What do your users need? Just ask
When you attend a dinner party at a friend’s home or visit your family for the holidays, do you sit back with a glass of wine and look at the ceiling? Unlikely. At some point, you probably ask, “What can I do to help?”
And when you see tragedies on the news, such as people suffering or putting the pieces together after a natural disaster, you probably ask yourself, “What can I do to help?”
And of course, if you’ve worked with customers — from food service to retail — you’ve probably asked them, “What can I do to help?”
We ask this in so many corners of our lives, but we often skew away from this question when it comes to user experience (UX). Instead, we rely on the best-of-the-best practices we feel we’ve aced over the years, never seeming to step back and ensure we’re asking the most crucial question of all: What can I do to help?
And while this question may open up Pandora’s box, it will always get you the answers — and reality — you need.
When it’s time to start your next digital project, face the music. Ask what’s needed from the people who rely on it most.
Asking this question may open up Pandora’s box, but it will always get you the answers — and reality — you need.
Approach 1: Get Face To Face with Real People
Many of us who work in UX don’t mind collaborating with our fellow content strategists, designers, digital marketers, and other UX colleagues. Asking questions of strangers can feel intimidating, especially when we don’t know the outcome.
But the best chance you have of knowing the value of what you’re about to build is by talking to the audiences who’ll be using it. Whether designing a website or app, pitching “what ifs” and “which would you prefer” scenarios to real users — face to face — gives you a unique opportunity to follow up, probe for more detail, and watch their expressions. For example, ask questions like:
- If you are looking for X, where would you go and why?
- Find a page about X, and tell me what information you’d expect to see here. What’s your experience so far?
- When you’re seeking X-product or X-service, how do you start that journey? What are you hoping to find and what helps you make the next decision?
This is especially true if you have the opportunity to build a focus group or testing scenario with devices. Even relying on a competitor’s site as a testing scenario lets you see and hear reactions from real people in real time, which mimics what they’d encounter if you weren’t standing next to them.
It’s a true-to-life user experience in action. And by setting an objective and hypothesis, your methods, conduct, and synthesis will follow.
Approach 2: Conduct a User Survey
Depending on your role in a given project — as an agency, for example, working with a client — you may have not had the luxury of gathering users into groups for face-to-face interviews and interactions.
But there’s no reason those questions couldn’t be posted in written form by way of a survey.
As I write this, I’m working with a client to help rebuild an intranet. Intranets are some of my favorite projects because they’re oft forgotten or treated as nothing more than a filing cabinet for documents, policies, and benefits. And clients who want to tackle an intranet redesign see the potential for what it could be: An engaging space for employees to connect even more closely with their organization.
So where did we start? We built a robust employee survey.
To keep the answers streamlined and easy to visualize from a data standpoint, we focused on top tasks analyzed in heatmap testing and Google Analytics, and asked for confirmation of the value of these items — things including links to apps or third-party portals, seeking benefit information, or reading news inside the business.
We left room for open text fields, too. We opened the floor with things like:
- Tell us other reasons you visit the intranet
- How could the intranet better serve you, your colleagues, or department?
- What features or functionality would make your job easier?
- Share additional feedback with the team
(Psst…Check out these awesome survey tools to give this a try.)
The best part of the 600+ responses we’ve received so far are the comments that simply said, “Thank you.” Thank you for asking us to participate. Thank you for valuing our opinion. Thank you for making us part of this project. We also saw several kudos to the intranet team for the great job they’re doing.
The employees and managers feel valued to be part of such a major project. And they should. The intranet is their space.
Getting new ideas from user feedback is the best part of any project. And some of those ideas are the most innovative improvements.
Even if you can’t get face time with users up front, surveys can be a great way to get information about what’s valuable or missing to their experience. And you can get some other outside-the-box ideas along the way, too.
In the end, we ended up with some great, easy-to-digest charts that captured the most traveled and accessed tasked, resources, and use of the intranet, helping us categorize what we needed most in the navigation.
There isn’t a third approach.
I’m sorry.
You can’t mind-read your users. You have to ask them. Talk to them. Watch them.
You should always be finding a way to get user feedback in any project you do. Whether it’s a survey, consumer data gathered by a research firm, or through focus groups or face-to-face user testing, this feedback is essential to building a product or digital experience that works.
While you’re working with users, though, don’t hesitate to verify some of what you’re hearing with Google Analytics, heatmap, scroll map, or click track data, or other testing initiatives. These can help confirm what you’re hearing, or redirect your questions and research discovery process so you’re getting the right (and true) story.
Most importantly, keep your eyes and ears open to all the possibilities. You may enter any project with an idea of what’s right or what should work best, but until you talk to the real people who’ll be your primary users or visitors, you’re really just shooting in the dark.
Conclusion: Remember “What can I do to help?”
Just like those dinner parties, or your part-time job in college, or when you’re trying to help after a natural disaster, the phrase, “What can I do to help?” should always be on the tip of your tongue.
By keeping this question — and the potential answers — top of mind, you’ll always be considering the people who matter most.
