User Research Guide For Founders, Part 1: Getting Started
User research is critical for creating a great product. Yet it can often feel hard to get started and can sit in founders’ minds perpetually as a should-do.
User research is instrumental regardless of whether you’re building products for consumers, developers, institutions or any other audience. And it can be as simple as just talking to people to answer your questions.
I’ve partnered with Pratiti Raychoudhury (VP, Product Group Lead and former Head of Research at Meta) to create a step-by-step guide to running user research sessions. To illustrate key points, we have referenced examples from our early experiences at Meta, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and PayPal.
We have created a three part series that should set you up to confidently do end to end user research. The series includes:
Part 1: Get started
Part 2: Plan your research
Part 3: Run sessions + Identify insights
In this issue, we’ll focus on getting started, which includes:
Set your research goals
Choose a research method
Move from goals to questions
1. Set your research goals
What do you want to learn? This is your research goal. Good research goals, like product goals, should be very clear and specific. These can be about people’s general experiences or about their specific interactions with your app. Keep it simple and write down 1-3 clear, specific, things you’d like to learn from people.
For example, when we adapted Google Maps for India, we knew that turn-by-turn directions were unusable because nobody used street names in India. We were aware that locals used landmarks to navigate. But we didn’t know how. So our research goal was to find out how locals navigated around India.
This was a big question, so we got more specific. We broke this down into two more specific research goals:
Learn how people used landmarks to navigate in India
Learn what types of landmarks were good for navigating
Be careful to avoid these common pitfalls:
Taking on too many goals. Do not take on more than 3 goals.
Trying to cover both current state and future state of a product. You need to choose one to focus on. If there is time left at the end, you can have a couple of conceptual level questions in your back pocket to help inform future product direction.
Honing in on one specific question. If you have one very specific question you want to answer, you can expand into related questions. e.g., If your question is: “What is the ideal length of time for ETH to be locked up?” You could also ask people about their current behaviors: “How long are you willing to lock up your ETH? What’s the shortest you’ve locked up? The longest? What led you to accept those terms? Would you do either again?”
2. Choose a research method
There are many types of user research. But these are the 3 methods we’ve found to generally be most useful for early-stage founders:
User Interview
Usability Study
Expert Review
Here’s a breakdown of each method:
User Interview
This is a conversational way to understand more about your users and their needs, behaviors, barriers, motivations, or how they perceive potential product concepts. User interviews help answer broad discovery questions like:
Do people understand what the product is/does?
How big of an issue is multi wallet management for new users?
How do remote development teams manage deploying code?
Does the brand feel good/relatable?
What are people’s unmet needs? Where is there white space and what are unsolved problems?
How are people using competing products and what delights them?
Any prototypes or mocks shared should just stimulate conversation. Avoid soliciting feedback on the prototypes or mocks.
—
Usability Study
The goal is to understand how easily users can complete a given task in your product. They will use the product, prototypes, or mocks to complete specified tasks. Usability studies help answer questions like:
Is it easy to get through the on-boarding flow?
Do people understand how to connect their wallet?
What do people do after they purchase an NFT?
—
Expert Review
This can be fairly informal. You are essentially asking an expert for their opinion on the product. They can think aloud as they explore the product, asking questions, explaining what is and isn’t working for them, and predicting how others are likely to experience it.
Experts can be wide ranging. Examples include someone who is very well versed in token economics, someone who has built several successful social products, a designer, researcher, etc.
The expert should be giving you feedback based on their experience and opinions. This is useful for understanding if something is directionally correct, early feedback on a prototype or trying to understand a specific element (like a social flywheel).
—
How to choose the best method
While there is some overlap, it should be pretty straightforward to determine which research method is best.
→ If you are seeking information outside of your product, do a user interview.
→ If you want feedback on your existing product, do a usability study.
You can also think about it relative to the stage of your product:
If you haven’t yet built a product and want to better understand people’s existing experiences or the value of a concept → User interview
If you have an idea for a new feature and want to understand how people would perceive the concept → User interview
If you’re looking for feedback on an existing product or feature → Usability study
Expert reviews are generally most helpful when you have an existing product. But you can and should target subject matter experts like “locals who navigate” or “day traders” for user interviews, if they are relevant to your target audience.
When Facebook was building an events product, the team wanted to understand how people planned events in real life. They conducted numerous user interviews with a wide variety of people to understand how they planned small events like dinner parties, large events like concerts, and everything in between, like birthday parties or class reunions. The team wanted to understand all the steps and decisions people encountered, so that they could build a product that made the experience of planning and managing events easier and better for people.
3. Move from goals to questions
Based on the 1-3 research goals you wrote down, think about the specific questions you could ask people. Jumping back to the example of launching Google Maps in India, one of the goals was to understand how people used landmarks to navigate in India.
It would be hard for someone to answer a very broad question like “How do you use landmarks to navigate?” So it’s important to turn these into more specific questions that would be easy for people to answer. In this case, some more specific questions could be:
If you were to direct someone from here to your house, what would you tell them?
Would that differ if they were already familiar with your neighborhood?
What if they were coming from out of town?
If they were coming by bike vs car, would you tell them the same thing?
Would you point out any specific landmarks? If so, why those specific ones?
Would everyone likely choose the same landmarks when describing the same route?
Are there any attributes you can think of that make specific landmarks useful?
—
In summary, follow these action steps to get started with user research:
Write down 1-3 research goals
Choose a research method
Write down all the relevant questions that you can think of
Generally, people are eager to talk about their own experiences and share their opinions — especially when it could lead to making their lives easier or improving a product they already use.
And remember, user research can be as simple as just talking to people to answer your questions.
Next up: Part 2: Preparing for Research (coming soon)