The Vital Role of Research in Product Design

This is an excerpt of an article I helped write while I was at Digital Scientists, the full article can be read on their website: https://digitalscientists.com/blog/the-vital-role-of-research-in-product-design/

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User research in its most basic definition is the process of understanding user behavior, needs, and motivations. User research places people (the end-user) at the center of the design process and your products. User research inspires your design and evaluates solutions. This is important for a few reasons. First, the team (everyone required in making the product: client, stakeholders, vendors, partners, etc) needs to be aligned on a clearly defined goal. Second, the team should define what success will look like and how it will be measured. Third, the team would be wise to validate existing assumptions about the problem and the users. For some reason, this last one always seems to be the trickiest for teams to put into practice, even though it is no less critical to the success of the product. Far too often, teams create products as if they were the user.

TIP: If you want to be on the lookout for this behavior in your organization or team, it sounds like this: “I have a problem and I would solve it in this way. Let’s build a product that represents my solution and sell it to others with the same problem.”

This line of thinking isn’t necessarily wrong. It is absolutely limiting. You are not the user. And the biggest problem with thinking you are is that it introduces bias. To create the best product you need the best solution. Which means you’ll have to understand all the people who experience the problem you want to solve and be open to the solution being different (and often greater) than you imagined.

Article continued on Digital Scientist’s website https://digitalscientists.com/blog/the-vital-role-of-research-in-product-design/