Dear User, Who Are You?

Earlier in the year, Sanitarium Health Food Company, scrambled to redesign a Weet-Bix promotion, for which they had already spent $1.3 million, featuring All Blacks collector cards because the children that the website was aimed at was a bit too hit-tech and difficult to use. Article here.

But this post isn’t about a particular misstep. It is about asking the question – should we execute user research every time we design?

Jackob Neilson writes in his Alertbox – Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, #10 – “Not Answering Users’ Questions – Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. They visit sites because there’s something they want to accomplish — maybe even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.”

To understand what the user is asking, it makes sense that we must first understand the user. And that isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Take for instance a low-budget project or one that has rapid turn-around. There isn’t always the time or money to execute research. I’ve been in client meetings where they have clearly no idea who their user or audience is. Or believe that their audience is everybody. But I have found success in asking the right questions and being a little resourceful.

1. For the limited budget project, ask to look at their customer database. It would be outstanding to dive into an advanced CRM system and segment. Many companies completely forget about their own database. Perhaps it’s a simple Excel or one that could be exported as a tab delimited file then opened in Excel. Do a little sorting and soon you can begin gleaning common titles or companies in a B2B situation, maybe there are a lot more males or female names, take a look at their email addresses (this is helpful in email design trying to assist in finding target email clients, etc. Taking this list to a mail house or analyst could also prove invaluable (depending on the complexity) if they can assist in segmentation.
2. For a decent size project with little or no budget for 3rd party research, use the above mentioned method along with some open-source research tools like Quantcast. Let’s say your clients URL is nestle.com. Just enter it in and it pulls from a variety of resources to provide you with demographics and lifestyle information like this:
   
   
3. If you are working on high priority projects and there is a success matrix in place for performance, using a 3rd party is invaluable. If you are the IA or UX designer, you should be provided insight detailing the outcomes of the research and information you can act on to design quality into the product. This will ensure you are correctly communicating and provide benchmark data for testing. I shared more on forms of this in my post titled: Automatic Usability Evaluation Applications.

I believe that user research should be engaged in every project.  Minimal information is better then no information at all to act on. And as protectors of creating positive online experiences, it is our missive to make sure this is always a part of the process.

Do you agree or have any examples of arguments against this position?