In this presentation, we look at how user research fits into your design process and when to do different types of user studies. If you decide to invest time in doing user research, it's important that you time it so that you get as much out of your efforts as possible. Here, we look at when you should do different types of user research and how research fits into the different work processes.
Before you can decide when to do user research, you have to clarify *why* you're doing user research. You need different kinds of insights at different times in your design process. Let's have a look at the overall reasons for doing user research. You can do user research to ensure that you have a good understanding of your users; what their everyday life looks like; what motivates them, and so on. If you understand the people who use your product, you can make designs that are relevant for them. This type of research is typically *qualitative interviews and observations*.
You can also do tests of the user experience to ensure that your design has a high level of usability. Finally, you can evaluate on the impact of your design – for instance, on the number of customers or efficiency of work processes. As you can probably see, the different types of research fit into the design process in different ways. Let's start by looking at how each type of research fits into a simplified timeline for product development. Afterwards, we'll look into how user research fits into different types of development processes.
Research to ensure that your design is relevant to your users will typically be interviews and observations at the user's home or another relevant context. Since research to ensure that you create relevant products is meant to influence what type of product you will develop, most of this research takes place at the *start* of the development process, either *concurrently* with ideation work or *before* any concept work is done. You can also do research to validate your design direction, once you've developed some concept ideas
that you can show prospective users or during early product development. After release, you can do the same type of research to understand how customers are using your product, to explore if they need other features or offer opportunity scoping for your next project. And that, of course, leads you back to the beginning of your next product development process. Research to ensure that your designs are easy to use is mostly done as usability tests. It's important to start usability testing as early in the design or development process as possible
so that you have time to make changes to your design if the tests show that changing the design will benefit the product. If you use paper prototypes or similar materials, you can do early user testing before you have an interactive interface. User testing works well in an iterative process where you continually do user tests to ensure that your design is easy and pleasurable to use. Finally, research to measure the impact of your design mostly takes place *after* your product is released. The studies can then lead to new development and design changes.
If you're working on web-based products such as apps and web pages, it makes sense to keep evaluating on the user experience after your first release. One thing is a simplified timeline, but when you can do user research and how much research you can do really depends on what type of development process you work in. You can fit user research into most work processes depending on how ambitious you are. But it's easier in some work processes than in others. Let's take a look at what a work process that's optimized for user research looks like.
*User-centered design* is an overall term for work processes that place the needs and abilities of the user at the center of the development process. It's been described in different terms, but overall it's an iterative process where the first step is *user research* to ensure the relevance of the product. The second step is to *define* concepts based on user insights. The third step is *design and development*. And the fourth step is *user-testing the solution*. Ideally, this iterative process continues until evaluations show that the product is ready to be released.
After release, evaluations of the customer experience might lead to further development. By the way, design thinking is one of the most well-known user-centered work processes. As you can see, the steps involved in design thinking are almost identical to the overall steps of the user-centered design process. When you work in a user-centered process, user research is an integrated part of that process. But, in reality, many work processes are either not like that or deviate from the basic process in different ways.
So, how do you approach user research if you don't work in a clear-cut user-centered process? If research is not an integrated part of your work process and it's not up to you to change the way of working, you can still do user research, but it's up to you to decide when and how. So, let's look at some rules of thumb for deciding if, when and how to do user research. The sooner in your process you can do research, the bigger the impact of your research will be.
If you can do research before development starts, you can help ensure that you work on products that are relevant to your users. If you can do research early in development, you have more time to make changes to ensure great user experience before your product is released, and so on. Sometimes, you work in projects where you're not involved in all phases of the development. But you can still do smaller research projects that influence the part of the project you *are* working on. If you're a UX designer who's not involved in early concept development, it still makes a lot of sense to do *iterative user testing* of your designs.
If you don't have a process for how to handle research results, you should stick to research where you also have influence on any design changes that your research brings about. If you *are* involved in planning your development process, make sure that you schedule in some time to do user research. That way, you can be *proactive* with your research rather than reactive, so you don't have to scramble for resources when you suddenly need research to support your design decisions.
Sometimes, you don't have the resources to do all the user research you'd like to do. In that case, think about which type of research will have the *biggest impact* on your particular project and prioritize doing those studies. If you have influence over how you plan your development, iterative processes are almost always preferable when it comes to getting the most out of your user research. Iterative processes make you open to changing the end goal of your design based on the results of your user research.
In many projects, your time and resources to do user research are scarce. Luckily, you can do a lot with a little. You can, for instance, do user tests with paper prototypes rather than with fully interactive prototypes that require software programming. Just remember that the *validity* of your research is always the most important thing. So, if your time and resources for doing research are so limited that your results won't be sensible, it's better *not* to do any research. Best case = you'll waste your time and nothing comes from it.
Worst case = insights that don't really represent the user will impact important design decisions. Similarly, if you're working on a project that could benefit from user insights but you don't have the time or resources to make any design changes based on your research, you should save your research efforts for another time when they make more sense. So, what's the take-away? User research fits into the development process on all stages, depending on why you want to do user research. When you should do research, and what type of research you can do, depends on what your work process looks like.
If you work in a user-centered design process, user research is an integrated part of the process. If you *don't* work in a user-centered design process, it's up to you to make smart decisions about when and how to do research.