Eat your broccoli ! A Practical Guide to User Research

Whenever i think about user research in the context of product development, i remember broccoli ! the vegetable that is so good for your health yet tastes bad.. as a father i learned about ways to trick my 6-year-old into eating his broccolis without him knowing, thus reaping all the nutritious values minus the taste… And comparably as a product leader i also figured out ways to integrate user research into the product discovery framework of the teams i led, making it more enjoyable, accessible … and tastes better 🙂

Throughout the 2 parts of this article i’ll be sharing with you my thoughts on the importance of user research, the most common challenges facing teams and how to overcome some of these challenges through promoting good practices and people setup to empower and sponsor a user research culture across your organization.

Part 1: What makes user research that important ?

Let’s grasp the big picture by plotting the most common methods used by product teams during product development, what should be used earlier in the cycle VS later and what usually takes more effort hence can be considered slower to execute VS methods that can be deployed in a much easier & faster way

The Product Discovery Matrix

The term “User Research” refers to a wide range of qualitative research techniques that can help product teams answer an array of questions like;

1. What should we build next and why ?
2. What pain points our customers are currently facing ?
3. How can we ensure a better product-market fit ?
4. What needs are currently being underserved ?
5. Are we solving the right problems with the right solutions ?
6. Why a specific pattern in data is happening ? what explains a specific user behavior ?

In essence user research helps you answer 3 main types of questions:

• Investigative, as in why a certain consumer behaviour is occurring
• Generative, as in what opportunities or underserved needs are out there
• Evaluative, as in validating which solutions solve the problem at hand and how does your users perceive it

If you are already a product manager or working as part of a product team then you’ll find these 3 types of questions — and their underlying activities — quite matching to your own job description or team mandate ! hence trying to continuously answer these types of questions is profoundly important for you and your team’s success in product development and in achieving product-market fit.

Technically, product managers, designers or researchers spearhead user research, that means they typically should know exactly which type of research can help them answer which type of questions, how to run the research, who to involve and how to synthesize learnings collaboratively ..

Although there are different types of user research yet in most cases — especially with generative/inductive research — you will find yourself talking directly with a sample of your users in a structured manner, either online, face to face, voice to voice, in your office, on the streets or in coffeeshops & shopping malls. As for evaluative research like user testing, tools like usertesting.com & usabilityhub.com contributed greatly in simplifying and accelerating the execution of such research projects by offering fully remote-unmanaged research execution with a great degree of reliability and at an affordable cost.

Finally, let’s cover the most common steps found in user research projects, and please note that the below steps might differ based on the research type and setup:

Common Research Steps

Part 2: What makes user research challenging ? and how to overcome some of these challenges ?

I chose to highlight the following 6 challenges which i personally faced most commonly while conducting user research over the years:

1. Dealing with the fear of talking to strangers
2. Finding enough time to dedicate to research projects
3. Defining a solid research goal
4. Setting the right research structure
5. Recruiting the research participants who represent the target audience
6. Documenting your research learnings in an easy to digest format

The rest of this article provides additional details as well as recommendations on how to overcome each one of these challenges based on what i tried and worked. It’s worth noting that some of these recommendations will be more relevant to individual contributors and some to functional managers with more executive powers (CPOs /VPs of Product /Heads of Product..etc).

Challenge 1: Dealing with the fear of talking to strangers

This is the most common challenge with user research especially facing teams or individuals who are new to user research, like newly appointed product managers, designers or new entrepreneurs.. Most of us were told during our childhood to not to talk to strangers, and even as adults most of us still are not very open talking to strangers, mostly because we don’t know what to expect, will they be open, will they respond nicely, will they be rude.. etc. Leaving this fear of talking to strangers unattended will be always hamper your abilities and your team potential as well.

Recommendations for individual contributors:

Start with friendlies first, such as your friends, relatives, colleagues at work or friends of friends. Basically invite them to your research projects as research participants till you overcome your fear of talking to strangers and gain confidence by talking with people that normally you’d be comfortable talking to.. Obviously the golden rule here would be that they should fall within the target audience of your research project !

