10/36 - User Research 101: Navigating the Discovery Process

"If you're not talking to your users, you're not doing user research." - Erika Hall

Mar 19, 2023

What is user research?

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. This field of research aims at improving the usability of products, services, or processes by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User researchers often work alongside product manager, designers, engineers, and programmers in all stages of product creation and idealization.

User research is an iterative, cyclical process in which observation identifies a problem space for which solutions are proposed. From these proposals, design solutions are prototyped and then tested with the target user group. This process is repeated as many times as necessary.

User research is the act of interviewing prospective and actual users of your products to gain clarity on a number of objectives. You might use it to figure out why people aren’t adding recommended products to a cart, why they’re not clicking through your emails on mobile phones, or why adoption of your application has fallen significantly.

You may also be developing a new product or redesigning a website and know you want to do it differently this time around. All of these are great reasons to let your users tell you how they feel about your product.

Benefits of user research

Decrease costs in the long term; save on development and redesign efforts
Increase user satisfaction; deliver exactly what your target wants
Get qualitative feedback which helps you to improve user’s interactive experience increasing conversion rate
Understand what best supports user’s goals and motivations; focus on the features that really matter to your target
Gain a competitive advantage; stand out from the crowd, be always 1 step ahead of your competitors, create a “wow” effect
Shorten the learning curve for new users; make your product easy-to-use
Have not only a beautiful design but a smart one, putting your user in the center of your product strategy

User Research Methods

A wide range of research methods is available in the field of user research. To better understand when to use which method, it is helpful to view them along with a 2x2 dimensional framework with the following axes :

User research essentially splits into two subsets:

Qualitative research – Ethnographic field studies and interviews are examples of methods that can help you build a deep understanding of why users behave the way they do
Quantitative research – With more structured methods such as surveys, you gather measurable data about what users do and test assumptions you developed from qualitative research.

We can also split user research into two approaches:

Attitudinal – you listen to users’ words (e.g., in interviews).
Behavioral – you watch their actions through observational studies.

Usually, you can get the sharpest view of a design problem when you apply a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research as well as a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral approaches.

What is quantitative data?

Qualitative and differ in their approach and the type of data they collect.

Quantitative data refers to any information that can be quantified — that is, numbers. If it can be counted or measured, and given a numerical value, it's quantitative in nature. Think of it as a measuring stick.

Quantitative variables can tell you "how many," "how much," or "how often."

Some examples of quantitative data:

How many people attended last week's webinar?
How much revenue did our company make last year?
How often does a customer rage click on this app?

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research does not simply help to collect data. It gives a chance to understand the trends and meanings of natural actions. It’s flexible and iterative.

Qualitative research focuses on the qualities of users—the actions that drive the numbers. It's descriptive research. The qualitative approach is subjective, too.

It focuses on describing an action, rather than measuring it.

Some examples of qualitative research:

The sunflowers had a fresh smell that filled the office.
All the bagels with bites taken out of them had cream cheese.
The man had blonde hair with a blue hat.

The Context of the product use

Natural use of the product – the goal is to leave the user with a product and look at what he or she does. This provides greater validity but less control over what topics you learn about.
Scripted use of the product – is done in order to focus the insights on specific usage aspects, for example newly redesigned flow.
Not using the product during the study – studies, where the product is not used, are conducted to examine issues that are broader than usage and usability, such as a study of the brand, demand, etc
A hybrid of the above – allows users to interact with and rearrange design elements that could be part of a product experience, in order to discuss how their proposed solutions would better meet their needs and why they made certain choices. Concept-testing methods employ an approximation of a product or service that gets at the heart of what it would provide in order to understand if users would want or need such a product or service.

User interview questions

Here is a list of helpers I use when I build my user interview questions. I usually prefer to conduct semi-structured interviews. It means that I write a guide with the main questions and topics I want to ask about. But I might not totally follow this guide and dig into topics that users will bring up while talking to them. This makes it feel more like a conversation than guided interviews do. Even if I record/have a note-taker, I like to take my own notes during the interview. This lets me ask to follow-up questions on what the user said later. I also usually ask a few questions during usability tests, so here again, those questions are handy.

Those questions are for the core of the interview outside of your screener, demographic questions.

1. Open discovery questions

To keep the conversation going I want to ask open questions. Those questions are questions that require more than a single word answer (like yes/no). Avoid starting questions by “did you” / “have you” / “were you” and replace them with “why”, “how”, etc.

“Tell me about …”
“Could you describe to me how you… / your experience with…?”
Frequency and quantity: “How often do you…?” “How much/many…” (how much can also be used to probe-level of knowledge like “how much do you know about this topic?”)
“What … do you use/do?”
“Why do you …”

2. Understanding user tasks/activities

Here are a few starter questions that help me understand how people perform tasks and activities. Most of the time I work on a digital products, but those can apply to any type of task or activity.

“Can you describe how you / how you would [task]?”
“What are all the things you need to do in order to [task?]”
Sequence: “Walk me through [task], how would you?”
Comparison: “What is the difference between [task 1] and [other tasks]?”

3. Performing/showing

User interviews don’t have to be limited to questions you can also ask people to perform tasks.

“Please / can you show me how you … “ ask them to perform the task, share their screen, etc.
Role-playing: “Let’s pretend I’m a colleague who knows nothing about this, can you guide me so that I could do it myself afterward?” (a friend of mine likes to use “explain to me like I’m five years old”, I like the idea but it might not be good in some situations ^^)

4. Recalling the past / anticipating the future

You can ask people about events in the past. Be careful though: any event prior to a few days in the past might be distorted. People are Lazy, Forgetful Creatures of Habit. Also note that people have a hard time projecting in the future so, again, treat the replies to those kinds of questions lightly.

“Can you recall a situation when you …, what did you do?”
“Can you tell me about your most significant/ memorable experience/interaction with…?”
“How do you think … is going to help you?”
“Could you describe the ideal product/experience…?”

5. Opinions/points of view/attitude and projections

Those questions usually help me ask about opinions. Still, you need to bear in mind that opinions questions are highly susceptible to some biases. For example: courtesy bias is “the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone”.

“What do you think about …?”
“What do you like/dislike about…?”
“What would your friend/partner/colleague think of that?
“Some people …, other …, what is your opinion on that?”
“Last week I interviewed people who did // said … What do you think of that idea // how do you feel about this approach?

6. Talking about problems and pain points

Part of my job is to understand issues and pain points in order to try to solve them. Here are some questions that help.

“How does this problem impact you?”
“How did you solve that issue ?”
“What’s the hardest / most frustrating part about …?”
“If you had a magic wand, what would you change?”

7. Sentence completion and drawing

Last but not least I sometimes ask people to complete a sentence. I also ask them to draw something like a process, how they recall the interface, etc. Some people are more visual thinkers than others so it can really help. How many times did you end up in a conversation where someone just said “wait let me show you” and started drawing a chart to explain to you? 🙂

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