Column: Continuous Research

My company built Airtime UX on the assumption that a collaborative, continuous research practice is superior to a dedicated research team’s running big-budget, discrete research projects several times a year—in many cases, working in isolation from one another. Collaborative research is effective because a whole product team can gain insights instantly while also getting face time with clients. Plus, collaborative research breaks down organizational silos. Continuous research is effective because having regular, light touchpoints keeps your client relationships going, lets you iterate product designs on the fly, and costs less.

Let’s assume that the many benefits of this research paradigm have convinced you and that you now want to adopt collaborative, continuous research in your company. While you can involve more colleagues from more product teams in your research, you’ll also have to book more, albeit shorter appointments with outside research participants. This involves a lot of additional administrative effort. 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

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