When we give them a task, we have to do it right
• The presence of the observer distorts the reactions
• We need something we can observe.
• Example: user testing

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Reactions tell you what people do, attitudes can reveal to you why they do something. For a variety of reasons, it doesn't make sense to ask people directly why they do something (it's a very challenging analytical question, and the answers will only show the picture a person has in their head of themselves, not the real reason they're doing something). Again, it is advisable to combine reactions and attitudes.

There are a lot of methods, but on many projects you can use only a few. For web projects, these are typically the following four.

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You find out from interviews what you don't know that you don't know. Questionnaires allow you to quantify conclusions or get input, e.g. through the web. Analytics will show you patterns of behavior. User testing reveals the real trouble spots of the site. You will also use keyword analysis that affects the information architecture of the site, customer support analysis or other methods...

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How to choose suitable methods for your project?

This basically depends on two factors — your intention and your project limitations. A project for a local company with tight time and budget without access to people will simply use different methods than a project for a mega-corporation with its own team of researchers and 30 states under the basic plan (and the subsequent expansion of research across continents). Of course, the experience of the team conducting the research is also included in the project limitations.

As Jan Chipcase says — there is a difference between conducting a conversation and conducting a conversation in such a way that you have valid and useful insights from it. This, of course, applies to all methods of obtaining data. But you will only find out in time, so let's not worry about it now (and more than practical training chi design collaboration I can't do it for you at the moment).

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Example — Brno.cz

The City of Brno has hired us to increase citizens' satisfaction with the city's websites. As part of the research, we used data from analytics, conducted a series of interviews with stakeholders, officials and citizens, conducted several online questionnaires,... we then tested the outputs — information architecture through tile tests, the web qualitatively with the citizens of the city and even created a benchmark of citizens' satisfaction with the city website through NPS and SUS methodologies. Gradually and iteratively.

To top it all off, you definitely won't find out everything with user research on sites. That's why we created Audit of the site, where we will go through your site from hundreds of different angles and find possible trouble spots that we would not have discovered with research.

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Data Analysis and Synthesis

Data analysis and synthesis occurs by putting data, observations, and attitudes in one place and trying to find patterns in them. We have been successful in doing analysis and synthesis in a group in the form of workshops — we come up with more things than if an individual were doing it. There are a number of ways to do this, you can try for example those used by IDEO agency.

You will soon find out that different people are different. They have their motivations, needs, fears,... don't let that discourage you and try to find what unites and differentiates them. You can then abstract the most prominent groups of people or their behavior into some form of documentation (value proposition canvas, personas, Jobs To Be Done,...) as needed by the project.

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User research is iterative

The user research process acts as a one-time affair. You use user research whenever you need to get data to make decisions. It means exploring iteratively. Very quickly, you will find that the questions you got answers to caused you to have better questions now (and sometimes still few answers).

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User research should have timeless outputs and therefore you need to store the data somewhere and in some form so that you can use it in the long term — both in the form of documentation, and the second in the form of raw data, insights or conclusions from workshops.

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Collaboration with researchers

If I modded you down for saying that user research makes sense, you've certainly wondered what now. My philosophy is fairly simple -- the contracting authority should be part of the implementation of user research and, if it has competence, should carry it out itself. You probably do not have the competence today, so it is appropriate get the knowhow and seek help from specialists.

The research itself doesn't make sense--it just provides the basis for decisions. That's why you need to work with researchers who bring data and designers to help you design a solution and test its correctness. You can only use a Senior Researcher Soloist when you have your own design team.

IN House of Řezč We work with the method of paired design, where one designer is closer to research and the other to interaction design. The project is then planned and implemented by the pair from start to finish. And above all, we research together with you, if you are interested in doing so.

Erika Hall says outsourcing user research is like outsourcing vacations. Slides or personas create an order of magnitude less empathy towards people than the experience of an interesting interview or test, because there are many non-transferable aspects in it. People need to be experienced firsthand.

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In conclusion...

If you don't know about something, you can't drive it. I am faced with the waste of money by clients and agencies on meaningless projects based on erroneous assumptions (for example, such characters created in a workshop in 4 hours are fantasies and not descriptions of reality). This article gives you at least a basic overview of user research and you will be better able to decide whether to include the research in your next project.

For those interested in user research, I have mentioned several times practical training, on which we go through not only research planning, but mainly interviews as a basic qualitative method. I also do it internally for companies. If by chance there is no deadline, write me an email. And above all, stop addressing why this is not possible and go out to research people in a targeted manner.

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Resources for further study

• Creation of the site in 2019 (long article)
• Training Strategic Research
• User research—recording of a lecture at the barcamp in Ostrava 2018
• Erika Hall: Just Enough Research
• Steve Portigal: Interviewing the Users