RESEARCH

Talking to people to discover opportunities.

Throughout my career I have primary performed three types of research in support of building software experiences.

Organizational Research: I kick off each new engagement with some form of organizational research. This typically looks like a 1 or 2 day in-person workshop but can also be performed digitally. This is our chance to learn more about the subject matter and determine what drives the business. This is an important first step because the viability of the work is informed by the overlap of desirability (what the business’s users need) and priority (what the business itself wants to accomplish). The reality is that no project is viable until it solves a business problem and organizational research is designed to help us create a list of business priorities that can be prioritized for work. The tools we use for organizational research are stakeholder interviews, surveys, and a wide range of design thinking activities that I tailor to each type of project.

User and Customer Research: After gaining a better understanding of the business priorities user research comes into play to enable the creation of hypotheses that can be tested through experimentation. The goal is to understand the true needs and priorities of the target customers/audience/end users. To make the right decisions and deliver real value we need to understand the context in which the users will interact with the system and replace assumptions (what we learned during organizational research) with actual insights. After we learn what tasks the users are trying to accomplish we can analyze those alongside the business priorities and any overlaps are opportunities to solve problems. These opportunities are what get turned into actionable development work. Some of the tools we use for user research are interviews (in-person or remote), surveys, usability testing (of their current process), customer service shadowing, and quantitative analytics.

Evaluative Research: Often referred to as usability testing, Evaluative Research is all about understanding how well the solution works. Does it work for the intended audience and with the intended purpose? Or do we need to make adjustments to better serve our users. This is the research that a product team should never stop doing, especially after a product is released. My preferred approach to this form of research is to have your target audience interact with the system and provide feedback. The goal is to gather quantitative and qualitative data that can be used to improve the current experience or added to the backlog as future enhancements that will delight your users. The primary tools for this type of research is moderated or unmoderated observation. Asking the users to perform a key set of tasks (based on what you learned during customer research) and analyzing how they perform. I’ve performed moderated usability testing but also have experience using tools like UserTesting , Hotjar, Userlytics, and more.