10 steps to start doing user research

And change definitely the quality of your work as UX/UI designer

In the last 4 years I have been working as an UX/UI designer at Youse, the first Brazilian insurtech. Before that, I worked as a digital art director in publicity agencies in Brazil. This career shift doesn't seem to be very bold, I know. Working as a digital strategist I had the opportunity to bring up a lot of cool materials to improve visual design in customer communication, making it more pleasant to the eye. Becoming UX/UI designer after taking care of digital solutions for campaigns seems like a simple way to continue solving visual concept issues. But it's not.

“Don’t start with the problem, start with people, start with empathy.” — Bill Burnett

As far as I can remember, traditional advertising is not interested in that thing called empathy. The goal is to make sales happen, cause an action, persuade to do something. This is why we work with compelling visual concepts and creative content in advertisement. People usually don't need what you’re offering. You don’t need to know what they need. You want to achieve your client’s goal. You need to know what the client wants, not what the target needs.

When you work in a startup mindset and need to build a product that addresses people’s needs, things change. It’s not just about using your ability to organize structures and make things beautiful (which is already a lot of work), but also understanding how people see what you are proposing and, beyond that, if they value it. The success of an UX/UI designer’s work is completely connected to understanding what people think about what was designed. If people don't value to what you offer, they won't engage your product. But how would you know that?

You’re not the user

Testing with real users is an essential part of the design process, especially if you design experiences and interfaces. Most people I know in design feel uncomfortable doing research. They get insecure and apprehensive when they have to deal with it. "How will I take my headphones off and leave my holy peace in my mac to go to streets and ask if anyone understands a button I drew?"

“Of course I know how to design buttons”. But … does it really work? Who is this button for? Is it for you to look and think “oh my beautiful son, my cute button” or for someone else to click on it? If it is to be user centered or anything else that focuses on user needs before yours, it makes no sense not making contact with the center of the thing to suggest appropriate solutions, isn’t it?

UX/UI design for me is about making assumptions and then validating them through testing. I think the quality of my work changed and I really became an UX the moment I wanted to listen to people. But wait, it’s not just about wanting to them. It’s about going there and actually listening. Wait, it’s not just going away from the computer and asking them “please, talk, user”. People won’t give you what you want like that. You have to know how to listen. And even for that, there is a right way to do it.

If you want to listen, do it right

In order to spread the most relevant lessons in this process that made me a user-centered designer, I’ll share with you 10 very basic steps. I hope this encourage more designers to begin making user researches.

1. Act

There is no use reading four hundred articles, studying five hundred books, doing a thousand courses and not going into practice. Theory without practice is empty. There's always a excuse, and we know that.

2. Try not to induce the answers

In the beginning, it is difficult to ask questions without inducing people to the answers you want to hear. To avoid it, it is good to have a well-defined script and someone along with you to look angry at you every time it happens. It takes time to value people’s sincerity and guide them to real answers.

3. Test low fidelity prototypes

You don’t have to refine and iterate visual design to check if your concepts work for the user. Make things simple. Fail fast, learn faster.

4. Use real content when designing

Avoid Lorem ipsum sit amet and dummy placeholders. People will read them and say “I really don’t know what’s all about. I don’t speak latin”. The text is a part of the experience. You can put valuable content to test your pitches there too. Take advantage of the precious time people are giving you.

5. Don’t try to test everything at once

Every feature deserves a time to be tried. If you have an app full of features and user flows to test, divide it to focus in a single problem at a time. If you have to spend more than a couple of hours asking the user to do things, you’ll see them running out of energy. People get tired of thinking aloud for hours and then start saying things they don’t really want to say. So, focus.

6. Define scenarios and tasks

In usability tests, I realized that people have a hard time saying what they think. So, create situations and place them in contexts, even hypothetical ones, and they will be able to picture them using the product. It makes the test easier. If there is a well-defined scenario and a task to complete, the user tends to bring more feedback about the difficulties they find in the way. If these contexts can not be traced, you must be very cautious to conduct the exploration without introducing bias.

7. Be invisible

Distancing yourself from the product encourages the user’s honesty. There are people who like to be gentle and will be afraid to touch a sore spot. put their finger in the wound. The less involved you seem, the better.

8. Put yourself in their shoes

When you leave the building and test products in the user’s environment, you can get a lot of extra information which you wouldn't if you'd have brought them into your company. By looking at the user’s home, how they behave in the environment, what interferences they have in real life, you can understand better the decisions they make. How can you relate to them if you don’t know what their place is like?

9. Preventing errors is better than fixing them

Full disclosure, I am glad to see that something doesn’t work before publishing. That is much more rewarding than seeing the product crashing online and then testing to find out what’s the problem, without a clue (because you didn't talk to anyone before the thing was published). But if, in production, that is the only way of testing, go ahead and do it. Just make sure always to listen to your user, always! Design process isn’t set in stone, researches should not be either. Adapt your design process for the product you design. Evaluate by context, but make sure to listen to the users.

10. Set a bin for your certainties

Our preconceptions go away quickly in the usability tests. After some researches you start to celebrate when you throw away certainties. This is good lesson for life, don’t you think? Set your bin of certainties. Allow yourself to analyze them one by one and to throw away what doesn’t make sense anymore. We change over time, our certainties should too, and that's okay.

BONUS: If it’s possible, have a mentor ❤

I had the incredible opportunity to have a mentor. Elisabet de Marco is our research specialist here at Youse, and since she started working here, the UX team has been forced to introduce a step for research into the design process. Yeah, we had to leave the comfort zone. At the beginning it was hard, but we just needed enough willpower (and a mix of very instructive workshops and facilitating tools) to start putting things into practice. Soon, some of us started enjoying the tests. Today, deliver things without testing is a sin. Our team is very aware of the value of research and our design deliveries have certainly reached another level because of the investigations we’ve conducted.

My transformation from Art Director to UX/UI designer was overwhelming

I am much prouder of the results of my deliveries today because I believe they have more value to the target. My work is user focused and this is really important for me nowadays. It’s very cool when we are willing to listen to real feedback from real users.

It doesn't mean that I'm always succeeding after testing and neither that after testing everything is alright. The search for understanding and searching for user’s valuable look is endless. After the product/feature is running, it is very important to keep track of the metrics and see if the adjustments you’ve made are really worth it.

My point in all this is…

You can beautifully architect a well organized wireframe and design an interface that work because you’ve studied to do it and you know how. I’m sure you know, because the world is full of great visual designers who have never talked to any users. You certainly know very good people to come up with attractive concepts, don't you? I've worked with many. But go straight to the point: talking about designing experience for people, you cannot just think about you. If you don’t listen to people who use what you do, the risk of failing at your solutions is very high. This whole thing of designing experiences only works if it makes sense to the users. There is no UX without users and should not exist UI also without them. It would just be X and I, right?

So, start testing! I’m sure you’ll learn a lot and improve the quality of your work, as I did.

This is my first medium post. It was not easy to write it, lol.
Any questions? Let me know! ❤ Hope to see you again soon.

☂️

Here’s more to encourage you into this journey:
Most common excuses for not doing user research
Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing