Finding Value

User Research

How do you know if something has value to your users? You can’t just ask them (we all know the horses and cars story). This is probably one of the hardest parts about user research, and here’s my take on it.

User Research is all about inferring conclusions from the conversations we have with people. For that end we need to ask the right questions. What are the tasks they do in their job (including and excluding the product we are analysing), how does this product fit into their other tasks, what are the concerns they have when using it, what are we trying to optimise (time, error prevention, task difficulty).

Based on the insights we get from talking to people we can then argue if doing this feature in this way will help them complete it faster, with less errors or concerns, to a higher level of quality or even simply fitting better with all the other tasks they have to do.

We then need to confirm if our assumptions were correct, this time hopefully with a prototype or beta version of the product. And so the cycle starts again.