Chapter 8. Conducting Guerrilla User Research
Take a chance and step outside.
Lose some sleep and say you tried.
Meet frustration face to face.
A point of view creates more waves.
—JOY DIVISION (1979)
BY RUNNING SMALL, STRUCTURED EXPERIMENTS, THIS QUALITATIVE fieldwork will help you to immediately validate assumptions about the value proposition and innovative key experience from the users themselves. In this chapter, you will focus on harvesting actionable takeaways from your potential customer segment through guerrilla user research. You will use the prototype from Chapter 7 to get closer to the truth with an open heart and mind to really hear what your potential customers feel and think about your product’s core experience. This chapter focuses on Tenet 3, Validated User Research (Figure 8-1), and makes use of the UX Strategy Toolkit.
Guerrilla User Research: Operation Silver Lake Café
On September 23, 2013, an unarmed team of UX vigilantes launched an organized attack on the value proposition of the software engineer I introduced in Chapter 1. The treatment center operation lasted 8 hours and involved 10 participants in two hipster café locations in Silver Lake, California. The entire team of vigilantes (team lead, UX researcher, and event coordinator) and interview participants walked away unscathed. Neither café location was compromised, ...
Get UX Strategy now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
