By now, you must have understood the importance of user research. User research is an intricate process that requires thorough and meticulous planning.
The users that you will be researching are not robots; they have genuine issues and problems that they need a solution for. At times, these issues can be unknown to the users themselves.
Therefore, it is important that you have clear guidelines, requirements, strategies and objectives before conducting user research. But how can you set these objectives?
It is important to set certain goals when you are conducting user research. These goals could either be to unearth some new insights or validate your assumptions and hypotheses.
The user research process flow involves the following steps:
- You set certain objectives or goals to be achieved when conducting user research.
- You make assumptions about what the users require. These assumptions can be something that you believe is true or expected to happen.
- Assumptions are subjective. When you put such assumptions to the test, these testable assumptions are called hypotheses.
Objective and Hypothesis
The objective is what you aim to achieve by conducting user research whereas a hypothesis is the assumptions you make before actually conducting the research. These assumptions could be proved or disproved by the results of the survey. There can be multiple hypotheses for a survey. Below are some examples that will help understand this difference.
Example-1:
If Uber was to conduct a survey before introducing UberPool, their objective and hypothesis would be as below:
Objective: To understand the factors affecting the commute of Indian consumers through cabs.
Hypothesis: This study can have multiple hypotheses as follows:
- Indian people are not comfortable sharing a cab with strangers
- People are willing to take a longer route to their destination if they are charged less
After analysing the results of the survey, these hypotheses will either be proved or disproved.
Example-2:
If Myntra wants to understand how users use the “Wishlist” feature on their app, their objective and hypothesis would be as below:
Objective: To study how users use the wishlist feature on Myntra.
Hypothesis: This study can have multiple hypotheses as follows:
- Users use the “Wishlist” feature to add items they wish to purchase in future
- Users use the “Wishlist” to share items they plan to buy with their friends.
After analysing the results of your user research, these hypotheses will either be proved or disproved.
Ideally, once you validate your assumptions and hypotheses through user research, you generate many ideas to develop your product.
Quiz
Q) You are the Product Manager for Sparkle, a line of dishwashing detergent. You have noticed a decline in revenue in the last quarter and are worried about how Sparkle stacks up to the competition. Identify one possible learning objective for this research and the types of users who need to be researched.
Objective: To understand the key factors influencing consumer choice for dishwashing detergents
Types of users:
- Anyone that uses dishwashing detergent of any brand
- Anyone that already uses Sparkle
- Anyone that used to use Sparkle, but now uses a completely different product
- Potential users - anybody that has moved out of home recently to the city, or started an independent life afresh
[! Answer] One of the learning objectives could be: What are the most important qualities that people look for in a dishwashing detergent (e.g., froth, strength)?
For this research, the types of people that could be researched are stay-at-home moms/dads, hotel staff, and youngsters living away from their families.