User research: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about user research that come up most often on our calls.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Do we need to care about this?

Five conversations beat a hundred assumptions. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How do we know it is working?

Talk to the people who did not buy. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about user research before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Talk to the people who did not buy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.