User research

User research is the foundation of the User Experience Design process. It’s how you learn about people and their behaviour in order to design services and products that they need and have a great experiences using.

Why do we need to learn about people and their behaviour?

At each end of a service or piece of technology there are humans trying to get something done.

This is the case whether the technology is old or modern. Technologies evolve and change, but human psychology—our desires, emotions and motivations—changes very little.

Communications devices are an easy example to picture. All of these devices are tools to enable humans to communicate over geographical distance in the moment:

  • a morse code station,
  • a rotary telephone,
  • a mobile phone
  • video conferencing software.

These technologies are very different, the human need remains the same.

The same principle applies for more complex products and services, for example, an air traffic controller, a senior citizen accessing a government service or a 16-17-year old applying to attend university.

Who’s using your service or product?

Are they the “perfect end-user”? Do they understand all your professional terminology (aka jargon!), your organisational structure and processes?

It’s unlikely that they think about your service or organisation or product like you because you’re an expert and you look at it with a depth of understanding that others don’t have. You have a different way of representing it in your mind to the people who use it.

Products and services fall short or even fail when we don’t know how people actually use them, or even who the people using them are.

User research reduces the risk of creating something that falls short or fails

It does this by finding out who the people using your services and products are, and:

  • Their goals and motivations – what exactly are they trying to do?
  • Their tasks and challenges – how are they trying to do achieve their goals and can they?
  • The context they are in – we need to design a service or product with the context of use in mind.
    • For example, a train driver and a passenger might both use a digital display – one of them to drive the train and one of them to use their phone or laptop in transit – two very different contexts of use in the same location.
  • And – crucially – where and when they encounter your product or service in the context of their circumstances.

Knowing these things helps you to create something that has real value for people.

User research can be applied all the way through the human-centred design process

Whether you’re at the start, in the middle or at the end of creating your service or product.

  1. At the start: Research before you start designing means that you get an understanding of what your target group needs. Meeting real user needs increases the chances that your service or product will succeed.
  2. In the middle: Iterative tests of ideas that meet people’s needs before and during development ensures that the you don’t drift off track with the meeting real needs and helps you craft a delightful user experience.
  3. At the end: Measuring the effectiveness of your design after your product or service is released will help you ensure seamless, intuitive interactions that produce something people enjoy using.

Arming yourself with this powerful 3-step process means that every dimension of your service or product will have been considered, analysed, and tested before it meets an end-user ‘in the wild’.

Which will provide you with greater confidence that you’re producing the right thing, in the right way, avoiding high support needs or expensive re-development.

After meeting exact user needs comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. 

Don Norman