What to ask your agency about user research

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on user research, these questions are worth asking early.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Five conversations beat a hundred assumptions. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Talk to the people who did not buy. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.