How can you identify user needs before starting a research project?

Aproxime-se e convide profissionais de Suporte ao Cliente e/ou Vendas para seu projeto de pesquisa. Essas pessoas est?o em contato direto e diário com usuários e podem nos ajudar muito a ter hipóteses melhor formuladas. ?? Ah, é claro... Fa?a a famosa "Matriz CSD", com Certezas, Suposi??es e Dúvidas sobre sua temática de pesquisa. Use as perguntas de pesquisa como guia.

Before initiating a research project, it's pivotal to pinpoint user needs. Begin with stakeholder interviews to gather initial hypotheses and business goals. Utilize existing data, like analytics or customer feedback, for preliminary insights. Engage in heuristic evaluations or expert reviews of current solutions to uncover potential pain points. Social listening tools can also be valuable, as they provide a real-time window into user discussions and concerns. Once you've collated this foundational understanding, craft your research questions. This approach ensures your subsequent research is laser-focused on addressing genuine user needs, making your outcomes more actionable and impactful.

Existing data is like a treasure trove waiting to be uncovered. By diligently reviewing it, businesses can gain deep insights without necessarily starting from scratch. It's essential, however, to approach this data with an open mind, allowing the numbers and feedback to guide your next steps. Before launching a new digital feature, we review your support tickets from the previous year. You may discover a recurring issue customers are facing, which wasn't initially on your radar. By addressing this in your next update, you not only enhance user experience but also get a significant reduction in related support tickets.

Reviewing existing data can be categorised as secondary research, where instead of starting from scratch, researchers tend to obtain existing public data about their audience. For example, when launching a new product, instead of diving straight into user interviews, it is usually a better approach to look for market trends, user reviews on competitor products, and more. This research is called secondary research and it is a significant resource to conduct cost effective preliminary research to formulate basic scope of your product. And it also helps regulate your primary research when you indulge in user interviews, surveys, and other early stage research techniques.

Even when you're the first UX Researcher chances are there is already some relevant data you can use to generate some hypotheses. Consider existing data sources like analytics, surveys, support tickets etc. Some techniques you can try: Clustering: group data into categories to spot trends and common themes Sentiment analysis: quantify emotional sentiment to highlight pain points Funnel analysis: identify dropoff points in key workflows Feature usage: uncover unused features to cut or enhance As others mentioned you can also approach the customer facing teams in your organisation to uncover existing knowledge about users.

Research is iterative and ongoing, so conducting exploratory research is essential to identify themes and also gaps in knowledge so that you can conduct new research studies that are more focused and specific (depending on the business goals as well).

A battle-tested approach to uncover unmet user needs, is getting an answer to the following three core questions: 1) What are people seeking to get done? (in your domain or target group of interest) 2) How are they trying or achieving that today? 3) Where does their current approach fall short? In other words, what are their unmet needs, pain points, workarounds, barriers and frictions? How do people define success and what's stopping them from achieving that today? The methods described here (contextual interviews, observations, diary studies) are well suited for this.

Assumption mapping is a highly effective tool to uncover hypothesis, biases, stereotypes and existing data about user needs. Prior to starting the research project, it helps identify the most important and risky/ unknown assumptions for the success of the research design and deliverable.

User needs identification is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Continually test needs and research questions through iterative studies and analytics. Refine them based on learnings to ensure you capture the most current and relevant needs.

Instead of aligning the user needs with the business objectives, flip it: Align the business to the user needs. Organise your business so that it can address (unmet) user needs durably and structurally. Start from user needs and work your way in (outside-in), instead of starting from your current org and trying to make the user needs fit. Address user needs and create user value in ways that end up benefiting the business as a consequence of that. Demonstrating this connection between user needs and business/financial objectives is key.