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Every Product Manager knows the importance of involving users frequently in the product development process. This involvement often happens through user research, conducted by a Product Manager, Designer, or, in more mature organizations, a User Researcher.
In this series, we will discuss how to master user research sessions if you are responsible for them in your organization.
Why is user research important?
The primary reason to conduct user research is to help validate your work. It provides additional data to de-risk any assumptions and resolve any debates that you may have within your team. User research complements quantitative analysis by explaining why something happened.
Identify issues with your product
Let’s say that you’re a Product Manager responsible for the checkout process of an eCommerce store. Quantitative data might show a drop in the checkout process by X%, but the cause remains unclear. Reach out to the users that dropped-off and speaking to them will help uncover the “why”.
Get stakeholder buy-in with user input
As a Product Manager, you navigate between various stakeholders and have to consider the business, technical, and design aspects of the product and the stakeholders that represent them. Factual evidence from user research helps persuade stakeholders to support your vision. Your opinion is as valuable as anyone else’s opinions, but the user’s opinion carries more weight as the feature impacts them directly.
Test your product directly with users before launch
Lastly, building a product or feature without user input can be risky.There could be issues or gaps with the design, data, requirements, valuable steps in the process, and more. User research prevents you from building “in the dark”.
Other benefits of user research:
When to conduct user research?
User research is essential during discovery, testing, and feedback stages for your product. The best product teams view this process as a cycle, rather than a linear path. This approach allows for a continuous stream of input, ensuring insights remain relevant.
Discovery
User interviews are a great way for you to uncover the areas that need to be addressed. During discovery, the key things that you can uncover are: who your users are (and aren’t), what problems and challenges they’re currently facing, and how they currently solve these problems. As a bonus, you may gather insights on how they might want the problems to be solved in an ideal state.
Testing
Now that you understand the most important problems to solve and an idea on how to solve it, testing designs or prototypes with users validates whether the solution meets their expectations. Additionally, testing can uncover other issues that impact the user’s value realization such as usability, accessibility, and desirability issues.
Feedback
Despite involving users throughout the various development stages, the final product that is launched can be different due to technical complexity, timeline, budget constraints, or even new requirements received from a stakeholder. Post-launch feedback helps identify areas for improvement or to build upon in the next iteration.
Putting it together
User research is one of the most invaluable tools for a product manager, because it provides factual evidence across all stages of the product development process. Not only does it help to uncover issues with your product, but it can help you get stakeholder buy-in and test your work-in-progress before launch. Conducting user research regularly and continuously is crucial for discovery, testing, and feedback.
Want real examples of how companies conduct user research? Check out these case studies.
Need users for your next co-creation session? Get started
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Every Product Manager knows the importance of involving users frequently in the product development process. This involvement often happens through user research, conducted by a Product Manager, Designer, or, in more mature organizations, a User Researcher.
In this series, we will discuss how to master user research sessions if you are responsible for them in your organization.
Why is user research important?
The primary reason to conduct user research is to help validate your work. It provides additional data to de-risk any assumptions and resolve any debates that you may have within your team. User research complements quantitative analysis by explaining why something happened.
Identify issues with your product
Let’s say that you’re a Product Manager responsible for the checkout process of an eCommerce store. Quantitative data might show a drop in the checkout process by X%, but the cause remains unclear. Reach out to the users that dropped-off and speaking to them will help uncover the “why”.
Get stakeholder buy-in with user input
As a Product Manager, you navigate between various stakeholders and have to consider the business, technical, and design aspects of the product and the stakeholders that represent them. Factual evidence from user research helps persuade stakeholders to support your vision. Your opinion is as valuable as anyone else’s opinions, but the user’s opinion carries more weight as the feature impacts them directly.
Test your product directly with users before launch
Lastly, building a product or feature without user input can be risky.There could be issues or gaps with the design, data, requirements, valuable steps in the process, and more. User research prevents you from building “in the dark”.
Other benefits of user research:
When to conduct user research?
User research is essential during discovery, testing, and feedback stages for your product. The best product teams view this process as a cycle, rather than a linear path. This approach allows for a continuous stream of input, ensuring insights remain relevant.
Discovery
User interviews are a great way for you to uncover the areas that need to be addressed. During discovery, the key things that you can uncover are: who your users are (and aren’t), what problems and challenges they’re currently facing, and how they currently solve these problems. As a bonus, you may gather insights on how they might want the problems to be solved in an ideal state.
Testing
Now that you understand the most important problems to solve and an idea on how to solve it, testing designs or prototypes with users validates whether the solution meets their expectations. Additionally, testing can uncover other issues that impact the user’s value realization such as usability, accessibility, and desirability issues.
Feedback
Despite involving users throughout the various development stages, the final product that is launched can be different due to technical complexity, timeline, budget constraints, or even new requirements received from a stakeholder. Post-launch feedback helps identify areas for improvement or to build upon in the next iteration.
Putting it together
User research is one of the most invaluable tools for a product manager, because it provides factual evidence across all stages of the product development process. Not only does it help to uncover issues with your product, but it can help you get stakeholder buy-in and test your work-in-progress before launch. Conducting user research regularly and continuously is crucial for discovery, testing, and feedback.
Want real examples of how companies conduct user research? Check out these case studies.
Need users for your next co-creation session? Get started
Toronto Product Management Association (TPMA) is a community focused on development, growth and networking of Product professionals in the Greater Toronto Area.
