Our approach to the nexus of user research and user testing
WAO often starts projects with a bit of user research: asking your stakeholders and audience, users and even friends to give you some insight is always time well spent. After all, we all bring our own biases and experience, and user research can help surface some of those to better serve other people.
While there are, of course, specialised organisations and more or less complex user research projects, user research is something that you and your organisation can do yourself!. Even talking to five people about your project will give you a wealth of ideas and perspectives on how to improve things for your stakeholders.
In this post, we’re going to look at a few important considerations to make as you start the design of your user research. Read on to find out how you can bootstrap your first user research project.
Are you doing user research or user testing?
We use the term ‘user research’ when we’re trying to figure out how to serve users better, whereas ‘user testing’ is when you have a prototype and you want to observe how people respond to it. We often do research that sits at the nexus of these two things — we ask questions as well as showing prototypes and ideas. However, rather than simply observing how people use them, which is what you would traditionally do in “user testing”, we talk to people about what they are experiencing. This allows us to both test ideas while also deepening our understanding of our users’ needs.
Who are ‘users’?
The word ‘User’ is sort of a confusing word in the research context. Sometimes we are, indeed, talking to users of a platform or product, but more often than not, we’re talking to people who are involved in a programme or project, but not necessarily as ‘users’. If you are having trouble figuring out who to talk to, you may want to reframe the term ‘user’ into ‘participant’ and reconceptualise ‘user research’ as just ‘talking to people’. Having a structured conversation with the people you are trying to serve is how you can create systems, process and, yes, products that are relevant and valuable.
The goal of this kind of research is to understand what people need and want, and the behaviours they have. This can help make programme, project or product design better. It can also help your communication and marketing.
The first thing you’ll want to do when designing a user research project is to think about the types of people you are designing for and see if you can talk to them. Our Learn with WAO site has some activities to help you think about who these people are. Perhaps start with Stakeholder Mapping and then see if you can apply your learnings in the Persona Mapping activity.
Can you be more inclusive?
While you need to be targeted in the specific types of people you talk to, it’s also important to ensure that you have a diverse range of participants for your user research. It’s important to be inclusive, which means that you don’t overlook people or groups that you might not associate as ‘users’. Once you’ve figured out the stakeholders and/or spectrum of personas you want to talk to, make sure you have diversity in your pool.
Diversity and inclusion is an intentional act, so if you realise that you do not have a racially, geographically, social-economically and gender diverse group of participants, you’ll need to do more outreach. It is perfectly acceptable to contact people within your network to ask for help finding diverse participants. You can also use social media and hashtags.
Sometimes, we use what’s called “snowball sampling” to help us find more participants. We simply ask people who have already volunteered to participate if they know someone who might also be willing to participate. This works well, but beware, snowball sampling can actually lead to less diverse groups because of the way network effect works. It can also lead to ‘scope creep’ where your project ends up being much larger than initially defined. So watch out for that!
What kind of data should you collect?
Effective user research combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. While quantitative data provides measurable insights, qualitative research helps to understand the context and motivations behind user behaviours, leading to deeper insights.
One of the tactics we like is to use surveys first. This allows us to collect quantitative data as well as to expand our recruitment pool for user research interviews. We ask “May we talk to you more about your answers?” And if the survey respondent answers yes, we ask for their contact information.
Once you have people to talk to, you need a set of questions to ask. A user research guide helps you ensure some rigour and can be used to steer interviews. You need to avoid leading questions, questions that have the answer in the question (e.g. things like “Isn’t this prototype beautiful and easy to use?”) Use open-ended questions, neutral language and avoid assumptions. It can help to test your questions on friends or colleagues!
Another point to note is that, as you carry out the user research interviews, you’ll learn things about the project and about the needs and desires of participants. You will need to balance asking similar questions (for fairness and reliability), with perhaps slightly different ones as the landscape becomes clearer.
Next steps
In the end, user research is all about getting to know what your users need and want from your project, programme, product or service. The best way to get that information is to find a diverse group of people and talk to them in any way you can! Then, you can gather your data and present it in a way that tells a story about what your next steps should be.
Need help? We do this a lot, get in touch!