ARCHIVE: Combining user research techniques for new product design
Originally published: August 2018
Working toward a common goal
We all have a good idea of the difference between user research and market research but it’s worth making sure we have a shared understanding. User research is the study of people’s (users’) behavior, motivations and needs in a particular context, which affect how people understand and use things in their daily lives. Market research gathers and analyzes information about consumer preferences, wants and needs to identify potential markets for a product or service.
There is both overlap and divergence between the two fields in terms of techniques, objectives and outcomes. In this article, I will focus on how user research techniques can be employed to gain insight, to help shape product development to meet users’ needs and give everyone confidence that the right decisions are being made.
There are a wide variety of user research techniques for researching new products. Different techniques become more appropriate at different stages in the development process, from concept, prototyping, launch, iteration and eventual retirement.
When developing a new concept for a service or product, we use user research to understand where the needs of our users and potential users are being met and where there are gaps in the market waiting for something to be developed to enhance users’ lives. As the infamous quote about horses and cars attributed to Henry Ford suggests, people find it difficult to imagine and articulate what it is they want or need if we simply ask them what’s missing from their lives.
We use research techniques to identify the gaps and opportunities by understanding consumers’ behavior, their lives, where they struggle or where they have workarounds and hacks, such as using a product for something other than its intended purpose or being forced to depend on inferior products and services because superior alternatives aren’t available or affordable.
When is the right time to do user research in product development? The pragmatic (and simple) answer is: any time. The ideal answer is: all the time or, rather, as often as possible when user research will have the most impact and the greatest positive effect.
The right time to do user research not only depends on where you are in the development cycle but also what you want to find out, your objectives. To do effective research you need to be clear about the purpose of the research.
Stage 1: Discover
At the inception of a concept, after some initial thinking, you should be doing research to understand whether you are going in the right direction. By understanding the way people behave and think you will get an understanding of whether your concept is going to enhance their life somehow or solve a problem they are experiencing.
Stage 2: Define
If you now have evidence that it’s worth investing in the new concept, the research can indicate which options(s) will be most fruitful to pursue. This is when you can refine the concept of the product and its purpose. At this point, further research can be done more deeply into users’ behavior and thinking around the options available to them.
Stage 3: Develop
This is the stage where potential solutions, on a small scale (single features of a solution) or a large scale (a user journey), are prototyped and discarded or iterated based on evidence gained from appropriate participants during user research.
Stage 4: Deliver
Assuming the product continues to launch, when it’s out in the world, being used, there is never a bad time to do user research with the aim of understanding how it can be improved. If your analytics/feedback show that something isn’t working but it is not clear what the problem is, user research helps you to understand what’s going on. To ensure your product/service is still useful and usable, iterative user research will help you keep track of if and how you are meeting users’ needs.
Stage 5: Retirement
User research will also help you understand when it’s time to retire your product because, for example, users need something completely different.
Aims and objectives
It is useful to articulate and share with stakeholders (anyone somehow involved in the project), the aims and objectives of your research at each stage of development, whether the product/service is being developed in an agile, waterfall or other type of process. Get everyone to agree to them before you start putting effort into doing the research.
Who should take part in the research? As with market research, getting the right user research participants is key to getting high-quality data. Participants might include existing customers, potential customers, customers of rival products or those using products in adjacent markets. Essentially, people with appropriate behaviors, trying to achieve tasks and do things your product is aiming at. It is important that in each round of research you have a representative sample of users.
What techniques to use and when do I use them? I describe how and when to use various user research techniques in my book User Research, such as usability testing, contextual inquiry, ethnography, card-sorting, guerrilla research, etc. I also give some examples of combining different techniques since, as I’ve mentioned, this is particularly relevant when considering the whole development cycle. There isn’t one correct way to combine methods but there are some common ways of working. I have included an example here to give you an idea of how you could combine methods yourself.
Do some guerrilla research. You can quickly and cheaply gather some initial evidence and insight to demonstrate how users think and feel about a topic and how people behave and do things in the real world.
Hold a stakeholder workshop. Get all the relevant people in the same room at the same time to share the understanding of the current situation, pitch ideas, agree the scope of a project and gather initial requirements. You can use the evidence gathered from the guerrilla research to support the idea(s) being pitched and discussed.
Do some contextual inquiry or ethnography. Once you have internal agreement of the scope, it’s time to get feedback and insight from the actual users or potential users. You are validating (or overturning) stakeholder assumptions from the workshop and the initial guerrilla research and gaining insight into users’ behavior and their barriers. Depending on the time you have available you can choose another user research method suited to asking broad questions, finding out how things work in the real world, in a particular context.
