What is Strategic Research?

Together with the new training, we introduced the term strategic research, which stands for strategic approach to user research. Typically, user research is done once at the beginning of a project, when the client is almost forced to do so by his agency.

A strategic approach to user research means you have a process that you activate whenever you need to make a key decision and don't have enough information.

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I know this from my own company. As an owner, I often make decisions based on my assumptions that don't have much to do with reality. Sometimes it's cool, other times it costs me a lot of money. So I've added user research to key decisions to allow me to work with facts.

When we created houseofrezac.com, we didn't do any research. Then we did it and found that even our clients had no idea what we were actually doing and the website was not helping them with that. Although he won the WebTop100. It's a mistake.

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Do we need to make any key decisions about strategy, products, services?

1. Determine the purpose of user research
2. We choose the appropriate methods
3. We analyze the results

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Sometimes a few conversations with people on customer support or a questionnaire are enough. Sometimes it is necessary to delve deeply into the topic and it is necessary to talk with different groups of customers. Other times, keyword analysis or a few phone calls will help. It's not about methods, it's about whether you can make more qualified decisions based on the outputs.

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Strategic research requires that your internal staff have sufficient knowhow about researching people and are not just dependent on their design agency. In particular, it means that:

1. get an overview of the entire user research process
2. will be able to choose appropriate methods
3. gain basic experience with key methods
4. will be able to tell if they are able to implement the method

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Even if you have a lot of money and agencies do almost everything for you, it is advisable to do your research in-house. Otherwise, all the know-how about the customers will go away to you with the agency. Yes — you will be left with documentation, but a substantial portion of the insights come through personal experience with people out there.

And this is exactly what we solve in training Strategic Researchwhich is all built on practical exercises that you can immediately start using in practice.

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