User research, it's the driving force behind successful digital products. Despite this obvious fact, many teams forget or postpone their own work because they are too busy with other priorities and think that is enough to push a product through development.

In today’s world of rapidly changing technology and shifting consumer behavior, ignoring users will lead your team on an impossible journey filled with false assumptions about what works best for them. Instead of putting in hours upon hours into developing something no one wants; invest time upfront to learn from potential customers before any coding happens so you can create better solutions faster than ever.

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Getting started

I'm a huge advocate for just getting started as opposed to drowning in details and over-planning, which is one of the most common reasons why user research gets sidestepped. The reality is that research takes time - but time isn't always plentiful when you're part of a digital or product team.

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But here’s the thing - user research doesn’t have to be an all or nothing scenario. Whether you’re just getting started or are looking to fold research into your existing process, you’ve got options. In fact, the most sustainable way to make user research part of your project life cycle is to start with the type that best suits your needs right now. Attempting to overhaul your process and go “all-in” can be overwhelming and unmanageable for most organizations, usually resulting in abandoning the initiative altogether. So, start small and grow based on what makes the most sense for your organization’s needs in the moment.

Types of user research
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Generative

Generative research is about building a fundamental understanding about users themselves. It helps us to define their needs and wants and how those cross over to your digital product or platform. This type of research can be conducted in various ways, scaling to your budget, resources and desired outcomes. Some examples include:

• Web surveys
• 1:1 interviews with users
• Detailed user diaries with observations gained through shadowing users
  

The ultimate goal of generative research is to help us generate hypotheses and distill those findings into potential solutions that may be helpful. 

Iterative

Derived from user needs, chances are that you’ve likely come up with a number of potential solutions that could solve issues for the user. Iterative research is where we field these directly with users and gather feedback on our hypotheses. 

But does this mean building out each of our ideas into high-fidelity visualizations? Absolutely not. In fact, iterative research is often simply about playing back some of your ideas to users through a simple conversation and adjusting as needed. Some examples include:

• 1:1 interviews with users to explain or demonstrate hypotheses
• Online A/B testing to solicit preferences and feedback
• Formal focus groups to demonstrate solutions to a group of users and gather input
  

The desired outcome of iterative research is to narrow down a list of potential solutions to a single hypothesis that you feel will best address all or most of the users’ needs.

Evaluative

You have what you believe to be the perfect solution for your users’ issues. Now you need to actually confirm that your solution will deliver, and this is where evaluative research comes into play. There are many tactics for evaluative research, most of which are also synonymous with traditional usability testing. In essence, this is where we put an actual prototype or similar visualization in front of actual users and record how well they are able to complete tasks with it. 

Think of evaluative research as a kind of dress rehearsal. You’re going to observe some kinks that need to be worked out or perhaps some edge use cases that your proposed solution didn’t originally account for. And that’s the point. Before rolling your solution into a formal product release and going live to users, evaluative testing is about making sure it’s rock-solid, usable and polished. 

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Take-away

While the three types of research above imply a sequence, you don’t need to use every type for every project. Remember - any type or quantity of research is 100% better than none at all. 

If all you have to work with are customer logs and informal feedback, you’ll gain a much stronger sense of what your users actually want and need. If you’re only able to arrange a 15 minute call with a few of your customers, your proposed solutions will be better grounded and informed. And if you can only afford to spend 1 day running ideas or prototypes by users, your end product will be vastly superior. 

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While the common thread across all research activities is, of course, is to listen, we must also be willing to ask the hard questions and accept the unpopular answers. We build our products and properties for our customers, not for ourselves or our egos. And this is why humility and empathy are thrown around so often when discussing user experience. Adopting any form or user research into your process acknowledges that your users aren’t just primary stakeholder group. They are the one and only factor that can differentiate your product and deliver unparalleled success.