{"id":2515,"date":"2020-03-11T16:04:43","date_gmt":"2020-03-11T15:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/?p=2515"},"modified":"2020-10-13T21:31:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-13T20:31:17","slug":"how-does-user-research-help-make-better-product-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/11\/how-does-user-research-help-make-better-product-decisions\/","title":{"rendered":"How does user research help make better product decisions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Originally published on Product Coalition<\/a>)<\/p>\n

User research studies give valuable information that product teams can use to inform and evaluate the work they are doing. The new book \u2018Building User Research Teams\u2019<\/a> covers all of the steps to integrate user research into a product team\u2019s work, reducing financial risk and getting to better decisions quicker. This extract from the book explores why recognising how decisions get made is the first step to achieving that.<\/p>\n

Every company makes decisions about what they should build or do. Some companies come up with ideas for new products or services to build and make them happen. Others iterate on an existing product, deciding which features they should add, or what future updates should allow users to do.<\/p>\n

Those decisions are informed by a whole variety of sources. Some of those sources are trustworthy, such as using analytic data to draw conclusions about what people are doing currently. Some of those sources are less trustworthy \u2014 such as the CEO reading an article about blockchain whilst on a plane and deciding that it is the future.<\/p>\n

The goal of a user research team is to improve the quality of those decisions by providing accurate information about user behaviour that informs and evaluates the work and assist everyone in doing a good job.<\/p>\n

However, it is not as easy as \u2018start running studies and good things will happen\u2019. Many organisations are unaware of the consequences of their current inefficient development process and are happy with the status quo. Building the case for how user research can help improve development is essential groundwork required before research can be truly embedded in how things are made and prevents the findings from research studies being dismissed later.<\/p>\n

How design happens<\/h3>\n

To recognise how research can help decision making, it is important to first recognise what the decision-making process currently is. There are a lot of different ways in which the \u2018design process\u2019 has been explained before, and models from GDS\u2019s \u2018Discovery\u2019->\u2019Alpha\u2019->\u2019Beta\u2019->\u2019Live\u2019, to the Design Council\u2019s Double Diamond which has the steps \u2018Discover\u2019, \u2019Define\u2019, \u2019Develop\u2019 and Deliver.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

At the core of every model of how design works is a process that involves:<\/p>\n