Whether you are a product owner, a stakeholder, or a service designer, it is essential to plan your project ahead of time. It is precisely the same with user research. There is a clear step-by-step process to go through before starting research.
The process may vary depending on the stage or the phase you are. I highly recommend you look at whether you require user research at an early stage.
Skipping the discovery phase is common. Once you arrive in alpha, or even close to the beta phase (see Chapter 2), user research ends up being rushed. Ideally, user research should occur at the beginning (see Chapter 2).
Process before starting a user research project
Before Starting
What are you trying to build, solve, or sell?
What is the reason for creating this new service or product?
You may want to sell a new product and have to create a new section on your current e-commerce site.
It may be that you already introduced a new product, but the stats do not show any sales.
You may want to reduce the amount of email your employees get and want to improve collaboration in your organization, so you want to put in place a new intranet that will solve those issues.
Sometimes you want to replace an existing product or get a new supplier.
Is there any legacy product?
Once you know what you are trying to do, it is essential to find out if your company is currently providing some service already.
Do you have a current online platform? Or a website? Or an agency? Or an existing supplier? Find out what the current situation is so you know if you will need to integrate any software or if you have to build onto something that is already there.
What are the implications of getting a new supplier?
Is it a service? Or is it a product? What is the difference?
If it is a service, is it a digital service or a nondigital service?
If it is a product, do you have any competitors?
If it is a new product, you need to evaluate if there are any competitors on the market, what they have done, what they are currently doing right, and what they are currently doing wrong. Are you planning to improve your current product or service? What is the reason for wanting to do it?
Working with Your Team and Getting Support
If you are a product owner, you need to make sure that all of the people working on the project are also involved in deciding to do some user research.
I highly recommend you discuss with a senior person or head of research who can advise you on whether you need some user research. Getting advice at this stage is necessary; the senior or head user researcher can provide you with arguments that will be useful for your business case. If you have an internal user research capability, it should be quite easy for you to access user researchers. But if you don’t have any user researchers in-house, it is always possible to contact user researchers through research communities, at UX events, or even through LinkedIn or Twitter.
Some people, such as event contractors, freelancers, or research agencies, are willing to discuss possible projects if you contact them.
I am always available to provide advice to prospective clients or even startups that can’t yet afford user research. Also, I can recall several occasions when I gave a lot of advice and even provided research plans in meeting and then later found out that those companies implemented my plan with internal employees, junior, interns, etc. Unfortunately, people who don’t have experience will probably take the wrong approach and even provide results that may be wrong. Relying on the recommendations made by nonexpert researchers may lead a project to failure.
Dismissing User Research
User researchers will probably not go in the direction that you expect. The user researcher is there to challenge assumptions, gather evidence, and make a clear account of who the users are, what their needs are, and that the product or services you are trying to build is usable by everyone. On many occasions, I see product owners or other stakeholders not happy with the research results, as it does not support their assumptions. Researchers receive criticism frequently that their results are not welcomed and sometimes dismissed.
Once I was introduced to a financial company specializing in currency exchange. They asked me to plan some user research, and they were very interested in it. I spent several meetings at their office. One day, a lead designer came into the organization and said, “We can fix everything with a new design. We know our clients; we don’t need user research.” The company took a significant risk to rely only on design, and the user journey is still broken today as the design could not fix all the problems.
In this case, the designer was overconfident, and in my opinion, he took a significant risk by dismissing user research. This was not to save money; it was more to avoid feedback that wasn’t supporting the creative idea of the design.
In other cases, the motivation not to involve user research is to save money. User research costs money, it takes time and expertise to plan, and the researcher has to identify the real users, to choose the appropriate methodology, to collect and analyze data, and to extract significant findings that will be translated into actionable recommendations.
By dismissing the importance of conducting proper user research, it shows a lack of respect for the profession. Without realizing it, a company will waste its time by not doing or involving user research correctly. Finally, they will probably spend more money trying to fix problems that could be avoided in the first place if they did proper user research up front.
I understand it is always challenging to find a budget for user research, especially for startups and small businesses, but when large organizations decide to take shortcuts, it will have a boomerang effect.
Do You Need User Research?
