UX for Business

Working with Users

User Research in Real Life

When students get into a real job after learning UX in a boot camp or university or some other not-really-doing-real-design type of education, they are often surprised to find out that user research is hard to do, or hard to get permission to do in real life.

If this happened to you, and you thought to yourself, “How do I know what to design if we don’t talk to users?”—you are absolutely correct! Unfortunately, that might not help you do real user research at your real job.

First, I think it is worth giving you a less grand idea of what user research must look like. If you can do super professional studies in a usability lab with eye tracking and carefully designed studies (like academics might do), that is great—do it! But if you are in the other 99% of companies, you can get a lot of valuable information from a much-less-formal study of users.

My favorite starting point is one-on-one interviews, maybe with a casual task or two in your product or website, and some fairly open, simple questions that I ask everyone. Five users, no gift cards or any other payments, and the users are selected based on a few important but simple criteria to make sure they are the right kind of people (real users are not all exactly the same, and in reality only a handful of factors make them relevant...don’t filter for more than that; otherwise you risk creating a bias toward the answers you want!).

Watch those users in real time, record everything ...