Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

Summary

A practical guide and crash course for conducting user research in the field of design and product development. Erika Hall covers everything from research planning and recruitment to executing interviews, analysis and synthesis and communicating insights. A must read for for early stage UX professionals who want a quick and dirty crash course as well as veteran professionals who need a quick refresher of research basics.

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Key Takeaways

• 1. Many organisations are largely responding to marketing, sales and the competition. User research is a customer-centric approach for product strategy that utilises systemic inquiry of iterative hypothesis and experimentation.

  This helps to:

  • Determine whether we are solving the right problem;

  • Identify small changes with huge potential influence;

  • Discover our best competitive advantages;

  • Learn how to convince customers to care about the same things we do;

  • See where our blind spots and biases are preventing us from doing our best work;

  • Figure out who in the organization is likely to tank the project.

• 2. Aggressively prioritize the highest-value users and defer less urgent research for when the software is being constructed.

  • Prioritize those user types whose acceptance of the product is critical to success and those who least resemble the software developers on your team. Go learn about them.

  • Recruiting and scheduling participants is the most difficult part, so always be recruiting. Set up windows of time with different participants every three weeks.

  • When you have them, you can either conduct an ethnographic interview to understand their behavior before the next round of development or do some usability testing on the current state of the application.

  • Use what you learn from the initial user research and analysis to create personas that inform high-level sketches and user stories.

  • Then, when the team is working on a feature that has a lot more engineering complexity than interaction design complexity, you can fit in additional evaluative research.

• 3. The better you know the current state of things and why they’re like that, the better you will be positioned to innovate.

• 4. Analyze and model data quickly and collaboratively.

• 5. Keep your biases in check when conducting user research so that the insights are as close to the customer’s truth as possible.

  Biases can include habits, beliefs and attitudes that you can carry into the interview and through the analysis process including design bias, sampling bias, sponsor bias, social desirability bias as well as the Hawthorne effect.