By Owen Fay . Posted on September 21, 2022Making user research an essential part of your strategy requires the support of everyone in your organization. Just like when creating campaigns, content, or features, you need to consider the needs and expectations of the users, this is the same internally. You need to understand what’s important to the people you work with, the stakeholders, and the business as a whole. Think about your organization and stakeholders as an essential part of making user research a valuable part of your strategy.
You need to show everyone that user research will help the business, grow your traffic, revenue, and become one of the most important things you do. This means displaying what the research does, how you can make it meaningful, and demonstrate how it actually does impact the business.
As a marketer or advertiser, you most likely know the positive impact user research can have. You have the ability to quickly and effectively meet user expectations, reduce risk, and spend your budget in better ways. You need to show the rest of the organization can benefit from research through measurement and impact.
Not sure where to start? We’ve put together a guide to making user research an integral part of your business. In this article we will cover three steps: define, implement, and demonstrate, along with some of the benefits of user research, and how you can do it faster and for less.
Define The Impact: What does research do for the organization?
Research is essential for every company to stay competitive. Its primary ability is to give any organization a way to precisely determine its target audience and tailor its offerings to meet their needs. It takes research to accurately pinpoint a company’s customers. Impact is a pretty general term, there are two ways to summarize user research impact.
- Business impact: How user research helps to inform decisions and drive better results for users and the organization?
- Organization impact: How does user research create a human-centered strategy and how does it help the business meet user needs, create effective messaging, and reduce the risk of bad decisions?
The tactical side of user research is getting product managers, stakeholders, and decision-makers on board so they can be confident in launching a new product or service. This could be helping designers, concept developers, and moving the team toward making decisions with data and feedback from research.
Organizational impact is where user research can have the biggest impact. Implementing user research into your strategy gets the organization talking about the user and allows them to focus on their needs. User research earns a place in a business when stakeholders feel the impact that it creates.
Implement the impact: How can you create meaningful research?
Understanding the impact created from user research comes when you first implement the research. A lot of organizations don’t know how to collaborate with researchers, and a lot of the time research is added after strategy and development are defined.
You need to spend some time building trust within the organization that research matters. Bring it up in meetings, conversations, and proposals, to show how much it can grow the business. Understanding why and how decisions are made can help you show how implementing user research can have a positive effect on the business.
When you are looking to add user research to your processes you need to look at how you can create meaningful research. The business wants to see proof and a plan for conducting research. You need to identify a user research method, tool, or strategy that will work for your company.
Once you have all of that outlined you will have a better chance of convincing everyone else that you need user research to drive more results.
Find a balance between strategy and execution
Businesses can get weighed down in strategic planning, but if you want to demonstrate the value of user research, you need to get quick wins with rapid user testing on small projects.
A single-user test can be conducted with Poll the People in under one hour for a lot less money than traditional research. You will receive fantastic feedback quickly and for less money with responses starting at about $1 per response.
The quick wins you can get from rapid user testing with Poll the People can come by answering a small-scale, specific question. But those tests are critical to implementing user research into every part of the development process. The small-scale tests can create the insights that user research teams need to provide useful insights that connect stakeholders to the bigger picture research creates.
Rapid user testing is quick, cost-effective, easy to understand, and tangible. It creates a path to credibility, progress, and trust. No matter if you are conducting small-scale research or want to run a lengthy user testing campaign it needs to be intentional. Consider the most important questions, features, and concepts that need to be evaluated.
Tips for Implementing Impactful Research
For your business to be successful, you need to understand your customers and target users. This means that user research is a valuable step in the design process, but still, it needs to be carefully organized. Not only are there many different user research methodologies to pick from, but it can be difficult to find respondents for your research. Moreover, to learn the correct questions to ask in order to obtain the information you require can be challenging.
We’ve put together a list of the most important things you need to do to get the most out of your user tests.
1. Set Expectations
You need to set realistic expectations with your user research implementation. Develop a clear plan with a problem, solution, and learning goals, then identify the teams that can benefit from it. Let the organization know what to expect and deliver on it with clear data.
2. Manage Stakeholders
Treat stakeholders as users, and make sure to identify their needs, goals, and expectations. Identify what has value to them and craft a roadmap together.
3. Prioritize effectively
Identify what you need to prioritize by building a guide based on the knowledge gap in the organization and the risk that comes with adding user research to help the team stay on track.
