Moderated vs unmoderated research: which approach is best?

Many organizations are aware that staying relevant essential for their success. This can mean a lot of things to different organizations. What it often means is coming up with plenty of new, innovative ideas and products to keep pace with the demands and needs of the marketplace. It also means keeping up with the expectations and needs of your users, which often means  shorter and shorter product development life cycle times.  While maintaining this pace can be daunting, it can also be seen as a strength, tightening up your processes and cutting out unnecessary steps.

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A vital part of developing new (or tweaking existing) products is considering the end user first. There really is no point in creating anything new if it isn’t meeting a need or filling a gap in the market. How can you make sure you are hitting the right mark? Ask your users.  We look into some of the key user research methods available to help you in your product development process.

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If you want to know more about how to fit research into your product development process, take a read here.

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What is user research? 👨🏻💻

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User experience (UX) research, or user research as it’s commonly referred to, is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, UX research involves using different research methods to gather qualitative and quantitative data and insights about how your users interact with your product. It is an essential part of developing, building, and launching a product that truly meets the needs, desires, and requirements of your users. 

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At its simplest, user research is talking to your users and understanding what they want and why. And using this to deliver what they need.

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How does user research fit into the product development process? 🧩🧩

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User research is an essential part of the product development process. By asking questions of your users about how your product works and what place it fills in the market, you can create a product that delivers what the market needs to those who need it. 

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Without user research, you could literally be firing arrows in the dark, or at the very best, working from a very internal organizational view based on assuming that what you believe users need is what they want. With user research, you can collect qualitative and quantitative data that clearly tells you where and what users would like to see and how they would use it.

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Investing in user research right at the start of the product development process can save the team and the organization heavy investment in time and money. With detailed data responses, your brand-new product can leapfrog many development hurdles, delivering a final product that users love and want to keep using. Firing arrows to hit a bullseye.

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What user research methods should we use? 🥺

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Qualitative ResearchMethods

Qualitative research is about exploration. It focuses on discovering things we cannot measure with numbers and typically involves getting to know users directly through interviews or observation.

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Usability Testing – Observational

One of the best ways to learn about your users and how they interact with your new product is to observe them in their own environment. Watch how they accomplish tasks, the order they do things, what frustrates them, and what makes the task easier and/or more enjoyable for your subject. The data can be collated to inform the usability of your product, improving intuitive design and what resonates with your users.

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Competitive Analysis

Reviewing products already on the market can be a great start to the product development process. Why are your competitors’ products successful? And how well do they behave for users? Learn from their successes, and even better, build on where they may not be performing as well and find where your product fills the gap in the market.

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Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research is about measurement. It focuses on gathering data and then turning this data into usable statistics.

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Surveys

Surveys are a popular user research method for gathering information from a wide range of people. In most cases, a survey will feature a set of questions designed to assess someone’s thoughts on a particular aspect of your new product. They’re useful for getting feedback or understanding attitudes, and you can use the learnings from your survey of a subset of users to draw conclusions about a larger population of users.

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Wrap Up 🌯

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Gathering information on your users during the product development process and before you invest time and money can be hugely beneficial to the entire process. Collating robust data and insights to guide the new product development and respond directly to user needs, and filling that all-important niche. Undertaking user experience research shouldn’t stop at product development but throughout each and every step of your product life cycle. If you want to find out more about UX research throughout the life cycle of your product, take a read of our article UX research for each product phase.

Natalie and Lulu have forged a unique team culture that focuses on positive outputs (and outcomes) for their app’s growing user base. In doing so, they turned the traditional design approach on its head and created a dynamic and supportive team. 

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Natalie, Director of Design at Hatch, and Lulu, UX Design Specialist, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on their concept of “radical collaboration”.

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In their talk, Nat and Lulu share their experience of growing a small app into a big player in the finance sector, and their unique approach to teamwork and culture which helped achieve it.

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Background on Natalie Ferguson and Lulu Pachuau

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Over the last two decades, Lulu and Nat have delivered exceptional customer experiences for too many organizations to count. After Nat co-founded Hatch, she begged Lulu to join her on their audacious mission: To supercharge wealth building in NZ. Together, they created a design and product culture that inspired 180,000 Kiwi investors to join in just 4 years.

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Contact Details:

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Email: natalie@sixfold.co.nz

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieferguson/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulupach/

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Radical Collaboration - How teamwork makes the dream work 💪💪💪

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Nat and Lulu discuss how they nurtured a team culture of “radical collaboration” when growing the hugely popular app Hatch, based in New Zealand. Hatch allows everyday New Zealanders to quickly and easily trade in the U.S. share market. 

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The beginning of the COVID pandemic spelled huge growth for Hatch and caused significant design challenges for the product. This growth meant that the app had to grow from a baby startup to one that could operate at scale - virtually overnight. 

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In navigating this challenge, Nat and Lulu coined the term radical collaboration, which aims to “dismantle organizational walls and supercharge what teams achieve”. Radical collaboration has six key pillars, which they discuss alongside their experience at Hatch.

