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

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