Recommendations for functional managers:

Hold hands and lead by example, train your team by carrying on research yourself at least for the first couple of researches, teach them by showing not telling. This technique is very powerful in solidifying the ties between you and your team members since you’ll be seen as the type of manager who is not afraid in getting his/her hands dirty.

Challenge 2: Finding enough time to dedicate to research projects

As i covered in part 1, user research projects tend to include several steps, which means that time and effort will need to be invested to get the most out of them and reach unbiased conclusions. If you skipped some of these steps or tended to deal with them in a hurry you will be basically putting the whole research outcomes at risk and you will be increasing the chances of taking wrong decisions based on inconclusive inputs.

Furthermore, not all product organizations (and or companies) can afford to have dedicated researchers with proper project management skills, and usually this task gets assigned to the product manager or designer in the team.. If you are already a product manager or designer yourself, then you’ll know the pile of other tasks on your plate and you’ll know just how hard it is to find enough time to project manage and execute research projects yourself while taking care of everything else.

Recommendations for individual contributors:

Apply the “Peanut Butter Approach” to user research. In most product orgs, you won’t be working alone, normally you will find yourself part of a team of 5 or 6 people on average, so why have all the user research fun alone while you can peanut butter it ? simply put, either you are the product manager or designer of that team, try to always up-skill your team, train them on how to do recruitment & conduct user interviews, and simply share the responsibilities with them. Spreading the load of user research can be a very effective technique if done right, and comes with a massive bonus; Empathy ! , as now everyone in your team including engineers will be familiar with their users, needs, pains, and the context in which the product that they are building and shipping is used in, this on the other-hand should keep everyone in your team motivated, empowered & help improve the overall product quality.

Recommendations for functional managers:

Establish a federated research organization within your department or team. In my recent years as a product leader, i used federated models in order to introduce functions like user research within my product organization where i would hire a small number of resources specialised in a certain product discipline, acting as a center of excellence, providing support, guidance and overseeing common practices. The role of these federated teams would then be to act as “enablers” not “gatekeepers”, hence their role is not to create any bottlenecks for the teams they work with, rather unblock them so they can move much faster.

You can start your atomic research team by hiring 1 senior product researcher and 1 talented research operations specialist to work together owning the below mandate:

1. They should lead & execute the most important, most complex or most impactful research projects themselves.
2. They should establish, safeguard and evangelize a solid framework for how research should be done in your organization.
3. They should continuously train product managers, designers and engineers on how to conduct user research, providing these teams with all the needed guidance & templates.
4. They should streamline research participants recruitment, continuously driving quality research participants to needed teams so they can get unblocked.

This atomic team can then be expanded whenever needed so they can support a larger number of product teams.

Challenge 3: Defining a solid research goal

Throughout my career i have seen teams spending much time and effort conducting user research trying to meet weak or vaguely set goals. Remember that user research is NOT the goal, rather its the mean that enable you to achieve a clearly defined research goal.

Your research goals should match the type of research you are conducting, examples of generative research goals can look like this “What are the underserved needs of young new mothers during the first year of their newborn ?” , or “What are the pains that car owners go through when they want to sell their old cars ?”

Recommendations for individual contributors:

Make sure that your research goal is well written before hand, discussed with your research team and whoever is going to involved in your research project such as your close stakeholders. Your research goal should be specific enough to enable you and the team know whether you have met the goal or no ! otherwise you’ll go into an infinite loop of research, not knowing when to draw conclusions.

When you finalize all the users interviews it’s always very important to meet with the rest of the team who attended these interviews as observers or note takers for a research briefing and conclusion, during these meetings make sure that you also review and assess the goal which you started with, conduct a retro and define what can be improved in the next cycle along with the research next steps.

Recommendations for functional managers:

Continuous engagement and coaching would be my advice here, make sure that you are getting yourself very close to the research projects being conducted, and establish a panel for the research outcomes to be collectively shared & discussed.

During my recent years as a VP of product, i used to organize and host a bi-weekly insights cadence involving my product managers, designers and stakeholders where we discussed the learnings of the different types of research projects that were concluded along other qualitative customer driven insights.

