Why and when should you conduct user research?

This guide is for designers and product managers who want to leverage user research to make better decisions. I’ll cover why research is important, when you should conduct research, and share examples from my own experience at Uber and Bread Financial.

Why user research?

As designers and product managers, we make countless decisions. They range from foundational (which user problem should we solve first?) to tactical (what’s the best copy for this error message).

To make decisions, we rely on a variety of “tools”. We look at data, we launch A/B tests, and often, we rely on our experience and intuition.

User research is another powerful tool in our decision-making toolkit. At the end of the day, we’re building products to solve problems for users. So, it can be hugely beneficial to incorporate user perspectives in our decisions. In particular, user research can help:

• Save time and money: Research can help us uncover issues and improve solutions early in the process, reducing the need for costly changes after features ship.
• Build team empathy: Research can help your company better relate to your customers. This gives everyone, from marketing to engineering, the context to make better decisions.
• Improve user experience and satisfaction: Testing solutions and collecting regular feedback helps you design better products and resolve user complaints, leading to happier customers.
• Improve competitive strategy: If you understand your users better than your competitors, this allows you to build better products and craft more effective sales and marketing content.

When should I conduct research?

User research isn’t a silver bullet that will tell you exactly what to do. Rather, it’s a tool that gives you more context to make decisions. When used correctly, it can help you build and design better products. So, in which cases should you conduct research?

• Continuously: Regularly conducting lightweight surveys and interviews can help you proactively identify issues and uncover new opportunities.
• Understanding data: Surveys and interviews are particularly useful in helping you understand the “why” behind trends in your metrics.
• Roadmap planning: When you’re trying to decide what to build next, user interviews are a great way to discover problems and needs. Surveys can further help quantify the priorities in your roadmap.
• Feature definition: Interviews are a great way to get clarity on user problems. They can help you uncover the “why” behind the problem and better understand existing user workflows.
• Solution testing: When you have a solution that you’re not certain will work, user interviews and usability tests can help you validate your solution and identify potential issues.

What does this look like in practice?

Here are a couple examples, from my own experience, where user research helped my teams build better products.

• Understanding data / solution testing: At Bread Financial, we saw an uptick in customer support tickets where users accidentally paid the wrong amount. To figure out why this was happening, we interviewed users to understand their thought process when making a payment. We learned that almost all users simply wanted to pay the amount due each month, with a subset wanting to make extra principal payments. We also took note of the language users used to describe payment options. We then used our learnings to redesign our payment flow with improvements to defaults, copy, and a streamlined set of payment options. We tested prototypes of these solutions before ultimately shipping the feature, which reduced payment errors to near-zero.
• Feature definition / roadmap planning: At Uber Eats, we wanted to improve the efficiency of restaurant to courier handoffs. To learn more about the problem, we visited restaurants to interview staff about their workflows and how they used our tablets to track prep time and communicate with couriers. We discovered several mismatches between customer mental models and how our product worked. Thanks to the research, we improved how we displayed courier status to restaurants and gave them more control over setting the prep time for each order. This led to a significant decrease in hand-off time.

Questions?

This is the first in a series of guides we'll be sharing about user research. If you have any questions or suggestions, I'm always happy to chat. You can reach me at [email protected].

We founded Versive to enable teams to conduct user research faster and more often. If you're interested in learning more about how Versive can help you, reach out to us at [email protected].

Eric Li, Co-Founder, Versive

March 27, 2024