User research: a practical guide

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. This guide covers what user research actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

The reason this keeps coming up

Five conversations beat a hundred assumptions. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

The practical version

Watch what people do, not only what they say. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Talk to the people who did not buy. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Five conversations beat a hundred assumptions
• Watch what people do, not only what they say
• Talk to the people who did not buy
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Common failure modes

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

What to do next

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.