Taking Your Product Design to the Next Level: How to Make the Most of Your User Research Efforts
In order to stand out and gain market traction, organizations are increasingly turning to user research to discover and understand their unique customer needs and product experiences. User research studies provide invaluable information that product teams can use to inform and evaluate the work they are doing, but conducting a study that delivers the insights they need is not always straightforward.
This article provides tips on establishing the essential groundwork of user research, what questions to ask in order to make better decisions faster, and example methods on how to integrate user research into your product’s design process.
Making Good Decisions: The Essential Groundwork of User Research
At any given time, there are multiple members of your team making decisions about your product throughout the development process—from the collective team making big-picture strategic decisions to the individuals making the smaller, day-to-day decisions.
Depending on your starting point and project goals, these decisions are weighted differently. Some projects are innovative and aim to do something never done before; others iterate on existing products with new features and updates. Furthermore, the basis of these decisions can come from a variety of sources. Some are legitimate, like analytical data and previous user studies. Others are less substantiated, like following trends or personal interests.
Whatever the case may be, the goal of any user research study is to improve the quality of decisions by providing information on user behavior. These findings are meant to inform the work, whether it’s done at the strategic or individual level, or for an innovative project or updating an existing one.
It’s not enough to just run studies and then cherry-pick which ideas get pushed forward. To truly embed user research into the product development process—and prevent findings from being dismissed at a later date—you have to make the case for how user research can truly improve the product experience (and essentially, the bottom line).
How User Research Fits into the Product Design Process
To understand how user research can help product teams make sound decisions, it’s important to understand the product design process first.
At Product Creation Studio, our internal product development process is guided by ISO 13485:2016, which enables us to identify and address critical design issues, mitigate risk, and validate the effectiveness of designs. This process minimizes schedule delays and costly development mistakes and ultimately makes safer products with high consumer adoption.
Our product design process involves the following phases:
Frame: Find and clearly define the problem.
Create: Conceptualize solutions to fit the problem and test as needed. Here, we consider multiple product dimensions like time, budget, technical constraints, ethical impact, user impact, and expertise required (i.e., product risk).
Develop: Engineer the best product solution and refine as needed.
Deliver: Transfer the design system and offer ongoing product support.
When we apply user research to the product design process, we seek to understand: What is the impact on the user? Does the proposed solution deal with a real-world problem? Does the product work as intended for the people using it?
What Are We Trying to Learn? How Different User Research Methods Help Us Make Better Decisions
Let’s look at this product design process again to understand how different user research methods can better inform product decisions.
1. Frame Phase: Find and clearly define the problem.
If you don’t have a clear and thorough understanding of your users, their needs, and their environments before you start design work, you risk designing a poor solution that doesn’t fit the intended use case, which leads to low adoption and a failed product. Understanding the audience early in product development will lead to better decisions about what to design and what to spend time and money on first.
Questions to Answer
In this phase of the product design process, we ask questions like:
What are users trying to accomplish and in what context?
Why is this outcome important for them?
What makes that difficult with products currently on the market?
Where are there gaps and pain points?
User Research Methods
Possible user research methods to find these answers:
Competitive analysis: Look at the competition and evaluate their solutions. This method is helpful to see where your solution has the potential to be better than the current market offerings.
Ethnographic studies: Also commonly referred to as “field studies” or “contextual inquiry,” ethnography allows you to observe users in their own environment and ask questions in context as they arise.
User interviews: Create a discussion guide, schedule users to interview, ask questions, and get some answers (qualitative feedback). The more you talk to potential users, the more in-depth you can get, which often leads to more questions that weren’t a part of the original discussion guide and deepen your understanding.
2. Create Phase: Conceptualize solutions to fit the problem and test as needed.
Next, the product team will come up with a variety of solutions and design explorations for your product, then present them in user studies. The findings of these studies will inform what to change and which concept or features to iterate on, and those decisions are backed by data that comes directly from your users. This approach helps the team further evaluate ideas before locking them into a design or prototype.
Questions to Answer
In this phase of the product design process, we ask questions like:
Does this solution fix the problem? Does X or Y feature meet users’ needs?
How easy is it to use?
Do people like it?
In cases where you’re comparing different versions of a prototype, which version do users prefer?
How are people using it (e.g., their position on an instrument)?
User Research Methods
Possible user research methods to find these answers:
Usability testing: At this point, you have some kind of prototype or interaction you want feedback on, so prep the materials and write out the flow of what you’re going to test with users. This is how you’ll learn if your design concepts have potential.
It’s a good idea to write discussion guides for these studies, too, so that it’s clear in your notes what is going to happen and when. Prepare a notes sheet with all the spaces you’ll need to capture data. Schedule users and have them come in for the study one at a time. (Don’t have multiple people in one session unless that’s part of the interaction you’re testing because they will unduly influence each other’s feedback.)
A/B Testing: Use this when you have 2-4 prototype versions that you want to compare. You can use results to help decide which versions to move forward with, or mix and match the best aspects of different versions to make an improved version to test again later.
3. Develop Phase: Engineer the best product solution and refine as needed.
Now, the team will create prototypes to further test the chosen product design with users. This approach allows the team to validate that the design meets user needs and refine its implementation or change course if needed.
Questions to Answer
In this phase of the product design process, we ask questions like:
Is the product design moving in the right direction?
Did any of the changes cause new problems?
Does the design meet user needs?
Is this product ready for production?
User Research Methods
Possible user research methods to find these answers:
Continued usability testing with prototypes: As your design evolves, keep testing with users to make sure you stay on the right track. Toward the end of this phase, the higher fidelity of your prototypes will also allow you to get feedback on how people feel about the product and whether they can see themselves using it in real life (whereas the previous testing may have focused more on concepts, interactions, and finding the right solution).
4. Deliver Phase: Transfer the design system and offer ongoing product support.
In this phase, we transfer the design system to your team to prepare for production and market release. While it might be easy to assume your product is done once it’s on the market, ongoing strategic activities—through the lens of user feedback—can help you find and address problems quickly, identify successes, provide you with direction for future updates, and stay ahead of the competition.
Questions to Answer
When you have a completed product on the market, it’s beneficial to ask questions like:
How do users feel about the product?
How can this (older) product be updated to better fit the needs of today’s users?
Will this update enhance the adoption or engagement of the product?
User Research Methods
Possible user research methods to find these answers:
User interviews: Get users’ input and impressions of your product, what they value in competitors’ products, and how your product fits into their lifestyle.
Surveys: To get feedback from a larger sample size than is reasonable with in-depth qualitative studies with a moderator, you can launch a survey with simple (mostly close-ended or quantitative) questions for your users. Their aggregate responses can provide stakeholders either with confidence that a design is effective or insight into what needs to be improved or explored further.
The Big Picture: What is the lifetime value of your product?
In real life, the product development process does not always follow this outline linearly, and there can be a lot of variation between the user research methods. Regardless of how your particular project plays out, conducting user research provides you with a combination of data and insight that allows you to create a bigger picture of how your product can attract, retain and engage your users.
In addition, it gives you a clear sense of where you could be doing better, and what you should tackle next—all driven by a deep understanding and holistic view of your customers.