📋 Definition of user-research

Research in a product organization aims to make better strategic and product decisions founded in customer, organizational, market, technological and specific business domain (energy, supply-chain, product development) knowledge.

Schematically, there is a terrible gap between what people say they do or will do and what they actually do. User research is the discipline of finding the reality of the behaviors, understanding the why behind the behaviors and forming an opinion about the reality of the power and acting dynamics, on a specific and well-defined segment of people and enterprises. The objective is then to leverage this specific knowledge to create a different and better set of incentives/magic formula that gets everything moving.

Thereby, User research :

• consists in collecting the right user data, spot insights and turn them into actionnable recommendations.
• ensures that products and services are centered around the customer.
• focus on finding answers and validations to enable the decision-making : understanding users' characteristics, specific goals, behaviors and experience towards achieving these goals

Basically you can have two types of users research :

• static research that aims to gather insights and facts of potential users ;
• dynamic research that aims to test proactively your product parts by projecting the user in your vision of the world and see how he acts, what works and what does not.

It can take various forms : exploratory interviews, concept tests and discovery, usability tests, product feedback and can leverage qualitative datas (conversations, mental models, feelings, reactions, and attitudes) and quantitative (behavior, product analytics, and generalizing data)

🗣️ Don’t Listen To Customers – Why User Research Matters

🥸 Why you can never trust your users. People lie. But, not intentionally.

Even users don’t know what they want. Humans are not capable of predicting their own behavior. It’s only after people actually start using the product, they realize where their preferences lie. There’s a big difference between imagining using something and actually using it.