From a user research perspective, this is one of the most critical questions to ask. Who are the current users, and who are the prospective users? How old are they, what is their gender, and why will they use the service or the product? Who are they? The first question to ask yourself, is “Does my product/service involve users?” If it does not include end users, you will probably not require any user research. This sounds logical, but some stakeholders want to do user research even if the product does not involve any participants. On the other hand, if your product or service involves some users such as employees, customers, students, citizens, etc., you will likely need to consider doing some user research.
What Do You Already Know?
If you want to save some money and if you have the resources internally, you can start by looking at what is already there. Many organizations have done some research in the past; it could have been in the marketing, social behavior, or analytics department. Reports may be stored somewhere. Any data you have is handy.
If you are in the alpha, beta, or live phase, you should already have some information from the discovery phase. You may realize that no user research has been done in the previous phases, and this is probably the time to start, since you don’t have enough knowledge about the users and their needs.
You may have some marketing information about your clients. What do you know about them? What don’t you know? Once you have gathered all the available information, you can find out what you don’t know; this is the time to identify the gaps and priorities that you want to find out.
Identify the Gaps
Identifying the gaps is the starting point of conducting user research and finding out what you don’t know. You may think you know your clients, from a salesperson’s perspective, but do you know when the users are using your product? Which devices do they use? It is probably better to identify this sooner rather than later. What is the current user journey? Is there any blocker through the user journey?
At the beginning of every project, it is crucial to identify what you already know. For example, look at previous research, not only from user research but also from data sciences as well as marketing. By reviewing previous research/reports, you will identify what you don’t know—identifying the gap to determine what is missing. Identifying a hole in the market means understanding what your product could also offer to the users.
Identifying the gap
What Do You Want to Find Out?
Who the users are, including the different types of users such as assisted digital and accessibility users
How they are using the product and service and why
What is the end-to-end user journey?
What is the traffic, etc.?
Do you want to get a better understanding of your product and your competitors?
The user researcher will help you to put in writing all the high-level research questions. If you don’t have a user research capability, you can always contact an agency to help you for the pre-project requirements or ask freelancers/contractors to help you refine your research questions. If you have a user research capability, use it.
High-Level Plan or Brief
If you have a user research capability in-house, you should ask the team if they have a template/form that you can complete. The form will help you get a better idea of what you want to do, and it will help the user researcher to evaluate whether you require user research.
I also recommend doing a face-to-face meeting with the head of user research, who will ask you more questions related to the brief; this is for them to get a better understanding of what is needed.
Sample brief form
To understand the aim of the research project.
To draft the research questions.
To understand who the participants/ users are/ will be.
To find out the time frame. It is always essential to put a deadline on your research. Often when we ask clients when they want the results, their answer is “yesterday.”
Build the Case and Present It to Stakeholders
You don’t discuss user research in the hallway with your stakeholders. If you want to get a budget, you should have a strong case so the stakeholders can understand the benefits of doing user research, why now, and what the Return On Investment (ROI) is.
If you have already done all the planning, you can prepare a beautiful slideshow, explaining what you are trying to do with your product or service. You can also present some kind of recap of what you already found out with analytics, previous research, etc.
It is always important to find out what the goals of your stakeholders are. These can also be incorporated into your research brief. Considering stakeholders needs in your proposal will help you get them on board.
What do I mean by building a case? You need to make sure that you are not reinventing the wheel. You need to have a clear account of what you are trying to do and why, what the benefits are of doing it, and what the risks are of not doing it. It is essential to include some numbers that will speak to the decision-makers.
Which Resources Do You Need?
Once you have your high-level plan, then you can start thinking about the resources that you may need for your research project. If you have an agile team, I recommend getting user research person to work on your scrum team. It is essential for the user research person to understand the culture of your organization as well as having access to people internally to provide some insights.
A user research agency can be useful if you are using external IT suppliers to build your solution, and they may have enough power and experience to help you communicate with your suppliers.
Sometimes your IT or design suppliers say that they also supply user research. Be careful, as they may not have the resources to do this; they will just get a third party to do the user research work. I have come across large agencies/IT/consulting companies that say they have user researchers, but in reality they hire a contractor who will work on the proposal and do the work for them.