Once you start conducting such type of bi-weekly meetings, you will be able to spot research projects which seem to be in limbo, with multiple reruns or inconclusive outcomes, when you spot such projects you should then start an offline discussion with the concerned team to deep dive and review the set goal and practices they are following, this should give you a prime opportunity to guide your team through the adjustments they need to consider.

Challenge 4: Setting the right research structure

As mentioned earlier, i tend to classify user research into 3 main types; generative, evaluative and investigative. Depending on your research goal you should select the right research type to conduct, the common here is that you’ll definitely have to interview users, ask them questions and listen a lot more than talking, yet the questions you might structure will differ based on the type of research you want to run.

Developing the research questionnaire is a very crucial and challenging aspect of your research project, as even if you got everything else right yet during the interviews you ask the wrong questions then you’ll definitely come to wrong conclusions.

It’s not uncommon to combine multiple types of questions within the same interview session as long as the questions are related to the same research topic/goal, and as long as you won’t overly exhaust your research participants or take any over time, as this might lead them to give you all sorts of answers just to get over with your research so they can leave !

Recommendations for individual contributors:

Throughout this article, you’ll find me stressing on the value of inclusion and involvement of other team members in your research to maximize it’s success opportunities, and my advice to overcome the 4th challenge won’t be much different, you have to keep the right people included in the right way.

Now i want you to think about research projects in a way that is similar to how you think about running your SCRUM sprints — that of course if you use sprints to begin with — every sprint should begin with a sprint planning session involving the SCRUM team and it should end with a retro and a review.

So start your research projects with a planning meeting where you’d invite the team that will be involved in the user interviews as well as your most relevant business stakeholders, during the planning session you should deep dive into the research goal and questionnaire with the group, make sure that they get well discussed, adjusted and agreed upon before moving forward.

Another advice while working on your interview questions, remember that they shouldn’t be persuasive, they shouldn’t include the answers, and they shouldn’t be as if you want to prove your own ideas to yourself, which is called confirmation bias. Remember to fight your own bias and try to keep an open & eager mind.

Recommendations for functional managers:

Work towards setting common guidelines, either yourself or with your dedicated researcher involved. The purpose of having common guidelines in place is to make sure that your product teams are well supported with the best practices that can limit the time they take in trial and error.

If you were able to hire the dedicated researcher i mentioned in challenge #2 then basically this person should lead such an effort to establish a working framework that enable product teams conduct user research in the right way.

I also advice you to consider the below aspects while working on your company’s user research framework:

1. The framework should define clearly the different types of research, along with the recommended setup, practices & tools.
2. The framework should define the contribution model, as in who should be involved in research projects and how.
3. The framework should be published online for example on your confluence project or whatever you use for documentation as long as it can be widely available and easily accessible.
4. The framework should and its documentation should be dealt with as a living organism, hence it should be continuously audited, reviewed and updated through multiple revisions.
5. Avoid developing a framework that is rigid with low levels of resilience, as this will most probably be a DOA piece of work

Challenge 5: Recruiting the relevant research participants

Recruiting research participants is maybe the biggest challenge and the most time consuming one, and it also drives the biggest risk if done wrong.. Imagine if you are developing a new product to be used by orthopedics yet you wrongfully recruited ophthalmologists to be part of your research ! absolutely 2 different branches of medicine all together, none of the feedback given — if they actually were able to give any — will be relevant to the research goal in this case.

Recommendations for individual contributors:

While you might need some very minor development help with this, yet there are ways you can help yourself and your team get unblocked:

1. Implement in-product, always-on research participants recruitment touch points, which can be easily done via tools like braze for in-app messaging. Most effectively run your recruitment campaigns towards the very end of your product funnel so they won’t disturb the user flow.
2. Land your recruitment campaign on a simple google form or a Qualtrics Survey to ask screening questions, this is very important to make sure you are recruiting the right participants for your research. For example, questions that would let you know the participant demographic, context of use of your product, frequency of use of your product, other similar products that they also use .. etc

Implementing these 2 tactics should give your recruitment capacity a nice boost, enabling you to focus on screening effectively.

