There are many ways to explore and generate a wide range of ideas. "Reframing" is one of my absolute favorites.
Who else loves reframing?
What are some of your favorite approaches to generate lots of ideas quickly?
The Wrong Way to Use Social Media for Research
Here’s an example of the WRONG way to use social media for research purposes. “Please take a look at my About section and give me feedback. Is it easy to read and do you understand what I do?”
This post was in one of my professional groups. I see these requests a lot and THEY SCARE ME. Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely applaud anyone who seeks genuine feedback. But there are MUCH BETTER ways to do it.
Here’s why this makes me sad (because it won’t be very effective).
First, she’s not asking her target audience (cannabis oil users). Half the people who respond probably aren’t even vaguely in her market.
Second, there are no means to judge whether they actually understand. What’s the right answer here?
Third, “easy to read” is such a subjective question; people have very different interpretations of ease.
A better approach might be, “Hey cannabis oil users, I'm trying to see if my About section is communicating my message accurately. Could you please comment on what you think I’m saying?”
This defines who she wants feedback from and provides a method to evaluate whether they understand or not.
***
Got a question about research? I’ll be happy to answer it. Seriously, this stuff keeps me up at night. I wish I could tell her this.
Download additional tools, templates, and inspiration
Learning to Ride a Bike is A Lot like Learning to Have a Meaningful Conversation
My daughter, Que (it’s a long story!) is learning to ride a bike, and I’ve noticed that doing so is a lot like learning to have a meaningful conversation.
Both require you to be neutral and balanced. You need to focus and try not to get distracted by the little things that are happening around you. And there’s also this notion—which you need to accept—that in the beginning you're gonna stumble. With more experience, you're going to gain confidence and improve.
Importantly, no one's going to come out of the gate the first time knowing how to do it.
When you think about it, having a meaningful conversation is MORE complicated than riding a bike! So it’s totally unrealistic to think that you can do it without practice and failing and learning and falling and getting better and getting it to be completely natural.
Just as with riding a bike, you're building new muscles. You are building your focus muscles. You’re learning to be present and curious. You’re learning to instill trust and confidence in the other person.
One last point: fear is what stops people from learning both skills, but once you conquer it, you will be amazed that you ever felt fear at all.
Want more guidance to improve your user research?
Are your customers are behaving “illogically”?
Last month I challenged myself to write about questions clients ask me to explore. Now I think it may be more fun to share interesting work stories, like this one, instead.
Has the thought ever occurred to you that your customers are behaving “illogically”? Maybe you haven’t looked closely enough at their needs or motivations.
A few years ago, I worked with an online retailer that had 10k people on their site at a time. Visitors would often spend hours there… but purchasing was very low. My client wanted to understand why.
We discovered two big things early on. First, many people were using the site to KILL TIME. They found it entertaining and valuable, almost like an educational tool. They used it to comparison shop, to find out if what they were finding elsewhere was a good value or not.
Second, customers LOVED the site… and engaged customers are a huge asset! There was an opportunity to harness their energy and desire to learn. Simple example: ask them to contribute tags, or flag something that's tagged inaccurately, to improve search. Or help people achieve different levels of certifications or education, instead of simply trying to sell them products.
Helpful hint: what you sell (today) is not necessarily a good way to define or understand your customers.
Download additional tools, templates, and inspiration
What Makes a Great Teacher? An Outstanding Researcher?
What makes a great teacher? An outstanding researcher? It turns out many of the answers are pretty similar for both professions.
I both conduct and teach user research, so it recently occurred to me that a good researcher and a good teacher share many of the same characteristics. They both are or should be:
Passionate
Deeply invested
Able to think quickly
Agile
Collaborative
Conversant
Curious
Empathetic
Ethical
Friendly
Informative
Open-minded
Resilient
Each profession requires quite a bit of improvisation. Curveballs keep interactions interesting, dynamic, fun, and challenging. I learn just as much from my students as they learn from me. I love making my classes dynamic to mirror what happens in the field.
But the similarities go even deeper. Identifying research goals and good research questions (i.e. being a researcher) is very similar to identifying actionable and achievable learning outcomes (i.e. being a teacher).
In both professions, you start with a topic, narrow it down, explore related questions and eventually dive into a juicy, semi-structured mystery. It's the bomb.
Thank you to my teachers during this teacher appreciation week! You inspired me to practice what I preach. I'm off to class (seriously)!
Want more guidance to improve your user research?
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.
