You’ve been supporting your beneficiaries for years. You think you know what they need. You believe you know what type of digital service to create.
But hold up. Unless you’ve already tested your idea you can’t be sure it'll work for your users. You can't yet know how to make it accessible and usable for them. You will still have assumptions. Only user research, followed by testing, will validate these, or show you they are wrong.
At Catalyst we believe in solid user research. That means:
Here’s what user research is and how it works.
The best digital services can only be made by charities who understand their users. Their services:
In short they have user value.
They have user value because the service's team did enough of the right research before they developed a concept, made a skateboard or wrote a line of code (not all services even need code).
It’s a way of understanding the needs, motivations, behaviours, desires of people when they are ‘using’ a product or a service. Doing user research helps generate actionable insights.” — Cassie Robinson, National Lottery Community Fund
In your day-to-day work you’ve probably developed a good understanding of your users. That’s important. But to build a good digital service you need to dig deeper into how and why people behave as they do. You need to get your research spade to work on three things:
You need to talk to people in ways that generate empathy (no focus groups required here).
Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
You could build even more empathy by learning about their lives even more. But it’s usually better to focus on the problem and the things that affect how your users experience it and cope with it.
“To truly understand user behaviours, it’s better to spend a lot of time with a smaller number of people, rather than one moment with a lot. So rather than surveys, you use techniques like semi-structured interviews or shadowing.” — Digital Service Principle 1, CAST
User research typically uses these techniques:
Here’s some tips on doing these things remotely.
Later on you’ll research and test prototypes with your users. You might even run some co-design sessions. But only after doing enough user research first.
In her book ‘Just Enough User Research’ Erika Hall explains the principles and practices of doing exactly that: just enough research. It’s reassuring to know that you don’t need to do as much as you thought. Erika also encourages us to reflect on our blind spots and biases.
Understand that doing less of the right research is more useful than doing lots of the wrong type. After five interviews you should have established your users’ main needs and behaviours. If you haven’t then do another five.
Read the book, it’s just long enough.
Or cheat and read a summary.
Sorry. I know we love ’em in the sector, but they’re not much use when it comes to user research. Both events create artificial environments where discussion is moderated and influenced by group dynamics. Conversations become abstracted, users end up feeling inhibited.
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs
User interviews are different. Group dynamics disappear, 1-1 connection becomes possible and users feel more comfortable opening up and sharing their experiences. This generates deeper and more reliable insights.
The first rule of user research: never ask anyone what they want.— Erika Hall, Just Enough Research
One of the biggest shifts that charities are making in their approach to user research and digital design is stopping asking people what they want. Steve Jobs and Henry Ford knew that as humans we aren’t good at knowing what we want. Even when we think we do. If you still need convincing that this is the right thing to do then read this.
Instead ask ‘why’? Try to find out your users’ underlying needs and behaviours. Keep a skeptical mindset about your discoveries. Use questions like these.
Good user research involves the whole team. You might share research tasks, but you’ll always analyse findings and generate insights together. It has to be this way. If you don’t collaborate then bias occurs and insights get missed.
Also, the best people to apply your research later on will be the people who carried it out. So get your designers and frontline workers involved. Give everyone the chance to bring their insights to the table.
We could go deeper. But for now let’s call a halt. We’ll write again about how to synthesise your user research. Until then dive into CAST’s Know How Non Profit Guide to Doing User Research for more guidance.