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Great Designers don’t fall in love with their solutions. Great designers fall in love with the user’s problems. – Jared M Spool
A web design team should consider the end user while designing your website; the key factor in Growth Driven Design Methodology is User Research, it’s the fundamental shift that we need to think while designing website, and user research will provide you with the necessary answers to build an effective website.
Consider an example of an archaeologist who starts their excavation with a large tool and then progressively gets more and more focused until using a fine tool for digging out the find. A similar principle is applied in user research to achieve user insights, this will inform you of what to build to drive user value and to grow your business
Start with broad techniques with User interviews which are a high-level metric reporting & then Specific user research
Phase in user research
1. Strategy phase – empathetic understanding of your Target audience and how your website can solve their problem - This phase will give you a full understanding of the following
• Target audience
• Customer Journey maps
• Personas
• Fundamental assumptions
• Tasks to be done
2. Planning phase – continuous improvement phase – This phase will help you identify problem areas and solutions for
• An audience not signing up for trial
• What is preventing customers from viewing a product video on the product page
How to perform User Research
The user research process consists of three major steps
User questions - Create user questions
Research - Select the correct types of research to use in covering the answers for those user questions
Reporting - Review your findings understand patterns and summaries your earnings and takeaways into a report
Step 1- User questions
Creating user questions: The goal is to collect user challenges, problems areas, formulate specific user-focused questions which you can then work to answer.
How to create user questions;
Start by reviewing your team goals, your current focus of the website performance road map
Desired user outcome.
Formulate internal questions on observed challenges – Start with broad questions and then narrow down to specific questions
Use 5Y technique – Start with one broad question and then ask “Y” loop the question to form a new question or statement and repeat up to 5 times which eventually will uncover the root cause of the desired outcome.
Convert the internal question (from your team) from step 3 and convert them into questions that you can ask your users during the research stage.
Tips to create questions
Revisit customer journey map and create new maps for specific focus – (usually your loyal customer group)
Feedback from your customer service desk employees on challenges
Follow up questions
Consider new customers and customers who have moved to your competitors and alternatives.
Consider an example for an Internal Question: What are the pain points of a business owner, who wants to grow his team? It’s often difficult to get an unbiased helpful answer for an internal question.
The best way is to turn this Internal question to a User question such as...
How do you want your business to look like in two years?
Follow up the questions
What is preventing you from getting there?
What are you doing today to overcome the challenge?
The above example of user questions and follow up questions are designed to start from a broad topic and then dig deeper and deeper to identify the problem areas.
Step 2 – Research
Goal - is to gain a clear understanding of the underlying challenges motivations and behaviors of your users in order to answer the questions that you created in the previous step, Pick the research method based on
• What are the questions to answer?
• Who, what, where & when?
• What data is already available and how deep you need to dig?
The research methods vary based on the type of result you are looking for. Let’s consider the below scenario’s
Scenario 1 – you would know you’re the time your audiences are on a particular social media platform, (Facebook) - The questions and the answer are straight forward.
Scenario 2 – you would want to know what is the anxiety that a user experiences while searching for a specific product – this would require a deeper question to understand the core anxiety.
Once you identify a suitable research method, you can now collect the data of your research and move on to the third step and report the findings.
Step 3 – Reporting
Goal – Summarize key takeaways, learning lessons and recommendations, Turn all the collected data into core findings and turn them into something actionable which aligns with the goals of your company. Analyze based on
• Patterns or common themes across your research
• Pain points of the users across successful and unsuccessful users
• Specific or unique challenges faced
• Look for patterns that sweep across most of your users once identified prioritize based on its commonality and pain points
An Ideal format:
One page clean clear and easy to understand
Questions that you tried to answer
Research that was done
Observed patterns
Key learning and recommendations\ideas
Next steps
*A report that is sent to higher management must be concise and the report that is shared across your team can be more detailed as it will help in brainstorming ideas.
Conclusion
Conducting User research is one of the most important activities in the growth driven design methodology, In reality, the only people who know the true answers are your users. Growth driven design is about what your audience\ personas prefer on your website, building a website based on what your audience need will result in a peak performing website.
further reading on user research please click the link below
Toptal.com
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