Shaping Product Intuition: Research Rituals for Competitive Product Design
Navigate through the best practices of user research and analysis
What is the most effective method to evaluate if the design works?
How do you keep up with customer understanding as user behavior/goals/needs change?
How do you improve your product intuition as a designer?
UX Research helps us figure out how effective we build products and how much value we bring to users. Without it, we won’t be able to align our team on the goals of what good user experiences can deliver.
Here are some ways of working that I have picked up along the way that have proven to be useful in uncovering insights.
1. Benchmark and triage
UX benchmarking provides a structured approach in evaluating a product's user experience using metrics. Through this, we are able to gauge performance against a meaningful standard.
One of the primary benefits of UX benchmarking lies in its ability to provide a baseline for comparison. Without it, it can be challenging to assess the success or failure of design iterations objectively. If you don’t have prior data for comparison, you can lean into industry benchmarks or your competitor’s data. Whether it's the performance of a website, a mobile application, or a digital platform, having concrete metrics allows designers to track progress over time and identify areas in need of refinement.
Moreover, benchmarking identifies strengths and weaknesses within a product's user experience. By dissecting metrics such as task success rates, error frequencies, and user satisfaction scores, designers gain insights into the specific aspects of the design that contribute to — or detract from — the overall user experience.
In addition to deriving insights from individual benchmarks, it's also valuable to cross-reference them with other metrics for a more comprehensive assessment. For instance, while obtaining a score from the System Usability Scale (SUS) provides initial feedback on product usability, its standalone value may be limited. To dig deeper, consider comparing it with metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which gauges the likelihood of customers recommending the product. This comparative analysis gives you more meaningful insights into user satisfaction, enhancing your ability to understand the overall product performance and user sentiment.
2. Document every piece of feedback at each stage of the customer journey.
To maintain an updated and comprehensive customer understanding, you need to know each user’s context, thoughts, questions, and criticisms from the moment they express interest as a prospect to their active engagement as a user. Document confusion points, questions, what they liked, what they hated, and how they solve their problem today. This way, you gain a full picture into their journey, enabling you to make comparisons with other users and unlocking a deeper understanding of their needs and behavior.
This list not only helps you assess the impact of each critical feedback and empowers your team to prioritize features and craft a well-informed roadmap. By leveraging this wealth of feedback, you can proactively address issues, identify emerging trends, and ensure that your product remains relevant and competitive in the industry.
To achieve this efficiently, it's crucial to collaborate with all customer-facing teams, including Sales, Operations, Customer Success, and Product. By consolidating customer feedback—whether from prospects, active customers, or churned ones—into a single platform, you establish a unified source of truth. This streamlined process significantly improves decision-making throughout the organization.
3. Look at the data regularly.
Observation is a powerful thing. You get to see how the user behaves in real time, not what they say they do. There are tools like PostHog and LogRocket that show you how people navigate websites and apps. Blocking off time to look at this regularly (at least 3x a week) helps you do 3 things:
You spot issues early and address them quickly, before user satisfaction declines.
Your product intuition improves - you have an understanding of what’s normal and what’s not. Which fixes/experiments are worth pursuing that are likely to resonate with customers. Which aren’t worth pursuing?
You start to notice behavioral patterns and gaps, which pushes you to more discovery work.
Conclusion
Having research rituals is vital in navigating the complexities of user experience design and ensuring the delivery of great products. By consistently analyzing data, benchmarking against industry standards, and meticulously documenting feedback throughout the customer journey, teams can gain invaluable insights into user behavior and needs. This understanding not only allows for informed feature prioritization and product refinement but also enables proactive problem-solving and innovation, ultimately ensuring that the products remain relevant and competitive.
Thanks for reading!
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Connect with me!
Email: laura.ang@expedock.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-ang/
Website: https://lauraang.design/