What should we build?

“What should we build?” implies that you—as my client— perceive that there is problem that your business can solve.

Without user research, this quest would be a high stakes gamble. You’d be investing time and money in an assumption that might be shaped by bias and or power centers in your company. Or, you might miss essential details about who has such a problem and what drives their perceptions and actions.

The role of user research is to lower your risk and increase your odds of success, and generate a few new opportunities you hadn’t seen before.

Too much development takes place in a vacuum. This is true in established companies and within startups. "Everyone needs a ___” is a great place to start, but it is incredibly worthwhile to gain a deeper, more strategic understanding of the audience. You are not your users.

The goal and purpose of generative research like this is to better understand which problem you should be solving... for whom... and why it makes sense for you to solve it.

Methods we use to do this include ethnography (out in the field, observing habits), interviews in context of daily life, or perhaps a diary study (asking people to record activities and thoughts over time).

---

Want more guidance to improve your user research?

The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore

People regularly ask me what I “do” as a design researcher so I decided to write about it.

For the next ten weeks, my posts will be under “The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore ” theme. (Yea, I need a catchier name.)

I plan to craft one post on how we gather input around each of these eight questions:

• What should we build?

• Are we building the right thing?

• Are we building the thing right?

• Who are our customers?

• What are our customers’ needs and motivations?

• How can we improve this?

• Do they understand this?

• Why did this metric go up or down?

Then I’ll write about my responses to two common client questions:

• Can you teach my team to do what you do?

• Can you teach me to do what you do?

Ten questions answered in ten weeks!

No, that’s not exactly right. I cannot give you all the answers, but I can help you to understand how we discover immensely valuable data to inform “the answers.” I’ll explain…

Where do we start? What are we looking for? How do we make sure our learnings are trustworthy? How do we translate research questions into participant questions? How do we make sense of what we gather? How do we ensure findings are acted upon?

Stay tuned. This will be fun and worthwhile.

---

Download additional tools, templates, and inspiration

Funny how we sometimes fiercely resist our first steps in the right direction.

It can be surprisingly easy to be clueless about what you were born to do!

Almost a decade ago, I went back to school and was moving through a series of innovation residencies at the California College of the Arts. When it was time to explore user research, I was so resistant that I literally offered my classmates money to trade places with me! (That option was immediately squashed.)

Our first task was to conduct a series of ethnographies, which basically means studying people in their own environments to learn how they think and feel and behave in their natural surroundings. I watched (ahem, observed) people as they prepared to go food shopping, actually shopped, and then came home and unpacked.

It was instant love! I’ve been working in user research ever since. It fills my “curiosity tank” in a way nothing ever had. I’m a consummate learner, and in this field we constantly learn in a pretty structured and focused manner. In every interaction, my goal is to learn. My clients pay me to learn. It's awesome.

In hindsight, this was a terrific lesson. I wonder what else I’m resisting. How about you?

Funny how we sometimes fiercely resist our first steps in the right direction.

---

Want more guidance to improve your user research?