I’ve noticed with my clients that the first thing cut is UX Research, usually because of some timeline or other resource constraint. I understand that not everyone has a UX Designer on staff or the time to do UX Research. But the absolute lack of it results in much more wasted time further down the line. Not doing the basic amount of UX Research in order to save time now, is multiplying that “wasted time” and delaying it to be dealt with at a later point. It’s procrastinating time wasting.
At the very, very minimum, for new features and new products, User Discovery Interviews should be done. The reason that I’m leaving out usability testing from this baseline minimum is that I think usability can always be improved through iterations and testing, but what can’t be improved is having built something that tackles a problem that doesn’t exist or isn’t pressing enough to the target market. This is especially important for Enterprise and B2B products.
User Interviews should be done even if you’re your own target market, because the way you currently do something, or the importance you put on a problem you face, is either unique or distorted. Distorted because you need a lot of self awareness to judge your own process without biases and blindspots. This is especially true when building a new feature or product, which can be exciting, which adds emotionality to the decision making.
The goal of the basic user interview should be to find out “Is this a problem (underlying issue) they actually care about?” This, obviously, shouldn’t be asked directly due to the general lack of self awareness we have as humans. It should be found out indirectly by learning about things such as the following:
What is the current process used to use to solve the problem in question, step by step, in detail, ideally demonstrated with specific real life examples.
What do they like about it?
What’s most frustrating about it?
What is this process costing them?
You can do this with multiple hypotheses of the problems faced, utilizing one customer discovery interview to learn about multiple opportunities. Learning about the status quo of how their various problems in the specific space you’re working in are solved, is the ultimate goal. That will validate the problem you’re working on, or help you discover deeper, more important underlying problems to tackle. Even five interviews will save you a bunch of time later down the line.