How to do user research

Talk to your users and design for their needs. Iterate with testing and craft a solution that works for them.

The phases of user research

User research can happen at any phase of a product’s life cycle.

However it’s especially important that you focus on understanding your user’s needs at the start of building or improving a product. 

Decisions made early have the greatest impact on the product’s direction.

To design the right thing for your users:

  • talk with people you’re designing for and figure out what their needs are
  • create prototypes that meet their needs
  • test these prototypes with the people you’re designing for multiple times (iteratively)
  • create a refined solution that meets your user’s needs.

Further guidance to support you:

Discover phase

User researchers use this phase to figure out what problems your product might have. This approach makes sure you do not assume you know what the problem is before starting to solve it.

In this phase you might:

  • figure out your research objectives, write a brief and a test plan
  • use desk research such as an environmental scan to give yourself a strong understanding of what other jurisdictions are doing
  • look at google analytics or other quantitative data sources
  • conduct user interviews, surveys, diary studies and focus groups. These can be used to understand what kind of pain points people might be experiencing.

Further guidance to support you:

Define phase

Use all of the data gathered in the discovery phase to create insights and findings. These will help you define the problem and offer solutions or next steps.

In this phase you might:

  • analyse data and create findings (observations). For example, use affinity mapping for user interviews to help understand behaviours and attitudes
  • take all the different streams of data to create insights and recommendations.

Develop and deliver phases

During these phases some of the insights and recommendations from the define phase will have been put into practice. These could result in prototypes being built by designers.

In these phases you might:

  • do usability testing where the prototype is iteratively tested with users to improve it
  • create insights to help improve the prototype for the delivery phase.

Further guidance to support you:

Key resources

Aotearoa NZ-specific user research guidance

Digital Service Design Standard

International user research guidance

Utility links and page information

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