UX: Research & Strategy

Everyone wants to be an innovator these days, but coming up with consistently innovative solutions (products that are technically viable, usable, and desirable) is actually pretty hard — especially when we don't think about what our users really want. Our goal in this course is to introduce you to a set of research techniques and processes that you can use on any product you’ll be working on in the future. This unit will help orient your thinking by introducing you to the product development framework we’ll be using in this course, and give you a birds-eye view of some of the research techniques you’ll be diving into. We’ll help answer some key questions: what is user research, why is it valuable, and how does it fit into the overall design process?

Innovation is driven from customer insight, and you can't gain insight without empathy. The very first step, and the centerpiece, of the design thinking process is to develop empathy with our users. Empathy means not just knowing how someone feels, but caring too. In this unit, you'll learn about why empathy matters, and practice techniques you can use in the field to understand your customers — the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.

In this phase we take all the information we have gathered about our users, and start to organize it so that we can make sense of it. We start to look for meaning and patterns in the data. By the end of the phase, we'll know who our users are, what their deeper needs are, and what problems we can solve for them. We'll also look for unexpected insights that can help us better define a "problem statement" or "point of view". The goal of this mode is to come up with at least one actionable problem statement.

In this phase we take the problem statements and Points of View from the Define stage, and start looking at ways in which we could possibly solve for them. We're looking to generate as many different ideas as possible, from as many people as practical. We let the ideas infect each other, we push them to grow, we kill the weak ones, and evolve ideas with favorable traits. Time to get creative!

There's an expression in the martial arts that it's better to bleed on the mat than on the street. The principle: it's better to fail in a safe controlled environment (inside the school on the mat), rather than in a dangerous, uncontrolled environment (the street). It's the same in product design since it's better to develop a prototype as soon as possible, as cheaply as possible, rather than spending lots of money creating a product and launching it only to find out that it fails. But it's no use to build a prototype though if you don't know what you are testing for. So during this phase, we will also work out what our hypotheses are and build prototypes that will help test those hypotheses.

The testing phase is our greatest opportunity to improve our products by studying how people respond and interact with our ideas. It can be daunting for people to get feedback directly from customers, but it can also be hugely empowering as well. The objective is to learn more about the people and the problem, and to inform potential solutions.