Design research doesn’t generate hypotheses; you do

A crash course for turning findings from UX research into product hypotheses.

Thanks to absurd illustrations for cover image

Design research is still such a new field in product design, that the common myths are still floating around. The most common (and dangerous) misconception I hear is that user research can be a handicap, creating biases towards a narrow group of people and preventing designers from doing anything more than building marginally better solutions.

The faster horse problem.

In a way, this is true. If you’re simply taking the pains of a specific user and solving each directly, you’ll end up with a faster horse. That’s great if that’s your goal. But if you’re looking to address user pains on a larger scale with the same amount of research, you’ll have to take a different approach.

Instead of focusing on users’ specific problems, listen for general themes and aim to understand them well enough to make a critical creative leap: from findings to hypotheses.

Here’s my TL:DR take on how to turn user pains into actionable and inclusive product solutions:

1. Ask why. Each pain point you hear about is probably a lot more complex and nuanced than it initially appears. Ask why, then ask it again another four times. What you’re doing is looking for the unspoken pain points, the ones in between the lines that require a little more digging. What are they not talking about? Does the user seem perfectly fine with something that feels very obviously broken? Why is that? (Spoiler: this is usually a signal that you’re misunderstanding their needs or you’re about to uncover a product opportunity). Either way, keep digging. Some of the most interesting hypotheses I’ve made were based on things people didn’t actually say out loud.
2. Create hypotheses. User research doesn’t give you good ideas. What it does give you is a deep enough understanding of your audience to be able to imagine their reality. From there, you need to do the work of coming up with ideas for new features, products and processes that could better serve their jobs to be done. This is hard — and there’s no trick to it. But the more I do this process myself, the more I can reliably come up with bets worth exploring. The two…