User research lies at the heart of Human Centred Design. Be it market, user or design research, it starts with identifying users, discovering their unmet needs, observing their behaviours and understanding their motivations, through methodical, investigative approaches.
Incorporating user focussed design activities would seem to add time and cost. However, these activities actually savetime and money by designing the right solution from the beginning and by finding and correcting problems early on, when they are easy and inexpensive to change.
The insights you gain are then used to ensure that all product design decisions do benefit the user.
There are several qualitative and quantitative methods to design and conduct your research - interviews, surveys, focus groups, field studies or desk based research through online reviews, data analytics, and or social media.
Irrespective of the method the process stays the same - explore, collate data, see patterns and make sense of it from the user’s perspective.
RESEARCH METHODS IN ACTION
This guide is divided into sections, on how to prepare, implement and form insights from your user research journey.