4. Identify Advocates
There are going to be other people in the organization that will be excited to implement user research. Find the people that are already on board with the new process and work with them to convince the rest of the business.
5. Know your decision-making process
All businesses have a planning and decision-making calendar, it can be yearly, quarterly, monthly, and many other times in between. Find out when these conversations happen, the metrics that matter to stakeholders, and get some time to talk in these meetings.
Demonstrate impact: How does the user research affect the company?
The results of user research can clearly demonstrate impact to the people that care the most about revenue. You need to find a balance between presenting results to number-focused decision-makers while also telling a story with the data you have.
Part of showing how user research affects the company is making the research accessible to your team and letting them know what’s been researched, what the insights mean, and what’s coming next.
- Build a tracking plan by measuring outcomes
- Track what you are doing
- Let everyone know when things are going well in your user research
Demonstrating the impact of your user research is the most important part of making it a part of all of your development. Impact will mean different things to different teams, make sure you know what they are looking for, it could be numbers, changes to concepts, reduced risk, or optimized budget, among many others. It’s your job to know what to show different teams so they can do their part to get research into your strategy.
How to conduct rapid user research with Poll the People
Today, there is a significant disconnect between how teams develop new concepts and how they gain knowledge from users. Gathering user feedback can take days or weeks and frequently entails in-person interviews or moderated video recordings.
To solve this problem in product development, we created Poll the People. Fast insights are now even more essential for successful product development, particularly in this time of rapid product development. Over 500,000 users on our diverse and dedicated panel are waiting to provide you with insightful feedback.
Businesses can perform tests with Poll the People in about an hour and gain the knowledge they need to optimize ads, prototypes, brand names, designs, concepts, and more.
Let’s get started with the quick and easy procedures of testing with Poll the people in just minutes.
Step 1: Pick A Concept Testing Template
Once you sign up for an account with Poll the People, choose a testing template. Narrowing down your design options to just two choices is the best way to test your design. It allows users to only make one choice and compare options, giving you insights that validate decisions or identify issues.
Once you’ve narrowed your options down to A and B, select an expertly crafted template from our template library. You can also visit our examples page to observe how real tests are done.
Step 2: Pick The Audience And Number Of Responses
The audience and required number of responses are the next two decisions you must make. For most tests, about 100-200 responses are enough to create statistical significance and give you all of the data you need. Additionally, the test should be finished in no more than 60 minutes.
With our extensive segmentation and advanced criterion options, you can identify a segment of our panel that represents your target audience. All you have to do is choose the number of responses you need and any segments or advanced criteria that help you get valuable feedback.
Step 3: Launch!
The last step before launch is to review the entire test. Make sure your design options are correct, you are asking a test question that helps to achieve your testing goals, and that the audience size and segmentation are correct.
Now sit back and watch the responses come rolling in within minutes. No waiting for days or weeks, you’ll have all of your feedback in just an hour.
Step 4: Analyze The Results
As the responses come in, you can watch them in a live real-time feed. You can immediately start analyzing the responses. Or you can wait less than an hour for the full test to complete.
The first thing to look at is: Who won and by what margin? A wide margin means there is a good chance the winning design will be effective once it launches.
Then look at the feedback from the responses. Each respondent has to provide a clear explanation as to why they made their choice. Based on the winning design and the feedback from the respondents, you can then make your decision. That’s it, you are done with your test in less than 60 mins!
Every choice regarding a product is decided using the rapid testing framework, which incorporates user feedback. Rapid testing eliminates any uncertainty from the creation of digital resources by relying on user insights at every stage. An organization can produce better products with the assurance that their concept will satisfy users and is exactly what they’re looking for by testing faster and receiving better feedback.
Conclusion
A business’s success is greatly influenced by how well they understand the target audience and the user research they conduct. Designers, marketers, and researchers typically handle this role because they face the challenging task of entering the minds of consumers and thoroughly understanding their needs, behavior, pain points, and emotions. While user research can take a lot of effort, it can make or break your product if done properly.
You can quickly test your ideas, concepts, features, or designs to verify your assumptions and see whether the concept you’re trying to develop resonates with customers before investing a lot of time and money in its development.
Contrary to qualitative testing techniques that rely on expensive and time-consuming moderated research, Poll the People allows everyone to test. If you’re ready to start saving money and making smarter design decisions, sign up for Poll the People or learn more about how you can optimize your business.
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