How to fit behavioural user research into every product development cycle

Customer insights not only reduce risks ($) but they fuel innovation ($$$). In today's consumer-focused, highly-demanding world, you cannot afford shipping digital products and services nobody wants or are hard to use. Users know – the alternative to your website or mobile app is just one click away. Successful software and online businesses like Google, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Thomson Reuters, 3AM, Babylon Health and Atlassian (just to name a few) conduct customer research and user experiments on a regular basis, sometimes daily, to stay on top of people’s needs, attitudes and behavioural changes. Here are a few new and common ways to increase the user research capability of your organization – no matter if you are a large or a small company and whether your teams can dedicate not more than 1 hour to one week of their time.

Heuristic Evaluation: 2 to 4 hours

An expert review against a set of principles.

Heuristic evaluations are a great way to go after the more obvious usability and user experience issues that come with the first iteration of a new user interface or software. Such evaluations give the design and development team a chance to look at their work with some fresh eyes. You don’t need any equipment to conduct the evaluation. The only downside – it requires a more senior usability or UX expert with domain-specific knowledge.

RITE: 1 to 2 days

Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation.

RITE helps you to evaluate and identify interface or application problems, quickly fix them, and then empirically verify the efficacy of the fixes, using a rapid test–fix–test–fix approach. We found RITE to be very collaborative and we always encourage a few more team members to join and co-facilitate the user interview parts of the sessions. It requires little to no setup. You mostly need a research facilitator and a designer to apply the changes between user testing sessions. We recommend doing four runs per day, depending on the complexity of your product and user tasks.

“Value is what customers love you for, so the first stage in any product development cycle is to develop a common and up to date understanding what that value is.” M.O.Gern

Cafe Tests – 3 to 5 hours

Fresh eyes on small, isolated usability issues and concept validations.

It’s a form of guerilla testing loved by startups where teams spread out, leave the office and chat people up on the streets to get some exposure time. It’s less formal, open and therefore should encourage everybody to participate. That said, it still needs a bit of planning time. You need to develop a clear understanding of your testing goals and prepare a prototype you can show to people and quietly observe their reactions, perhaps even ask follow up, open-ended questions.

Pulse Study – 1 week

Sprint cadence user studies.

A Pulse Study is a condensed, sprint-like replacement for a more lengthy classic, 4- to 6-week research (lab) setting. It provides companies with a more agile, flexible but structured testing framework. Before you start, make sure your equipment is set up and tested. Agree with your team on effective ways to recruit test participants or even build out a pool of people you can always refer back to when running a week of sprint-research. Don’t waste time crafting a lengthy research report at the end, but instead send out EOD (end of the day) daily emails with the latest findings, which you then deliver as a summary in the format of UX SnapShots or similar.

Diary Study – open ended

A snapshot of people’s behaviour over time.

Capture life as it is in real-time! Diary studies provide rich insights and an overall picture of your customers’ journey towards the first purchase, first product usage and perhaps even spanning the whole product usage life cycle. It’s necessary to keep the daily logging and sharing of insights for participants lightweight, so make use of existing messaging habits and leverage WhatsApp, twitter (DM) or similar. Know in advance how you can trigger reporting by preparing a rigorous format with structured interview questions before the start of a study. Diary studies require no special skills, just a decent amount of time commitment to keep participants engaged and to analyze the data afterwards.

Conclusion

Gone are the old days of occasionally conducting consumer research with surveys, collecting biased opinions from generic focus groups, reaffirming what marketing teams seem to have predicted already in their marketing and customer experience strategies. It’s about time to collect real behavioural user/customer insights to better predict current and future product/feature usage. The methodologies, processes and tools we propose here are easy to implement and use. Reach out to one of our researchers to help you get started this year. Interested in setting up your own ResearchOps team? We can help, too.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Peter Drucker

Need help with behavioural research? I am passianate about UX Design, User Research and Customer Development. Talk to me or one of my collegues at Appnovation about this specific service. Appnovation is a Vancouver based full-service digital agency and we have offices around the world.