Column: Continuous Research

In the first installment of my new column Continuous Research, I looked at automating recruitment processes for user-research panels, or user panels. These are lists of relevant participants who would be motivated to join your research and help you understand your target personas through their participation. Having a user panel can be helpful to any company that is conducting UX research, but absolutely essential for companies who are conducting collaborative and continuous research. The foundation of these research methods is built on having frequent, lightweight touchpoints with customers, involving the whole product team. To ensure you’ll have enough people to talk to, you need to have enough sufficiently engaged participants who have the right backgrounds.

Conducting collaborative, continuous research is a great way to start UX research activities when you don’t yet have enough dedicated researchers, as is likely during a startup’s early stages. Plus, this is the period when your company needs to gather the most feedback about the product you’re building from your prospects and customers. You can use these insights to make your early-stage product really stand out. Unfortunately, this is also the time when you have the least resources to get the feedback you need. Read More

In my previous article for UXmatters, “Why UX Research Repos Fail at Democratizing Insights,” I discussed how collaborative user research Is becoming the new paradigm for UX research. When you involve the entire product team and other stakeholders in user-research activities—especially in interactions with users—you can seamlessly integrate user insights into your product-development sprints. This leads to better customer focus and, in the end, better products.

The practice of continuous research—a lightweight set of user research methods that you conduct at regular intervals—complements this collaborative approach to user research very well. When collaborative and continuous research go hand in hand, you’ll be able to gather a steady stream of customer insights on the fly, at a lower cost. Therefore, this approach to user research can be especially beneficial for growing technology startups who are greatly in need of customer insights, but do not have a wealth of resources on which to draw. Read More

In my previous Continuous Research columns about user-research panels—user panels, in short—I covered the topics of automating your user-recruitment processes and ways to fill your recruitment pipeline. I argued that we should consider recruitment a high-value first step in the user-research process rather than the task checkbox that UX teams too frequently perceive it to be. If you automate your processes and focus your attention on building lasting personal relationships, you can have a group of trusted advisors who feed you insights continuously. In this final column in my three-part series about user panels, I’ll discuss how you should engage with new panel members.

Now What?

All your efforts have worked out and you now have a steady stream of HiPPO-quality user-research participants who want to give you feedback. This is a great problem to have! Now you can focus on building your relationships with these people. The way you welcome them, what information you store about them, and the way in which and how regularly you interact with them determine how successful you’ll be at building this group of trusted advisors. Read More