Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15. Feedback and Research

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Zora Neale Hurston

Research with users is at the heart of UX design. Too often, though, teams outsource research work to specialized research teams. And too often, research activities take place on rare occasions—either at the beginning of a project or at the end. Lean UX solves these problems by making research both continuous and collaborative. Let’s dig in to see how to do that.

In this chapter, we cover the following:

• Collaborative research techniques that you can use to build shared understanding with your team

• Continuous research techniques to build small, informal, qualitative research studies into every iteration

• How to use small units of regular research to build longitudinal research studies

• How to reconcile contradictory feedback from multiple sources

• What artifacts to test and what results you can expect from each of these tests

• How to incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the Lean UX cycle

Continuous and Collaborative Research

Lean UX takes basic UX research techniques and overlays two important ideas. First, Lean UX research is continuous. This means you build research activities into every sprint. Instead of being a costly and disruptive “big bang” process, we make it bite-sized so that we can fit it into our ongoing process. Second, Lean UX research is collaborative. This means that you don’t rely on the work of specialized researchers to ...