How do you put your organization’s values into practice? Where could you get better? And are they even the right values in the first place? These three questions are important, but rarely asked. All of this presupposes that you’ve spent some time thinking about and writing down your values and…

Who is user research for? And what does it help them? And why do the answers to those trivial questions matter? — I’ve always found it helpful to treat user research as a product: Who: It’s a product for PMs, designers, engineers, marketers, sales people and many others in your organization What: It helps them make better decisions, more quickly, about what to design, build and sell Why is this helpful?

Who is user research for? And what does it help them? And why do the answers to those trivial questions matter? — I’ve always found it helpful to treat user research as a product: Who: It’s a product for PMs, designers, engineers, marketers, sales people and many others in your organization What: It helps them make better decisions, more quickly, about what to design, build and sell Why is this helpful?

Confidence intervals are everywhere in the quantitative research world, but in small scale qualitative research there isn’t a truly analogous concept. …

Which user research findings do you keep? And which do you chuck out? — Some insights are ‘evergreen’ — they’re relevant for a very long time. Those insights might teach you something about the fundamentals of how your customers or audience behaves, and they might end up becoming part of your design principles or brand values. But sometimes the loop between research, insight and…

When you’re researching one thing, you often learn about something else. — Imagine you’re doing a customer research project about dogs, talking to dog owners about how they care for their animals, what they feed them, and where they take them for walks. And let’s call your findings the core insights from this project. The chances are you’ll also hear things about…

Most user research reports are monolithic. What does this mean? They combine multiple pieces of information into a single ‘blob’ — often a document like a slide presentation or an email The information itself is framed in the context of a particular project: ‘In this project we discovered X, Y…

You’ve read The Lean Startup and you know about the concept of the Minimum Viable Product. You practice customer or user-centered design in your team, and the organization you work for has a strong design culture. Sound good so far? But what about the impact of research on the product…

As a researcher, you almost certainly use quotations from research participants in your reports. The question is: how do you attribute these quotes? — Let’s take a look some of the information you could include alongside a quote: Name Gender Age Place/country of residence Address Phone number Email address Customer/audience segment Organization they work for or represent Job title Ethnicity Dietary requirements