In-depth interviews are gold. This user research method allows us to genuinely understand who our customers are and what they experience in their everyday lives. It’s a style of interviewing that goes beyond the customer’s interaction with our product. Of course, we still want to know how a product or service impacts them. However, understanding our customers as real people, with lives outside of our product, should affect the way we build our product or service.
Here are 5 steps to get started:
Example: Choosing a software product is a very complex process; we seek to deeply understand how people make these decisions.
2. Define your research objectives. They should address HOW you are going to study the problem statement. Do this by breaking the research problem down into several objectives:
Ask yourself: “What am I trying to learn?” and “What must the research achieve?”
Example objectives:
Identify what stage of the idea is being researched:
3. Target the correct participants for the study. Before you start recruiting, you have to understand who your users are so you can optimize recruiting efforts. Talking to the right people is a fundamental part of effective research. What are some ways to do this?
4. Write a research plan. Research plans contain all of the necessary information about the research project. Use it as a kick-off document to distill core goals and align the whole team.
5. Align the team. Once you have finished the research plan — or even before — sit down with the team to discuss the research problem and objectives. By doing this, the whole team can brainstorm questions they would like answered or concepts they would like to understand better through the research.
With these five steps, you should be able to start generating critical insights from discovery research!