Is anyone talking about your idea? A sneak peek into User Research
Many times we get this heavenly light bulb in our heads, we get convinced beyond measure that we have found the cure to humanity, the meteorite to Thanos (Marvel and DC fans come and kill me — I’m in my father’s house). But in all honesty, you might be the only one who thinks your idea is great, and the world is still a better place without your meteorite (Thanos rocks!)
During the previous week at Genesys Tech Hub, we looked into how to conduct a simple user research and market analysis. As a Product Design intern, I’ve only just read about the big grammar associated with user research and validating your idea, and haven’t really gotten my hands dirty with the real deal.
User Research consists of a lot of investigative processes that Product Designers use to guide their design process. There is no one straight path to conducting user research, and the method the Product Designer uses are always relative to the stipulated goals.
After a lot of discussions (most of them at very high pitched tones — Nigerians ehh), we came up with an agreeable process to guide us. We decided to work on an ideal Logistics app — ozii, that’ll help potential users connect with the perfect logistics services to help them move stuff.
Our process is broken down into four simple stages that any Product Designer could use:
1. Product Cycle
Before starting off with anything, one has to first define the stage at which your product is in the product development cycle. You wouldn’t want to ask your users what colour of button to use when there is no app to press buttons on (Duh..). With this in mind, we defined our ozii app to be in the Idea Validation phase. And this guided us during the rest of our research processes.
2. Research Goal
Next up was to define our research goal, we didn’t want to suffer from any information overload and start running helter-skelter with a lot of unprocessed data. We came to a consensus about the kind of data we wanted to get from our research, and they included:
- Finding out the market size of the logistics sector in Nigeria
- Finding out the pain points of logistics users
- Finding out the validity of a mobile app in delivering logistics services
3. Persona Time!
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
From Interaction Design Foundation. Read more about Personas here…
To avoid any transmission confusion answers from users,
we also made our target audience clear and tailored our survey questions to fit them. Some of the population we targeted in our research were:
- Enterprises
- Online vendors
- Families
This helped us at a later time to get very insightful results and conclusions about ozii. Defining your Persona is key to good user research!
4. Research Method(s)
Now to the main fight, we had gathered information on our current product’s cycle, our research goals, and our user sets; it was time to explore and decide on the most suitable research method to gather all the information we needed to validate our ozii idea. While there are no right or wrong methods, it is up to the Product Designer to make the most out of an appropriate chosen method.
And trust me when I tell you, staying in a room full of enthusiastic Product Design interns, high on coffee, arguing about the best research method to implement is nowhere to be. You better RUN.
After a long exhausting time of translating big grammar to my native language in my head (who else here doesn’t think in English?), we decided to go with using three research methods:
Market Demand and Trend Analysis
Using some online tools like Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner, we checked the number of people talking about logistics in Nigeria. We also mined for related searches about logistics, and problems people usually associate with logistics services, this helped us tailor our survey questions to collect the data we really needed for our research goals.
User Interviews/Surveys
Using Google Forms, we created a brief survey and shared to our target users. Some of the questions we asked our users included:
- The kind of mobile phones they use
- How many times they move things around in a year
- How they usually access logistics services
- What they like/hate about the current logistics services they use
With the insights we got from our survey results, we went ahead to check out our competition in the market and see if they provided the features our target users wanted.
Competitive Analysis
Although performing a competitive analysis isn’t rocket science, it does go beyond the few simple Google searches needed to identify and categorize your competitors.
From BigCommerce. Read more about competitive analysis here…
Armed with data from our market demand and our user surveys, we went ahead and gathered an extensive list of our competitors, separating them into primary and secondary competitors.
After categorizing them, we examined their customer experiences and took note of their process. We also compared what we gathered with our proposed app features and put them into some cool tabular form.
The result of our research process was very satisfying, we got insights on how big the logistics market is, the pain points of logistics users, and we got to know what our competitors didn’t offer that we would offer (our secret sauce lol).
User research can get very tiring and boring if not planned well, but we should also note that user research is a very vital phase in the product development process and Product Designers should learn to figure out what works with them.
If this article made any sense to you, don’t forget to gimme my accolades!