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Pillar #1: When you live and breathe your North star

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Listening to hundreds of their customers’ stories, combined with their own personal experiences with money, compelled Lulu and Nat to change how their users view money. And so, “Grow the wealth of New Zealanders” became a powerful mission statement, or North Star, for Hatch. The mission was to give people the confidence and the ability to live their own lives with financial freedom and control. Nat and Lulu express the importance of truly believing in the mission of your product, and how this can become a guiding light for any team. 

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Pillar #2: When you trust each other so much, you’re happy to give up control

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As Hatch grew rapidly, trusting each other became more and more important. Nat and Lulu state that sometimes you need to take a step back and stop fueling growth for growth’s sake. It was at this point that Nat asked Lulu to join the team, and Nat’s first request was for Lulu to be super critical about the product design to date - no feedback was out of bounds. Letting go, feeling uncomfortable, and trusting your team can be difficult, but sometimes it’s what you need in order to drag yourself out of status quo design. This resulted in a brief hiatus from frantic delivery to take stock and reprioritize what was important - something that can be difficult without heavy doses of trust!

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Pillar #3: When everyone wears all the hats

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During their journey, the team at Hatch heard lots of stories from their users. Many of these stories were heard during “Hatcheversery Calls”, where team members would call users on their sign-up anniversary to chat about their experience with the app. Some of these calls were inspiring, insightful, and heartwarming.

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Everyone at Hatch made these calls – designers, writers, customer support, engineers, and even the CEO. Speaking to strangers in this way was a challenge for some, especially since it was common to field technical questions about the business. Nevertheless, asking staff to wear many hats like this turned the entire team into researchers and analysts. By forcing ourselves and our team outside of our comfort zone, we forced each other to see the whole picture of the business, not just our own little piece.

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Pillar #4: When you do what’s right, not what’s glam

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In an increasingly competitive industry, designers and developers are often tempted to consistently deliver new and exciting features. In response to rapid growth, rather than adding more features to the app, Lulu and Nat made a conscious effort to really listen to their customers to understand what problems they needed solving. 

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As it turned out, filing overseas tax returns was a significant and common problem for their customers - it was difficult and expensive. So, the team at Hatch devised a tax solution. This solution was developed by the entire team, with almost no tax specialists involved until the very end! This process was far from glamorous and it often fell outside of standard job descriptions. However, the team eventually succeeded in simplifying a notoriously difficult process and saved their customers a massive headache.

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Pillar #5: When you own the outcome, not your output.

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Over time Hatch’s user base changed from being primarily confident, seasoned investors, to being first-time investors. This new user group was typically scared of investing and often felt that it was only a thing wealthy people did.

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At this point, Hatch felt it was necessary to take a step back from delivering updates to take stock of their new position. This meant deeply understanding their customers’ journey from signing up, to making their first trade. Once this was intimately understood, the team delivered a comprehensive onboarding process which increased the sign-up conversion rate by 10%!

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Pillar #6: When you’re relentlessly committed to making it work

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Nat and Lulu describe a moment when Allbirds wanted to work with Hatch to allow ordinary New Zealanders to be involved in their IPO launch on the New York stock exchange. Again, this task faced numerous tax and trade law challenges, and offering the service seemed like yet another insurmountable task. The team at Hatch nearly gave up several times during this project, but everyone was determined to get this feature across the line – and they did. As a result, New Zealanders were some of the few regular investors from outside the U.S that were able to take part in Albirds IPO. 

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Why it matters 💥

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Over four years, Hatch grew to 180,000 users who collectively invested over $1bn. Nat and Lulu’s success underscores the critical role of teamwork and collaboration in achieving exceptional user experiences. Product teams should remember that in the rapidly evolving tech industry, it's not just about delivering the latest features; it's about fostering a positive and supportive team culture that buys into the bigger picture.

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The Hatch team grew to be more than team members and technical experts. They grew in confidence and appreciated every moving part of the business. Product teams can draw inspiration from Hatch's journey, where designers, writers, engineers, and even the CEO actively engaged with users, challenged traditional design decisions, and prioritized solving actual user problems. This approach led to better, more user-centric outcomes and a deep understanding of the end-to-end user experience.

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Most importantly, through the good times and tough, the team grew to trust each other. The mission weaved its way through each member of the team, which ultimately manifested in positive outcomes for the user and the business.

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Nat and Lulu’s concept of radical collaboration led to several positive outcomes for Hatch:

• It changed the way they did business. Information was no longer held in the minds of a few individuals – instead, it was shared. People were able to step into other people's roles seamlessly. 
• Hatch achieved better results faster by focusing on the end-to-end experience of the app, rather than by adding successive features. 
• The team became more nimble – potential design/development issues were anticipated earlier because everyone knew what the downstream impacts of a decision would be.

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Over the next week, Lulu and Nat encourage designers and researchers to get outside of their comfort zone and:

• Visit customer support team
• Pick up the phone and call a customer
• Challenge status quo design decisions. Ask, does this thing solve an end-user problem?

