It can be super fun to work with teams on unique and exciting products, but the real success of virtually any product begins and ends with the user. It’s as simple as this: no users, no product.
This begs the question, how can you create great products for your users?
When you incorporate great UX design principles into your product, your users will have a better experience. Great UX starts with great user research.
Excellent user research can help your team with scheduling and technical feasibility. It can also provide much-needed insights into your users with cross-functional applications (think of your marketing department).
Discover how to cater your products to your ideal users’ wants, needs, and challenges by conducting effective user research.
✏️ Thanks to our friends at Sprig for sponsoring this blog post! Blog illustrations by ls.graphics.
What makes ‘good’ user research?
User research falls into two categories. Quantitative research can be computed and calculated, focusing on numbers. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is about interviews and descriptions. Observation and interpretation can be made but cannot be calculated like statistics. While one research method is not “better” than the other, there can undoubtedly be good user research and bad.
The definition of “good” user research can vary depending on who you ask. Still, we have to admit there’s a big difference between enlisting your mom to test your bare-bones MVP and investing in a hyper-specific focus group. 😉
In a perfect world, all stages of the design process should be driven by user research. And the best research insights come from your actual users, as they experience your product.
After determining the target user, tests should be conducted at every stage to ensure the UX is on track. Of course, you can measure the effectiveness of your design after the product is released. Still, you’ll be more likely to hit a home run by following these three principles of ‘good’ user research:
- Test designs with actual users
- Learn how designs land in the wild
- Use automation to save time
Read on to learn more about each principle and how to make the most of your user research testing experience.
1. Test designs with your actual users (in minutes)
Testing is essential to ensure your designs and prototypes land with users, are easy to use, and are quickly adopted.
But you won’t always have time for 15 hour-long usability tests. That’s where remote, unmoderated testing can help get quick design feedback without a lot of effort.
Get specific by recruiting actual users within your product to take the concept tests. For example, you can test with new sign-ups, trial vs. paid users, and a variety of demographics or different user personas.
Testing with actual users is not as difficult as it seems. Sprig integrates seamlessly into your design workflow to provide a variety of video, text, and multiple-choice testing options. The process of recruiting users from your database is straightforward as well.
📌 Check out The UX Designer’s Guide to Concept Testing for more insight.
2. Learn how designs land with users in the wild
Your work doesn’t end when code is deployed. Survey your users in-context to continuously understand how to improve ease of use, reduce friction, and identify what changes to include in your next design sprint.
With in-context surveys, you can collect feedback from your customers after launching a new concept or design to ensure it always meets customers’ expectations.
Like your marketing team gets hyper-specific when creating ads relevant to your target audience, the UX team should look into specific user groups at critical points in their customer journey.
This is referred to as ‘Contextual Targeting’, and tools like Sprig can help your team capture hyper-relevant insights by targeting your actual users. For example, you can survey users during specific points in the customer journey (like onboarding) or after they have engaged (or not engaged) with a new feature.
Some great hyper-relevant questions you can ask your users include:
- How would you perform [task] if you wanted to?
- What did you find most/least important/challenging about this?
- Are there any things you would change/add/remove to make this more useful to you?
- Did you encounter anything unexpected or surprising?
- On a scale of 1–5, how [adjective] was this feature?
3. Automate your efforts
User research is traditionally tedious and time-consuming. From spending hours conducting and reviewing interview notes or transcribing video feedback into remotely usable snippets of information, user research can be a thoroughly draining process.
Using the right tools can turn a two-week-long research project into a two-day one. Connecting with the right users in a few seconds, bypassing hour-long zoom sessions, and automated analysis of test and survey results can help you get more user feedback without more of the tedious stuff you hate.
Great user research starts with the right tools
Great products start with great user research. The problem is that your product will never be relevant if you don’t know your users, their difficulties, and their motivations.
The right tools can help you design a user-friendly and relevant product for the market (while providing a return on investment), so your team can continue doing what they love: finding solutions. In addition to cutting down on time spent on user research, Sprig allows researchers to integrate directly with their products to streamline the process.
Want to learn more? Join leaders in the user research space by trying Sprig today and get valuable user feedback in just days. ■
Find more Process stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact [email protected].
