User Research

One of the core activities in UX is conducting user research. Research helps you refine your understanding of how users will interact with a product, what they'll think, and even what they'll feel.

User Research

One of the core activities in UX is conducting user research. Research helps you refine your understanding of how users will interact with a product, what they'll think, and even what they'll feel.

The idea that we should focus on what users are feeling when they're using our product might strike you as weird or silly, but it's actually the ultimate way to zero in on building the right thing. If users enjoy using your product, they'll use it often, maybe purchase it if that's the business model, tell their friends about it, write epic poems about it...

When users use a product, they're constantly making both conscious and unconscious observations about their experience:

• "This is frustrating—I'm trying to go back, but I can't!"

• "This is so neat—I can slide here and see the graph change right away!"

• "I really wish I could see that other table right next to this one to compare them directly."

We should always try to anticipate how our users will experience our product—but ultimately, we'll never be able to anticipate everything. That's why user research can be so useful—it lets us cheat by getting more information!

User Research Methods

Let's say you're working on a product that lets homebuyers shop and apply for a mortgage. How would you conduct some user research to point you in the right direction?

Discovery

Discovery is usually the first step in UX design research. It focuses on finding or generating some initial information to get oriented about a problem space and the people facing those problems.

Discovery is broad and often purposefully open-ended; you're just trying to figure out: "what's going on here?"

Common tools for discovery include:

• reading articles and studies (e.g., about the housing market, the mortgage lending industry, public policy...)

• interviewing people facing a problem you're interested in solving with your product (e.g., recent, active, or potential homebuyers) or people adjacent to those problems (e.g., interviewing someone working for a mortgage lender to learn more about the mortgage application process)

• holding workshops with various combinations of stakeholder groups (stakeholder: anyone with a "stake" in the development process)

• gathering data (e.g., from real mortgage applications)

• taking notes based on your own experiences (e.g., applying for a mortgage)

Exploration

Exploration is a bit less open-ended than discovery, and involves actually diving into the information you've generated.

Usually, a major goal of the exploration process is feature mapping—linking the user needs you've identified to potential features to build in your product.

Common tools for exploration include:

• defining personas of representative groups of potential users based on the data you've got (e.g., "Thomas is a 41-year-old bitcoin miner with a credit score of...")

• drafting user stories (which you'll do in Labs!) to put yourself in the perspective of your users for each action they'll need to take to solve their problems (e.g., "As a user, I can specify a desired APR and see how much I'd have to pay in points to get that rate.")

• prototyping early ideas for key areas of your product, possibly interactive (e.g., a clickable mockup of a rate comparison page)

Testing & Feedback

Testing is checking the performance of your application with specific metrics in mind; feedback is putting something in front of users to see how they react and/or what they say about their experience.

Common tools for testing & feedback include:

• usability testing to see what users say about how easy it was to accomplish their goals (e.g., "I felt like it look a lot of clicks to get to the part where I could finally view the rates.")

• deploying heatmaps to see where users move their mouse, click, or even look while using a version of your product (e.g., "Wow, look how much red is over the rate comparison button! We're really driving users effectively toward taking that primary action.")

• user surveys to gather any other qualitative information (e.g., "How clear were the visualizations of interest rates over time?")

• analytics for a deployed product (e.g., the number of daily active users (DAU))

Use these methods based on your best determination of when and with whom they'll be most relevant, based on the context, timeline, and goals of your product.