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A great user experience (UX) is one of the largest drivers of growth and revenue through user satisfaction. However, when budgets get tight, or there is a squeeze on timelines, user research is one of the first things to go. Often at the cost of user satisfaction.  

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This short sighted view can mean project managers are preoccupied with achieving milestones and short term goals. And UX teams get stuck researching products they weren’t actually involved with developing. As a result no one has the space and understanding to really develop a product that speaks to users needs, desires and wants. There must  be a better way to produce a product that is user-driven.  Thankfully there is.

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What is user research and why should project managers care about it? 👨🏻💻

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User research is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, user research involves using different research methods to gather information about your end users. 

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Essentially it aims to create the best possible experience for your users by listening and learning directly from those that already or potentially will use your product. You might conduct interviews to help you understand a particular problem, carry out a tree test to identify bottlenecks or problems in your navigation, or do some usability testing to directly observe your users as they perform different tasks on your website or in your app. Or a combination of these to understand what users really want.

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To a project manager and team, this likely sounds fairly familiar, that any project can’t be managed in a silo. Regular check-ins and feedback are essential to making smart decisions. The same with UX research. It can make the whole process quicker and more efficient. By taking a step back, digging into your users’ minds, and gaining a fuller understanding of what they want upfront, it can curtail short-term views and decisions.

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Bringing more user research into your development process has major benefits for the team, and the ultimately the quality of that final product. There are three key benefits:

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1. Saves your development team time and effort. Ensuring the team is working on what users want, not wasting time on features that don’t measure up.
2. Gives your users a better experience by meeting their requirements.
3. Helps your team innovate quickly by understanding what users really want.

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As a project manager, making space and planning for user research can be one of the best ways to ensure the team is creating a product that truly is user-driven.

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How to bring research into your product development process 🤔

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There are a couple of ways you can bring UX research into your product development process. 

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1. Start with a dedicated research project.
2. Integrate UX research throughout the development project.

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It can be more difficult to integrate UX research throughout the process, as it means planning the project with various stages of research built in to check the development of features. But ultimately this approach is likely to turn out the best product. One that has been considered, checked and well thought out through the whole product development process. To help you on the way we have laid out 6 key steps to help you integrate UX research into your product development process.

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6 key steps to integrate UX research 👟

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Step 1: Define your research questions

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Take a step back, look at your product and define your research questions. 

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It may be tempting just to ask, ‘do users like our latest release?’ This however does not get to why or what your users like or don’t like. Try instead:

• What do our users really want from our product?
• Where are they currently struggling while using our website?
• How can we design a better product for our users?

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These questions help to form the basis of specific questions about your product and specific areas of research to explore which in turn help shape the type of research you undertake.

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Step 2: Create your research plan

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With a few key research questions to focus on, it’s time to create your research plan.

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A great research plan covers your project’s goals, scope, timing, and deliverables. It’s essential for keeping yourself organized but also for getting key stakeholder signoff.

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Step 3: Prepare any research logistics

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Every project plan requires attention to detail including a user research project. And with any good project there are a set of steps to help make sense of it.

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1. Method: Based on your questions, what is the best user research method to use? 
2. Schedule: When will the research take place? How long will it go on for? If this is ongoing research, plan how it will be implemented and how often.
3. Location: Where will the research take place? 
4. Resources: What resources do you need? This could be technical support or team members.
5. Participants: Define who you want to research. Who is eligible to take part in this research? How will you find the right people?
6. Data: How will you capture the research data? Where will it be stored? How will you analyze the data and create insights and reports that can be used?
7. Deliverables: What is the ultimate goal for your research project?

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Step 4: Decide which method will be used

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Many user research methods benefit from an observational style of testing. Particularly if you are looking into why users undertake a specific task or struggle.

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Typically, there are two approaches to testing:

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1. Moderated testing is when a moderator is present during the test to answer questions, guide the participant, or dig deeper with further questions.
2. Unmoderated testing is when a participant is left on their own to carry out the task. Often this is done remotely and with very specific instructions.Your key questions will determine which method will works best for your research.  Find our more about the differences.

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Step 5: Run your research session

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It’s time to gather insights and data. The questions you are asking will influence how you run your research sessions and the methods you’ve chosen. 

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If you are running surveys you will be asking users through a banner or invitation to fill out your survey. Unmoderated and very specific questions. Gathering qualitative data and analyzing patterns.

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If you’re using something qualitative like interviews or heat mapping, you’ll want to implement software and gather as much information as possible.

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Step 6: Prepare a research findings report and share with stakeholders

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Analyze your findings, interrogate your data and find those insights that dive into the way your users think. How do they love your product? But how do they also struggle?

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Pull together your findings and insights into an easy to understand report. And get socializing. Bring your key stakeholders together and share your findings. Bringing everyone across the findings together can bring everyone on the journey. And for the development process can mean decisions can be user-driven. 

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Wrap Up 🥙

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Part of any project, UX research should be essential to developing a product that is user-driven. Integrating user research into your development process can be challenging. But with planning and strategy it can be hugely beneficial to saving time and money in the long run.