topics are user topics. They’re asking questions about someone’s life or the problems that they encounter in the context of trying to perform their work.
• I want to know the top problems that computer programmers have when looking for a new job.
• I want to know how recruiters meet new computer programmers and figure out if they fit the profile of a specific job.
User research is about the user. Hence, the name. It tells you how they live, what they like, how they work, and, most importantly, what sorts of problems they’re experiencing in their everyday lives that you can solve for them. User research methodologies tend to be ethnographic in nature. They often take the form of long-form interviews or in-home visits or observational sessions where you get to know who the person really is as well as why they’re using your product.
It is particularly necessary at the beginning of your product development when you’re just learning about your user and figuring out what sort of thing to build for them. This is how you get to know your potential customers and begin to narrow down which groups of people are the most likely to want your product.
Product research, on the other hand, is the sort of thing you do after you already have a very good understanding of the person for whom you’re building a product. It helps you understand the problems associated with the use of your actual product. It includes things like usability studies where the goal is to figure out where you’re putting obstacles in the way of customer success, but it could also include research with ex-users to understand why they left or observational sessions with current users to see the process they go through while using your product.
These are product topics:
• I want to know if people can successfully post a job listing using my new design.
• I want to know why so many people start the registration process in my product but then stop.
• I want to know how many people successfully register and search for at least one job using my product.
• I want to know how often and at what times people check their job listings.
If someone can’t understand how to post a job using your product, that’s a potential issue with your usability. How many times a day somebody checks a job listing will give you some insight into the context in which people are interacting with your product. How far people get into the registration process gives you insight into potential friction with new user sign-up. All of these topics are about your user’s interactions with your product.
When you’re thinking about product research, usability testing is probably the methodology that’s most familiar. It’s specifically designed to show whether users can perform certain, key tasks with your product.
But product research is about more than just specific problems in tasks. Product research can also show you where your product has feature gaps or isn’t completely solving the user’s problem in a compelling way. We’ll get to that later.
For now, all you have to do is answer this question for your first research project: do you want to learn about your users? Or your product?
After you’ve decided, go ahead and put a P or a U on each of your sticky notes to indicate whether the topic is a product or a user one (see Figure 3.3).
FIGURE 3.3 Mark each topic as Product or User.
Generating Ideas vs. Validating Ideas
Do you want to generate ideas or validate them?
Contrary to popular belief, great ideas don’t just appear in a flash of light. Great ideas are based on something that someone has experienced or learned, and then validated to make sure that they’re really as great as we think they are.
Generative research can give you insights into your users that will help you come up with better ideas that are more likely to be valid because they’re based on something other than a hunch. A generative study is anything that might give you new ideas for features or products. It gives you insights into your product or user in a way that helps you come up with a hypothesis.
Evaluative research, on the other hand, is a method of finding out whether something is valid, like a design concept, marketing copy, a prototype, or a hypothesis. With evaluative research, you’ve already come up with a hypothesis or idea or even a product, and you’re testing it to see what’s right or wrong about it.
Let me give you a quick example. Back in 1998, Pets.com thought that a lot of people desperately wanted to buy pet food on the Internet. This was a hypothesis. As it turned out, 300 million dollars later, this was an invalid hypothesis. In fact, at that point in time, not enough people wanted to buy pet food from the Internet to make it a going concern. Had they validated their original hypothesis earlier, several venture capitalists would have saved 300 million dollars, but I wouldn’t have a commemorative sock puppet, so I feel like the whole thing was probably worth it (Figure 3.4
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