User research, explained without the jargon

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Here is user research without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Five conversations beat a hundred assumptions. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

Watch what people do, not only what they say. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Turning this into a decision

Talk to the people who did not buy. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about user research before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Watch what people do, not only what they say — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.