A guide for understanding when and why to do research

Presented by Stephanie Ho

INTRODUCTION 

If your team has ever found itself wondering what to make or why, you’ve landed on the perfect opening to do user research. Whether your team is starting with a blank slate or with a redesign of an existing product, research can help guide decisions that you need to make at various stages of the product development process. 

Prioritizing research to help your team understand your target audience and their needs before you start ideating on solutions or thinking about features will help your team create and deliver truly useful and validated experiences. 

Making time for research can help you…

• Understand your audience and who you are designing for

• Challenge internal assumptions and biases about the target audience

• Know your audience’s needs, behaviors, and motivations

• Know what problems your product is solving for your audience

• Identify whether your designed solution meets those user needs

It can be daunting to take on research, especially if your team doesn’t have dedicated research support or is still building a research practice. This guide offers suggested strategies to help you get started with doing your own research, how to know what type of research to do, and when to do research during the product development lifecycle. 

Keep in mind that you can design your research studies to fit your team’s capabilities and limitations, and there are many research approaches and styles in addition to the strategies below that you can use to address a given problem. 

IN PRACTICE

Use the tips and concepts in this section to cultivate a product culture in your newsroom

Align on your research goals

To get started with research, decide what you need to know. The intention behind doing research should take the form of a research question or problem. It can take a few tries to sharpen your research question, so take the time to make these as specific as possible, e.g. “How might we better understand how our current readers use our site?” With research questions in hand, you can move on to identifying the right methodology to find answers. 

Pick the right methodology 

Truly useful findings are only possible if you leverage the methods best suited for your research question and product lifecycle phase. There are a number of methodologies in the UX research discipline, and each method has its place and purpose. For example, in the ideation and discovery phases, you might use surveys, interviews, or competitive analysis to better understand the existing landscape for your product. In the development phase, look to concept and usability testing to further define the product design prior to launch. Post-launch, research can take the form of gathering and tracking product feedback. A/B or multivariate testing can also help you further refine your launched product during this stage.

Keeping your research question in mind, consider what kind of data you want to get out of your research as you design your study. For questions concerning why a user might do something or think a certain way, qualitative methods are your best bet. Conversely, to understand why Design A might perform better than Design B, you’ll want to lean on methods like A/B testing to quantitatively measure performance and help you identify opportunities for improvement.

Make research an open and collaborative activity

Research doesn’t have to be done in isolation from the rest of your team. To help make research an integral part of your development process, take the time to explain why you’re doing research, and communicate widely the intended deliverables and outcomes of the research phase. 

You can also involve interested colleagues directly in the research process. Teammates can help craft research questions, provide feedback for your research plan, or help with observing interviews and contributing to synthesis sessions. Sharing updates, such as quick summaries from user interviews, in stand-up or similar meetings as your research plan progresses can also help make research feel more fast-paced and fruitful.

Create research partnerships

Broadly speaking, different teams and colleagues across a company might take on research in some shape or form. Collaborating with cross-functional partners can help your team come up with more holistic answers to your research questions. As an example, one possible collaboration could be between your user researcher and a colleague from a data science, experimentation, or analytics team. This creates a two-pronged research approach, where one side provides qualitative insights to the quantitative data supplied from the other. In doing so, you’re likely to piece together a more complete picture of who and what you’re solving for through conducting a research project. 

You can also create a relay process between multidisciplinary teams where each team is responsible for a certain phase and type of research. This might be defined by where the project falls within your product development process, or depend ultimately on the core research goals. 

Get buy-in for doing research 

When done well, research can save your team extra work over time. Research allows your team to figure out what to build and how to build it right for your specific users, but it is undoubtedly an investment of time and money. Making research and experimentation a part of your development process is not always as easy as just knowing you should, and it can take some convincing for skeptics to get onboard with doing research.

Strategies like conducting stakeholder interviews, making your research process open to teammates, or sharing research success stories from peer companies might be helpful depending on your organization’s culture. Telling vivid stories using your research findings can also help make research’s value more memorable. Your team can also track things like analytics before and after research is conducted to illustrate impact. 

Research is seldom one and done, and each completed research study helps prove the utility and value of taking the time to learn as you build. Ultimately, it might take doing one project end-to-end to show the true value of research.

TERMS

Definitions for product terms referenced in this guide are sourced from NPA’s crowd-sourced product glossary

UX Research

A discipline aimed at understanding audience needs, behaviors and goals through observation and feedback.

Iterative Process

A series of steps used to build on and improve a product throughout its lifecycle. In development, this often means short cycles of testing with audience feedback early on to guide progress and future updates.

Beta Testing

A research process during which a product team launches a product to a closed group of users to understand its performance in a real world setting and to uncover any potential usability issues or bugs before a wider launch. 

Usability Testing

The process of evaluating a product by testing it with your intended audiences. Testing involves defining learning objectives and designing usability exercises that allow you to observe how your testers interact with your product, without directing how the product is intended to be used. This can help identify whether your product meets its objectives, identify functional changes needed to improve user experience, and provide valuable feedback for whether your product satisfies audience needs. 

RELATED READINGS / RESOURCES

How To Run The Right Kind Of Research Study With The Double-Diamond Model - Smashing Magazine  

We've spent two years studying readers' & listeners' needs of The Atlantic -  Emily Goligoski 

Conducting Audience Research - The Membership Guide  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Ho

Stephanie Ho is Senior UX Researcher at Dow Jones, where she focuses on improving experiences within the family of brands such as Barron’s, MarketWatch, and The Wall Street Journal.  She first started conducting user research in the news space while a graduate student of the Studio 20 program at New York University. Prior to her current role, she has also conducted research for the Associated Press, Genius.com, and the American Museum of Natural History. 

Puedes leer la guía traducida y adaptada al español aquí: Hacer que la investigación y la experimentación sean parte de su proceso de desarrollo

Você pode ler o guia traduzido e adaptado para português aqui: Tornando a pesquisa e a experimentação partes do seu processo de desenvolvimento