Recommendations for functional managers:

Most effectively, hire the research operations specialist. I discussed the federated product research model above, and what makes the role of the research operations specialist very important and very interesting, is because of the effect this person creates by acting as a catalyst, he/she will not only be owning the continuous research participants recruitment, but also manage the research participants lifecycle from beginning to end.

Below is how i define the research operations specialist scope of work:

1. Own the implementation of recruitment campaigns both on and off product.
2. Own and manage the research calendar, as in who is expected on what day and time.
3. Manage all research participants communications pre and post interview.
4. Run post interview feedback surveys with those who participated in the research interviews.
5. Ensure participants rewarding post interview, like giving voucher codes or freebies.

The role of the research operations specialist is very flexible and can scale nicely with your investment in user research.

Challenge 6: Documentation

A lot of teams overlook the importance of documentation and it’s not a surprise, remember that in most small and medium sized companies research projects are owned by the product manager or designer themselves, who are also very driven by execution speed and don’t usually have enough time to write detailed research summaries yet also remember that your research outcomes must be available in an easy to share format so you can share it with your other team members (engineers++), stakeholders and other functional heads whenever needed to secure a common understanding and get their buy in.

Recommendations for individual contributors:

Well let’s put it this way, no one is expecting you to write a book or a 300-pages thesis 🙂 , by documentation i mean the bare minimum amount of written information that can help an outsider — or a future self — know what was the purpose of the research, what was the composition of the research participants who took part of it, what were the key outcomes and decisions taken.. in other words your research document should answer the why, the who & the what, a 3 or a 4 pager document which is well written should be sufficient in most cases.

As with all documentation i always encourage my teams to stay organized, keep everything hosted on the cloud, and openly shared internally.. there are no secrets and literally everyone in your company should have easy access to the research learnings.

Along with the written piece of documentation, i always ask my teams to record the sessions and keep recordings uploaded online as well for future reference and further deep dives if required. Keeping recordings as well will help you a lot with learnings summarization and extracting exact user quotes to enrich your narrative.

Another humble recommendation to help you during your documentation journey, which is to write your research document iteratively, start with an initial document that states the research goal, questions and desired target participants, then add to it as you go, step by step, this way you won’t feel the burden of writing it all at once going through your memory lanes and scrap notes.

Recommendations for functional managers:

What functional managers can add as a meaningful contribution is to help their teams with tooling and creation of sample writing guidelines, from my personal experience i can recommend the below very helpful tools:

1. Create and use a shared google drive as an online research library for video recordings, and make sure it’s shared with your team.
2. Create a “store front” for your research library using Google Sites, which is very simple yet powerful to use, and make it available internally.
3. Keep your internal guidelines & framework documentation on Confluence if you use the Atlassian suite of apps or GDocs if you don’t.

Aside the above, it’s very important for you to keep coaching your team, keep reminding them, be actively share notable research outcomes with upper management and other executive peers to keep them excited about research and most importantly aware of the voice of customers.

The bottomline…

As with broccoli, the trick is to blend it with other ingredients which makes it as hidden as possible :) if you are cooking pasta, blend it with the tomatoes to make a sauce, if you are cooking homemade burger then just mix it with the meat, i guess you got the point .. Simply: blend it, hide it, till your kid develops the habit of eating it.

Similarly, if you are the head of your product organization, then you can use the same tactic, blend user research into your product development lifecycle, streamline it’s known challenges to make it as seamless as possible, and bit by bit your team will fall in love with it, and hence turns into a habit.

It definitely takes time and persistence to strengthen the research muscle in any organization — which is almost true for many of our product practices — but no matter the challenge you face there will be always a way out..Throughout this article my intention was to share the common challenges i personally faced during my years in product development, and how i was able to overcome them, both as an individual contributor and later as a senior leader of a large product organization.

I hope my humble learnings & recommendations can help you out and please remember to share your thoughts & comments below.. cheers !