Why build digital products based on user research?
Developing digital products can take a lot of effort, money and time. From a business point of view, it’s crucial to spend those resources wisely, reducing the risk of failure and focusing on the quality and value that your product can bring to its users. This is why, in this article we will talk about user research - one of the most important steps on your product’s development path. Read on to find out how user research can contribute to a successful realization of your digital idea.
Table of contents
What is user research?
User research is a must-have process when building digital products that bring value to people and businesses. In the end, your product’s future depends on users, their interaction with it, and their specific needs that the product fulfills. Making users’ lives easier by solving their problems, your product can become meaningful and desired. But what is user research all about? Where to start with it?
First, you need to know who your users are and what problem your product can potentially solve for them. This will help you develop a main product hypothesis which should then be validated before your team starts creating any kind of MVP vs. prototype. In short, user research is all about finding out if your proposed solution matches users’ real needs. It’s about discovering users’ problems to build a product which actually solves them.
Some say user research is an initial stage of digital product development, but when creating products in an agile environment, using lean methodology, user research can be valuable at every stage of full cycle product development. It helps to move the product forward by implementing the right features (for example, in the product-market fit phase), or investigating new groups of users and their needs (such as when entering new markets in the scaling phase).
What are the benefits of user research for digital products?
Why is user research important? There is one main benefit of conducting user research for a digital product: with user research you can greatly reduce the risk of your product’s failure. Of course, you cannot predict how the market will react to your product or new features, but you can gather feedback from users (or potential users) and make sure the product meets their expectations.
Moreover, with user research your development team will have more information to inspire innovative ideas for new features or improvements that are really desirable to the product’s target audience. Knowing which functionalities are helpful to them and which ones are unnecessary, you will be able to create a much better product than your competitors, who may skip the user research process trying to save time and budget. A better product, of course, may also result in higher ROI and other business benefits, such as stronger company brand and more trust from investors and contractors.
Creating a digital product based on user research obviously benefits the users and increases their overall satisfaction. In consequence, happy users bring more users and generate more profit, by recommending the product to others.
User research step by step & user research methods
At Boldare, when conducting user research we stay data-informed, meaning that the product decisions are not only based on the data but also on other factors. Those other factors might be our past experience, additional metrics or extraordinary events that occur at the time of research. The opposite of that approach is to be data-driven - to let the data guide the decision-making process. For user research however, it’s better to have a more complete view into the users’ information, ensuring that your research is even more accurate.
When building a new digital product from scratch, at the idea stage, and right after the product discovery workshops, we create a clear description of a user persona. We need to find potential product users for research, so we need to know exactly who they are. We use various tools and methods to figure out our user persona’s characteristics and needs.
Quantitative data from tools such as Google Analytics can be enough to discover user behaviors, but in order to create a full user persona profile, qualitative user research methods apply. We usually conduct in-depth interviews to map the persona - identify their needs, actions, motivations, etc.
Based on this user persona research we are able to formulate product hypotheses and give developers a green light for writing the first lines of code for a prototype or MVP. A clickable prototype does not always require coding - in this case it is prepared by product designers and can be used to verify whether the product meets users’ needs.
At Boldare, when processing user research we always follow the build-measure-learn cycle - a lean startup tool. So, with the product idea and product hypothesis ready, we move on to creating a prototype or MVP, which is a first stage of the lean startup cycle - build. Then, in the measure phase, we conduct user testing (which is a part of our UX research). Here, we need to choose the particular methods that will help us validate the product hypotheses. An example is to let potential users interact with the prototype (or MVP) and ask for their feedback.
Depending on the nature of the product hypotheses, we can also use one or more user testing methods, such as:
- online tools - Hotjar for heatmap analyses, eye-tracking tools, mouse-movement tracking tools etc.,
- A/B tests - to test two different versions of a product or feature with users,
- individual in-depth interviews - to research user behaviors, hidden needs and crucial pain points,
- online surveys - to gather feedback,
- focus groups - moderated discussions with a group of users to get their detailed feedback, opinions and perspectives,
- usability testing - to test if the product is usable we ask users to go through a particular path or process in the application and then we analyze their behavior.
The last stage of the lean startup cycle is learning. In order to learn, we first need to gather and segregate all our user testing insights and data, and analyze the results. After that we draw conclusions. We need to check if our hypothesis validation is positive or negative.
User research validates product ideas - an example
Let’s look at a real example, when user research really made a difference for the product, users, and thus for our client’s budget. Our client was an online printing company that bought a license for a virtual design tool, allowing users to design their own marketing assets (flyers, business cards or booklets). They wanted to add this online tool into their main printing platform assuming this was something their customers needed.
After a series of in-depth interviews with their current customers, our team completed the hypothesis validation process negatively, meaning the tool was not a solution the customers would use and value. We recommended the printing company not invest in it as this could be a tremendous waste of resources.
Taking user research seriously
Should you take user research seriously? Of course. But remember, any user research is better than no research at all. If you don’t have a huge budget to create a user research strategy and follow it step by step at each stage of product development, just focus on interviewing a few users and gathering their feedback. Believe it or not, it all makes a difference.
At Boldare, we believe the success of digital products largely depends on the quality and quantity of user research. This is why our UX research teams are cross-functional. There are various specialists always involved in the user research process: product designers, developers, product strategists, quality assurance experts, and scrum masters. This is how important it is for us and our clients. We hope you can now see the benefits of conducting user research at each stage of your product development cycle. We have our fingers crossed for your success.
Share this article:
