User research is integral to the understanding of your users and how they interact with your product. It serves as a link between you and the users — a way to empathise with their needs and wants, and incorporate that into the product.
- Introduction
- Surveys
In this session, you were introduced to the concept of user research and the various ideas, techniques and frameworks commonly used while conducting user research.
User research is a great tool for empathising with your users. It helps you obtain quantitative and qualitative information about your users’ psyche as they see or use your product.
User research helps you:
- Validate your assumptions and hypotheses
- Understand your users’ needs and requirements
- Identify gaps in your product and user needs
- Iterate and develop your product based on user feedback
Some steps to be followed while conducting user research are as follows:
- You set certain objectives or goals to be achieved when conducting user research.
- You make assumptions about what your users require. Assumptions can be something that you believe is true or expect to happen.
- Assumptions are subjective. When you put such assumptions to the test, these testable assumptions are called hypotheses.
- Once you validate your assumptions and hypotheses through user research, you generate many ideas to develop your product.
You learnt about user research methods that work across the following four dimensions. These are summarised below:
| Dimension | Area of Focus |
|---|---|
| Behavioural vs Attitudinal | What people say vs what people do |
| Qualitative vs Quantative | Generating behavioural or attitudinal data based on observing users directly vs generating behavioural or attitudinal data indirectly, through measurement |
| Context of Product Use | Understand whether and how participants are using the product |
| Phase of Product Development | Using research methods based on the phase of development the product is in and the associated objectives |
| You learnt about various research methods such as card sorting, participatory design methods, surveys, interviews and A/B testing. |