{"id":3229,"date":"2015-03-18T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T10:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=156"},"modified":"2016-12-05T12:01:06","modified_gmt":"2016-12-05T12:01:06","slug":"what-were-really-trying-to-do-when-we-do-user-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/what-were-really-trying-to-do-when-we-do-user-research\/","title":{"rendered":"What we\u2019re really trying to do when we do user research"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons we enjoy working on Government Digital Service exemplar projects so much is the way they\u2019ve approached the thorny issue of user research.<\/p>\n

Why is this such a \u2018thorny\u2019 issue? After all, doing research with \u2018real people\u2019 is one of those things everybody agrees is generally a good thing to do, right?<\/p>\n

But product owners and delivery teams often seem to struggle to find the time for regular research. And that\u2019s because, even if you\u2019re doing it on a shoestring<\/a>\u00a0it\u2019s something that takes effort.<\/p>\n

User research takes effort because it is one extra thing to think about. At the pace of an agile delivery project, sometimes it\u2019s hard to synchronise the effort of research with the speed of delivery. Without a thoughtful research plan, and a library of user research, it might appear to be non-trivial to match up the right piece of insight with the right bit of design and development \u2013 and this means teams sometimes struggle to see the value of doing the research in the first place. (It\u2019s not necessarily that hard, as we\u2019ll see below, but it is one more thing to think about while you\u2019re trying to build momentum).<\/p>\n

5,000 miles away<\/h3>\n

And then there\u2019s the cost. The team we were in at the Home Office spent time putting together a persuasive business case for a research project abroad while we were building the China Visit Visa product. Here\u2019s what the Home Office Product Owner had to say about the\u00a0user research project 5,000 miles away.<\/a><\/p>\n

We invested our travel budget in two trips to China \u2013 to support transition testing and to conduct post-release user research. Both were money well spent, highlighting a variety of changes and improvements we could make. There is no doubt in my mind that one of our big lessons learnt is that there would have been value in sending our researchers out to China much earlier.<\/p>\n

An interface in Chinese?<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s not just the cost of the trip itself, but the sheer amount of preparation and planning required<\/a> to pull it off. Especially, when you\u2019re building a product with an interface in Chinese!<\/a><\/p>\n

An obvious target for measuring how effective user research is seems to be \u2018how much.\u2019 How much research did we do? Or how many users did we speak to?\u00a0You can argue that the type of usability testing\u00a0(don\u2019t call it user testing!)<\/a>\u00a0teams often do can be measured with \u2018number of issues and fixes identified\u2019. That makes sense if you\u2019re testing and are focused on increasing quality. But it makes a lot less sense if you\u2019re viewing user research as an investment.<\/p>\n

You should be seeing user research as something which can save you money rather than some narrow use as a bug-fixing, snag-spotting tool. Done right, user research can save you a ton of effort and take you far beyond the bureaucratic nature of compliance efforts. You don\u2019t often see Product Owners wishing they\u2019d put less effort into user research or wishing they\u2019d left it to the last minute.<\/p>\n

Exposure Time<\/h3>\n

At GDS, they\u2019re big on Exposure Time<\/a>.\u00a0Everybody in a delivery team should see people using the product you\u2019re building so measuring this makes sense \u2013 it\u2019s a great proxy metric for success and widely applicable to all delivery teams.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve got a couple of metrics I monitored very closely during my time with Equal Experts at the Home Office. Admittedly, they\u2019re not as concrete as the minimum of \u20182 hours for everybody, every 6 weeks\u2019. But they helped me understand when we were doing something right.<\/p>\n