User Research

When you design a new product, you might need to understand a space that you’ve never explored before. You might have to ask questions you’ve never asked, and talk to people you have never talked to about things they have never seen or heard of. At digital product agency Moonshot, we frequently find ourselves in Read more »

A persona starts off with a classic formula – name, age, demographic, location –  and that formula can work when you have a focused audience with specific needs. But what happens when your product is direct to consumers, and there are an awful lot of them? My career has been focused in media: I’ve worked Read more »

This article explores the value of both moderated and unmoderated user research. It outlines the differences between the two, and looks at the potential options for product managers in the light of timeline, budget, and expected revenue. And while moderated research may be expensive, it’s my view that the benefits it delivers are worth the Read more »

Mona Patel is the customer experience expert behind the UX-led innovation and design company Motivate Design. She uses her knowledge of design research and ergonomics to deliver “mind-spinning” solutions to companies with customer-related research problems. But how does she spin their minds? How does she find the insights inside their data? She naturalises the research contexts. Read more »

Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, ranging from cross-functional, to customer-centric all the way up to iterative. But there’s one aspect which will soonish vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. The notion that successful product teams strictly need to operate from within Read more »

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of developing a product when you realize you’re going to miss the launch date. That’s never happened to you, right? Well, according to the Center for New Product Development, “the average new product development project exceeds its schedule by 120%.” So why does this happen, even to the best of Read more »

At #mtpcon San Francisco, Leisa Reichelt, head of research and insights at Atlassian, took on our current approach to user research and how we take an evidence-based approach to doing completely the wrong thing. Five years ago, the industry was focused on just getting people to do any user research. Product managers weren’t regularly talking Read more »

No one is immune to cognitive biases. Cindy Alvarez, Principle Researcher at Microsoft and Author of Lean Customer Development wants us to recognize this fact. Because while we can’t avoid bias altogether, she has some advice for us on how to work around bias and reduce the impact it has in our research. You are Read more »

In this era of product management, I think we all agree that user research and feedback is important. We also know that sourcing users for this research can be difficult. So we often turn to proxy users in our research.  Proxy users are people who are not actually your users, but are close enough that Read more »

The trash heap of history is littered with the corpses of unicorns. Most companies talk a good game of customer centricity and design but aren’t doing the hard part: user research. The Cult of the Designer ‘Design’ as a concept is now widely discussed and debated without a real understanding of what it actually means. Read more »