We are not the user

What we often do is assume, without realizing it, that our users think as we think and like what we like. What we get is generalizing based on our own experience, which is actually a cognitive bias called the availability bias.

Designers need to go against this bias by interacting with their users as much as possible.

Users don't always tell the truth

Only talking to our users does not automatically yield useful insights, and very often it can actually lead us in the wrong direction. Users don’t purposely lie to us, but things people say are different from things people actually do.

It takes the designer's skills to make them reveal their actual needs and behaviors. Without them, the user research becomes useless at best and misleading at worst.

Make the problem clear

If done right, User Research is the strongest foundation for everything that follows. Having a deep and reliable understanding of our users and their problems can empower a team and lead it in the right direction like no other thing.

Decisions become easy because we no longer have to guess. With this knowledge, we are able to create products orders of magnitude better and save ourselves great amounts of time by avoiding rework.

So, how do we conduct the proper user research?

Define your Research Objectives

What is it exactly that we're trying to learn? Write down your research objectives before doing anything else. We usually aim for 3 to 7 objectives per project. Examples of what we are trying to learn are:

• Goals or motivation - what are our users goals?

• Behavior - what kind of actions does our user typically take, and in what order?

• Knowledge - which common knowledge for our design does the user posses?

• Situations - what kind of situations is our target audience often in?

• Decision-making process - how does our user evaluate and act in our environment?

We want to understand our actual users, but also need to understand their ecosystem. Interview users with a different range of experiences and backgrounds. In some cases, you might also want to interview non-users that have a supporting role in order to understand the issue at hand on a deeper level. Let's say you were to do user research for an e-commerce website, you'd start it with interviewing people with different shopping habits (one-time buyers, regular buyers, company accounts, …), people using the competition, customer support, etc.

Ask for your users' stories.

There is no better way of gaining information from your users. When your interviewees tell you stories about their experiences - they will also parallelly be answering many of your questions at once. Open-ended questions are the way to go about it - giving your user the chance and space to fully express what they feel.

Try to stay away from opinions

Never ask your users what they want. Designers are not the user, and the users are not designers. Do not talk about your idea - in doing so we only skew the data as it is in our nature to twist the narrative in order to tell you what you want to hear.

Summarizing things

Take as many notes as possible. Making sure to write all the feedback that you get from your interview is very important, as our findings will be backed up and based on it. After completing the research, start looking for patterns. After identifying them, the next step is to create systems that will help your team build the best product or service. Those can be user personas, customer profiles, experience maps, behavior patterns, strategy canvas, and so on. Remember that everything we build and create is for our users sake, as such, we should communicate to them as much as possible in order to get the clearest understanding of their requires & needs.