Here’s the thing about user research. It’s incredibly important, but it doesn’t have to be that hard.
Hear us out: We know it’s hard to find the time, and the budget, and manage the logistics, and do the recruiting, gather and analyze insights, run presentations, and the list goes on. Those things are hard and this field guide exists in large part to make those things a little easier.
What doesn’t need to be that hard is getting started, doing something instead of nothing, regularly practicing the bold act of actually talking to your users, customers, and would-be users and customers.
If you read nothing else, and we really hope you WILL read something else, read this. If you are already humming along with a kickass research program, feel free to subscribe to more targeted chapters that suit your needs by clicking anywhere you see "Subscribe." Or just navigate to the Field Guide index and explore.
Without further ado, here are some well-loved tips among the UX research community to conduct effective user research and interviews. Consider this your MVR (minimum viable research) cheat sheet.
“A professional researcher might do better interviews, but most people are capable of research that is good enough.” — Jonny Schneider, Finding the Fastest Path to Feedback
While qualitative research can be time consuming, the good news is you really only need to talk to about 5 people before you hit a point of diminishing returns in terms of insights. Of course, that entirely hinges on finding the right people. This doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here’s where we subtly throw in that User Interviews makes all this that much easier and sometimes cheaper, but of course you can do this manually if you like. Google Sheets + Craigslist + Mail merge FTW!
This need not take more than 15 minutes or so for MVR. Don’t go into a session without a simple set of questions.
You are a human, talking to another human. What an amazing opportunity to get permission to connect with someone you wouldn’t otherwise. Be warm, be authentic, be yourself, just don’t get too chummy or start influencing the participant’s ideas with your own enthusiasm. Be a professional.
Don’t let your research die in the session itself. Again, don’t over-complicate this if time is not a luxury you have.
That’s it. Of course there’s much more to cover, and cover it we will, but hopefully the above tips empower you to just get out there and do some research today. Building a regular research habit is the best way to build discipline in yourself, your organization, and to consistently show its importance to your product and customers.
Quite a lot, as it happens.
For starters, we’re a UX research tool—more specifically, User Interviews is a user research recruiting and participant management platform. We exist to solve the pain point of user research recruiting—especially for qualitative research studies with niche requirements.
For another thing, User Interviews exists in large part because our founders needed to recruit participants for their own research—and they hated it. After doing some user research, they found out other people hated it, too.
And so, the idea that eventually became User Interviews was born.
You can read all about how our founders pivoted from a failed startup to a $10 million Series A through (meta) user research in this article. In addition to being our origin story, it’s also a compelling case study on the power of user research!
The UX Research Field Guide is meant to be read cover-to-cover—the outline roughly follows the UX research process, and the knowledge you acquire in one module can be applied and built upon in the next.
Over the course of this Field Guide, we’ll dive deeper into the various UX research methods, as well as the foundational knowledge and research skills you’ll need to effectively plan, recruit for, execute, and report on your user research efforts.
But you don’t need to read the full Field Guide to get started, and many of you out there might be seasoned pros just looking to brush up on a couple topics (hence “Field Guide”). Each chapter is designed to stand on its own, so you can also skip around to the chapters that are relevant to you.
We’re relaunching the UX Research Field Guide with 4 refresh and refreshed modules:
You’ll notice that the later modules include a note about upcoming release dates. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out some pretty major updates to the content in those modules, including fresh templates and resources for doing UX research.
You can still read and find a ton of value in the original chapters, but we highly recommend signing up to receive the UX Research Field Guide over the course of 10 weekly emails. You’ll get the latest edition of each chapter, along with a top-level summary of the module topic and a special email-exclusive pearl of user research wisdom from the User Interviews UXR team.
You’ll also receive brand new chapters as they’re published. Those chapters—like the ones on co-design, preference testing, and research synthesis—are denoted by a “Coming Soon” tag in the Field Guide itself.
Don’t see one of your favorite methods or a need-to-know topic on our list of upcoming chapters? Hit me up at katryna@userinterviews.com to request future content.
And with that… happy researching, folks!
