Is your team making decisions in a silo? Evidence-based design can help.
User experience research (UXR) asks us to identify our biases and hypotheses first, prove or disprove them to be true, and then act collectively on what we discover.
We all set out wanting to make products our customers love.
If you’re involved in the product world then you likely strive to create products that people not only want to use, but actually enjoy using. And you know how to do it: craft experiences that are useful and relevant; ones that make our customers’ lives easier.
Yet time and time again you discover your customers are disappointed, frustrated, or confused with what you built.
How does a product go from lovable to annoying?
Here are some of the top reasons your product may no longer deliver on its intended purpose:
1. You’re human. You’re biased.
It’s crucial to understand and own that, as people, we have a whole slew of cognitive biases that effect our decisions and behaviors. Though we have good intentions, we often end up making decisions about our products based on assumptions or intuitions that we have about our customers, without any real evidence. We can’t help it. We’re human. This is how we have survived this long–by making estimated guesses. But not everyone thinks the same way you do.
2. Your product wears way too many hats.
Crafting a product is a lot like sculpting clay, susceptible to the pressures and demands that can either shape it into something remarkable or cause it to crumble under the weight. Factors like time and budget constraints, feature pressures, and maintenance requirements all contribute to the delicate balance. And this means your product often ends up trying to do too many things at once.
3. It takes too long to get aligned.
Money, time, and resources end up being wasted on decision fatigue or on focusing on something that never mattered in the long run. And these decisions can often seem like they’re being made inside of an internal silo that perpetuates itself and grows bigger and bigger as time progresses. You end up losing patience and confidence that you can even steer the ship at all.
How can you make great product that actually withstands the product-creation process?
The answer: Gather evidence about your customers that your team can’t ignore.
1. Talk to real customers. Get to know them.
By investigating what drives the people using your products to make decisions and take action, you’re bound to create a product that solves their needs (both known and unknown). You might confirm some guesses you had. And no doubt, you’ll learn something entirely new.
2. Invest in user research, continuously and purposefully.
It’s simple — investing in user research means investing in the success of your product. Research from Forrester shows that every $1 invested in UX brings $100 in return. (That’s a whopping ROI of 9,900%!). By understanding what the needs of your customers are, you will be able to more confidently prioritize what needs to get done to make their (and your) life easier.
Research shows that every $1 invested in UX brings $100 in return.
3. Become an evangelist for user research within your product.
Not everyone understands the value of user research, or how it works. Help others see how user research impacts all parts of the product development process by showing them the impact it makes to their piece of the pie. Solving and prioritizing the right problems demands a deep understanding of what truly drives our customers. Infusing their invaluable insights should be in the very DNA of our decision-making. But in order to become an evangelist we must educate ourselves on the value of user research, and..
4. Tell a compelling story.
Storytelling is how we find meaning; it’s what connects us to one another, and influences our experiences as human beings. So naturally, storytelling is paramount in user research as it has the power to captivate, engage, and evoke empathy with your team and partners. Great storytelling should show the context in which your research is useful to each team.
→ Does your team need motivation and inspiration? Put the team at the heart of the story.
→ Does your team lack some understanding or empathy for the people using your product or service? Talk about how their lives will improve once the product or redesign is out in the world.
By presenting user insights and experiences through compelling narratives with product-specific context, your stakeholders can see how the research impacts their team and, hopefully, connect emotionally with the people that use your product, too.
So stop guessing.
With great user data and research, you can create evidence-based designs, which is your most useful weapon against product development challenges. So everyone can can do what they ultimately set out to do — make the best possible thing your customers will love.
“If you want to create a great product, you have to start by understanding the people who will use it.”-Don Norman, founder of Nielsen Norman Group
Are you lost at sea without a user research game plan? Coalesce can help. We don’t just help you find the answers, we help you craft the right questions. Want to learn more? Sign up for a free research audit with our team!