Do some prototype usability testing. The contextual research will provide insight into whether the concept is worth continuing to develop and what direction that development could take. Once you have more fleshed-out ideas of the new product/service you can also do research on these. You don’t need to wait to have something tangible before you put it in front of users; for example, you can use sketches on paper that describe what you intend to do.
Iterate. The insight gained from usability testing should be used to improve the prototype, which can be tested again to validate the changes made. Once a new or improved product or service has been launched, the insight-improve-validate cycle should continue. You can to combine usability testing with guerrilla research as prototypes are iterated. Guerrilla research can quickly give insight into how small things (with a narrow focus) can be progressed and improved. It can highlight where issues are being experienced by users.
As the product/service progresses in the development life cycle, other user research techniques will be more appropriate but it very much depends on what you are developing and what you need to know. Keep in mind that guerrilla research should never be the only method used as it’s not rigorous or in-depth enough. It is, however, useful to combine it with other methods.
Not meeting user needs
I have seen products and services into which a great deal of development time and effort was invested fail to meet user needs because no one took the time to conduct user research.
When I was a consultant I worked with a retail client that had spent several months developing a highly interactive prototype to help users design rooms in their homes and place products from the retailer in a 3-D rendering of their room so that they could fully visualize how things would look. These interactive prototypes (built for touchscreens) were developed without user research. I was brought in to do some user research on the functions of the prototype and found that it was only partially meeting users’ needs. The idea was not completely wrong (although this can happen) but the product was much more complex than it needed to be. The retailer had not considered the needs of the users at an early stage. Participants felt it required too much time and effort to learn how to design a 3-D room to purchase items from the retailer considering how irregularly they would do so. They would have much preferred a 2-D bird’s-eye view layout which they considered quicker and easier to produce.
In these types of situations, however, keep in mind that when you are offering something completely new, you may want to start small and simple and iterate, adding new features over time as users start to incorporate your product or service into their lives. If you are innovating, pushing the boundaries and providing people with something they haven’t seen or considered before, you can change habits and behavior but this takes time as there is a certain amount of inertia to overcome. This reality should be considered when developing something new; it should inform your underlying understanding of users’ reactions during testing and after initial launch. If the product/service is providing a valuable experience for users, they will make the effort to learn the new ways. If they do not consider it valuable they will walk away and find something else.
Behavior and opinion
One of the key things to think about when doing user research is the difference between behavior and opinion. If you are looking to understand how people behave you can include a much smaller number of people in your research. Behavior in the context of services and products is about how people undertake and complete tasks; groups of people with a similar background and motivations for doing something are usually quite consistent.
We all like to think we are very different and unpredictable as people. This is simply not true. We all have a lot of learned behavior, shared cultural and societal understandings of how things work on both a macro (society) and micro (families, individuals) level. As you drill down (moving towards the micro level), smaller groups (user groups) that have been segmented in the right way will have similar experiences and therefore a shared understanding of how things work. Designers will already know this; this shared understanding is why we have design patterns for how to build things.
If you are doing usability testing, after a few sessions observing people doing the same tasks you will start to see a lot of repetition in how people behave and how they get tasks done. However, there might be quite a lot of variation in how they feel about it and what they think of the experience. Some of the difficulty with opinion is that people aren’t always willing to tell you what they think — or they don’t really know what they think. I have often heard in user research, when asking people what they think, something along the lines of, “Most people will struggle to buy gloves from this Web site and they won’t like it but I found it easy and enjoyed it because I am an Internet expert.” The truth is, most of the time we don’t really know what other people think.
Another point to consider: Sometimes it is obvious to participants when they have correctly completed a task, sometimes it is not. This will also affect their opinions and views on what they have done. If they don’t know exactly what success looks like — for example, it’s not as clear-cut as “buy a pair of gloves from this Web site” — they may not know they have failed the task and may feel they’ve had a very positive experience.
Done at each stage
User research can and should be done at each stage of the development of a product. There are multiple stages of any development cycle but the types of user research to be done can broadly be grouped in three main categories for product development teams: understanding potential users and their lives; working out what should be built next; and testing things that have been built.1 There are many different techniques that can be used but the right combination of user and market research methods, employed effectively, will help ensure that we get product development right at each stage, from concept to production to retirement.
