Mining for behavioral gold leads to more innovative products
Over the years, I have been lucky enough to work on many design teams where designers also act as researchers. As a student of industrial design, I learned a key lesson about research that I did not get to study this discipline would have taken me much longer to learn if I was just a digital product designer. That lesson is that the best insights come from getting inspired from being in the field and observing what people actually do! Not endless usability studies but a deep observation of people and their behaviors. This the main differences between the field of design research (descendant from industrial design) and user research (descendant from social sciences).
Design research vs. User research
Don’t get me wrong, Design research and user research are both critical to developing successful products and services. They help to ensure that products meet the needs of the people who will use them and are tailored to their specific requirements.
Design research focuses on understanding the needs, motivations, and behavior of users to inform the design of products and services. This can include research methods such as interviews, surveys, and observations, as well as techniques like personas and user journeys. The goal of design research is to provide designers with a deep understanding of their users, which can help them to create more effective and user-centered designs.
User research, on the other hand, focuses on evaluating the user experience of a product or service once it has been developed or the mental models of users with existing products. This can include usability testing, where users are asked to perform specific tasks with a product, as well as more qualitative research methods like interviews and focus groups. The goal of user research is to identify areas where a product or service could be improved and to provide feedback that can be used to make those improvements.
Applying this to digital product and service design, the same observation for inspiration in digital products. When working on claims adjudication tools we did 70 hours of observational research, looking at the most productive and accurate and those that were slower than average. Using these observations we back out the logic that these extreme users who either excelled at productivity or accuracy were using to do that work and apply it to both automation and a novel user interface, that is now patent protected. Bringing the best practices to the average human claims processor and superpowers to automation.
This type of observation or stimulus-based research gives you insight into interesting behaviors that can get scaled up fast. For example, when working on revolving credit products we used a wallet tour to understand how users thought about their spend and were able to develop better products for helping consumers understand their bills and manage their revolving credit.
Looking at the extremes
Extreme users are individuals who have unusual needs, behaviors, or abilities; who may therefore be more likely to encounter problems with a product or service. They also might just give you great ideas based on how they interact with the world, and give insights that can drive innovation. This can work about both extremes example, a person with a physical disability might be considered an extreme user of a mobility service, or a person with severe vision loss might be considered an extreme user of a website. On the flip side, the highest-performing salesperson’s practices might be an inspiration for a CRM tool or a new sales process.
To be honest, in my experience of doing 1000s of user interviews and research sessions, it’s never the “average” user that gets my generative mind going or truly inspires the design. Averages are boring! It’s these users that drive innovation.
Especially when working in B2B environment, I have found it very valuable to look at:
Users who are considered top performers in their field and reversing out their mental models as opportunities to spread to all users
Looking at the lowest performers, in contrast, to understand what is blocking them
Looking across novice and expert users as well
Looking at high performaning organiztions and seeing how they opperate
Looking at low performing organization and seeing how they operate
When working on consumer products it’s also helpful to look at extremes:
Those who manage their money very well vs. those who do not
Those who have disabilities
Those who come from lower socio-economic classes
Those who have high-risk factors for social determinants of health
Those who distrust technology or healthcare.
Those who live in a rural environment and need access to care
Those who use products for what they are not indented for
Conclusions
Look beyond traditional user research methods and get inspired by design research methods and our friends in industrial design and how they do research. Encourage your teams to take the time at the beginning of a project to do the research to understand a space, don’t just look at the screen or what the person says but what the person does, what’s around them, what physical evidence there is of their behavior. Recruit at the extremes and analyze your data for the odd behaviors that just might lead to innovation gold that can get scaled to a larger population. Save the averages for validation research and traditional user research methods. Its more fun that way and drives innovation faster.