In the end, they are charging you a lot for it, and they take a significant cut, leaving the user researcher/contractor with a lower rate. It may be easier for you to use those agencies that provide you with the resources for your project, but it may be cheaper for you to use a recruiter or headhunter to find you the right person for you at the right price.
You may find some agencies that specialize in user research; make sure that they are not supplying you with a UX consultant instead of a user researcher. Their UX consultants tend to be designers or business analysts instead of user researchers.
If you have some internal capability, it would be easier for you to get some support from them, and they can tell you when they will have a user researcher available. They may also help you with the estimate to see whether you need a lab, specific equipment, and a participant recruitment agency.
Get an Estimate
Do not hesitate to shop around and get several quotes for the project. If you plan to incorporate a user researcher on your agile team, you may ask an agency to supply you with one of their researchers; you can also request a recruiter/headhunter to find you a freelancer/contractor. Many user researchers are contractors, and they are excellent, sometimes much better than the one supplied by big agencies. You can also look at agencies and see what they can offer you for your budget. Some agencies are more expensive than others; it is worth getting several quotes that specify the expertise of the user researcher that they will supply you.
If you do not work agile or do not need someone in-house, you could get an agency that will conduct the user testing, the discovery, etc.
Even if some people tell you that you choose your research methods depending on your budget, I disagree: you need to figure out first what you want to find out based on your research brief; then the researcher will be able to decide which research method will be the more appropriate to answer your questions. Only then can you get a quote or estimate. Not the other way around.
Get Your Budget
Getting your first user research budget is not easy; doing user research is expensive.
It is not always easy to sell user research to your organization. Is this because many companies do not have a good understanding of what user research is? Or is it because they can’t see any benefits of doing user research? They are very often confused by UX and user research (see Chapter 1). There is always the question of the budget as well as time restrictions. Evangelization for user research and its benefits is fundamental. If you have a researcher in-house, it may be easier to get someone on board to support you. The main issue that you will experience is having a user researcher available to carry the research for your project. A less successful organization may not have a user researcher in-house and will have to recruit a contractor or to commission an agency to do the work for you. For those, you will have to get some budget. To start this project, you will need to sell user research to your manager and stakeholders. It is always challenging to sell user research, especially if you are not a user researcher.
It is essential to adapt your arguments depending on your audience. For example, if a politician has a great idea, probably supported by political ideology, they may not be pleased to have some user research done. User research may challenge their ideas, which is not welcomed by everybody. But if you say that user research will evaluate the plan and identify how it will affect the end user, provide evidence of what the criticism will be. The evidence can help the politician to adjust his plans, to respond to any criticism, to modify the project, or to even make a U-turn.
Several years ago, one French politician proposed a new tax for French people living abroad. I got so many complaints from the French community in London that I decided to collect data and conduct user research discovery on this matter. I evaluated the impact of this new taxation.
I had many pieces of evidence of the negative impact, including a financial, emotional, and cultural impact on people. The most significant implications for the politician were that presidential election was around the corner. The impact of implementing this new legislation had a direct effect on the votes.
After sending a correspondence to the political leaders with the overview of the results and the consequences of implementing such legislation, they removed the legislative bill. Even though removed, it was probably too late to counter the negative impact. Telling people a story like this helps them to understand what the benefits are of conducting user research.
I recommend starting with a small budget. Some user testing sessions can bring a lot of insights, and you can follow up with a survey with more participants. In some organizations, the budget will come from the marketing or communication department. In other organizations, the IT department will provide some funds. If you are lucky, you may have a UX budget or even a user research lead who will have a budget. You may have some internal sponsor who will support your project and help you by giving you some budget. Startups may struggle to get a budget for user research, but they could do some crowdfunding or get their investors involved.
Recruit a Contractor or Commission an Agency
Once you have your budget, you can start recruiting the relevant solution for your project, whether agency or contractor. Every company is different; some may prefer agencies over contractors. Again, you can get new quotes and contact the people who helped you with your business case.
Statement of Work/Brief
Brief
Start
Now that you have gone through all the different steps from Figure 4-1, you are ready to start your research project.
Summary
Identify if you need user research for your product.
Review the research that was done in the past and identify the gaps.
Identify your users.
Build a case to get budget for your project.
Get your stakeholders on board to support the project.
Put in place the relevant capability to conduct the research.