User research

About user research

User research is the process of learning about your users – their situation, background, needs and context in which they work.

Good user research is a critical component for many types of design projects and will help you:

• Learn what people will do with your information or application
• See when and where people will be using the information
• Learn about people’s conceptual models of your information
• Learn about how people think about processes and workflows
• Gather terminology from a user perspective.

The research collected provides input to many aspects of information architecture and interaction design projects. Most importantly, it helps you to ensure the project provides value to users and will be usable.

User research in a project

User research belongs toward the beginning of any design or redesign project (though it can be used later to focus on collecting more information about a detailed part). Techniques for user research include:

• Interviews with users
• Small group discussions
• Observing people in their normal situation
• Surveys and questionnaires
• Diary studies
• Analysis of existing information (website statistics, search statistics, customer contacts, help desk queries)

All of these methods provide good information about what your users may want to do, how they describe things and how they are likely to work.

Where contact with actual end-users is very difficult, we can learn about users by talking with people who do have contact with them (such as call centre, sales and field staff). This approach can provide some good insights, but less than research with actual users.

Deliverables

Depending on the needs of the project, deliverables from user research may include:

• A set of user profiles, outlining the key attributes that describe the user group
• A set of personas, describing individual archetypal users as a rich narrative
• Key issues to consider when designing for the user group
• Detailed notes or transcripts from research activities

When to get me involved

I usually conduct user research as part of information architecture and interaction design projects, but can do it as a stand-alone step where needed.