Are We Building the Thing Right?

How do we explore, “Are we building the thing right?” Let’s start with an analogy...

Imagine you have to transport people from A to B. Are you moving them in a school bus or via Lyft? Where will people load and unload? There are many different ways that you can approach solving the same problem. Are you taking the right approach?

At this stage, our goal isn’t to validate your current thinking. In fact, we want to poke holes in it, so we can continue to improve and iterate. A slight concept shift, or refinement to a user flow, can create a world of difference in adoption.

Many methods can help at this stage. Often we conduct a facilitated study with a beta or prototype, but unmoderated click or preference tests can be helpful also, to learn whether people can accomplish goals quickly and accurately. Ideally, we move between qualitative and quantitative research to inform strategic business decisions.

To the greatest extent possible, we involve your stakeholders throughout the research process. Such inclusiveness maximizes understanding of what actually occurred; what you hear and what I hear differ because of variances in our perspectives. Participation creates trust and credibility. The more engagement, the more likely the outputs will be acted upon.

---

Want more guidance to improve your user research?

Are we building the right thing?

When we get to the "Are we building the right thing?" question, my clients are usually in the early prototyping or concept phase. So what they are creating hasn't yet made it to customers.

This is the time to start gathering feedback, and to keep testing as your concepts evolve and get increasingly specific. At this stage, we’re exploring which of these approaches we should build out. It’s important to learn what’s resonating, what’s not… and why? You want feedback from people like those in your target audience.

For example, can people understand the concept of what’s being proposed? If the answer is “no,” or “not really”, we want to find out now.

We typically gather this feedback in 1:1 interviews, concept tests, or preference studies. We are not testing interfaces, we are testing loose ideas, purposefully! These may be shared in a storyboard format, a paper prototype, or a simple video.

Through these efforts, the team continues to identify and refine the unmet needs that are most frequently communicated; these are likely the biggest opportunities and the most useful problems to solve. They might even lead you to shift the way features are presented… and eventually, we want to test that, too.

---

Download additional tools, templates, and inspiration

What should we build?

“What should we build?” implies that you—as my client— perceive that there is problem that your business can solve.

Without user research, this quest would be a high stakes gamble. You’d be investing time and money in an assumption that might be shaped by bias and or power centers in your company. Or, you might miss essential details about who has such a problem and what drives their perceptions and actions.

The role of user research is to lower your risk and increase your odds of success, and generate a few new opportunities you hadn’t seen before.

Too much development takes place in a vacuum. This is true in established companies and within startups. "Everyone needs a ___” is a great place to start, but it is incredibly worthwhile to gain a deeper, more strategic understanding of the audience. You are not your users.

The goal and purpose of generative research like this is to better understand which problem you should be solving... for whom... and why it makes sense for you to solve it.

Methods we use to do this include ethnography (out in the field, observing habits), interviews in context of daily life, or perhaps a diary study (asking people to record activities and thoughts over time).

---

Want more guidance to improve your user research?

The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore

People regularly ask me what I “do” as a design researcher so I decided to write about it.

For the next ten weeks, my posts will be under “The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore ” theme. (Yea, I need a catchier name.)

I plan to craft one post on how we gather input around each of these eight questions:

• What should we build?

• Are we building the right thing?

• Are we building the thing right?

• Who are our customers?

• What are our customers’ needs and motivations?

• How can we improve this?

• Do they understand this?

• Why did this metric go up or down?

Then I’ll write about my responses to two common client questions:

• Can you teach my team to do what you do?

• Can you teach me to do what you do?

Ten questions answered in ten weeks!

No, that’s not exactly right. I cannot give you all the answers, but I can help you to understand how we discover immensely valuable data to inform “the answers.” I’ll explain…

Where do we start? What are we looking for? How do we make sure our learnings are trustworthy? How do we translate research questions into participant questions? How do we make sense of what we gather? How do we ensure findings are acted upon?

Stay tuned. This will be fun and worthwhile.

---

Download additional tools, templates, and inspiration