UX Research Guide

It’s critical to the success of any project — be it for an external client, for an internal project, or a new product you’re building — to adopt a user-first approach that positions the people that use what we build front and center. As you build your UX toolbox, it’s essential to equip yourself with the research tools you need to design great user experiences effectively.

When embarking upon the design process — indeed, as you’re framing the problem you’re trying to solve — it’s important to ask:

• What do your users want to get done?
• What are their goals?
• What are they trying to achieve?

Your user research should give you some insight into the answers to these questions. It should also be one of the first things you focus on. In short: it’s critical to undertake user research right at the beginning of the project. This helps to define: the scope of the project (what exactly it is you’re doing); and the goal (what the intention is).

Start with the goal, clearly defined, and work back from that.

Great products enable customers to get jobs done, your role as a designer is to define those jobs, then design for them. In short: spend some time with your users, getting to know their needs, and what it is they are trying to achieve, these are their “jobs to be done.’

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