Conducting Research, Qualitative Research, Remote Research

While conducting user research remotely is not new, it has become the norm amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At Tetra Insights, we’ve always been advocates of a remote-first research strategy and are here to share our best practices with a free ebook: The Definitive Guide to Remote User Research.  Read more.

Usability testing is a wonderful way to quickly discover friction points in your user experience. With just five users, you can determine 85% of usability problems, making usability testing an easy and integral part of any design process.
Here are the five steps to conducting an effective study. Read more.

Looking for a new role just in time for the holidays? Ready to start your 2021 off fresh? There’s still time to make something great happen in 2020 by nabbing one of these UX research gigs. This November, companies are looking for researchers who can work cross-functionally to deliver insights to a variety of stakeholders, from UX designers to product managers, business leaders, and engineers. Whether you’re looking to join an established research team or forge a company-wide research strategy of your own, we found lots of options, including several remote roles that allow you to work from anywhere. Read more.

A product roadmap can be determined by a variety of goals and interests. Sometimes, they come from user research. Other times, they are decided by business initiatives, technical goals, marketing campaigns, competitor launches, customer requests, etc. 

When your product roadmap decisions are based on initiatives outside of user research findings, it’s important to take time to validate those decisions with research. You can use your findings to compare the importance of each effort based on how strongly it aligns with your overall product goals and strategy. Read more.

While companies across every industry have been experiencing a digital transformation over the past decade, the pandemic has now catapulted the world, and business, into all-digital-all-the-time. This reality has forced all businesses to immediately transition almost all of their customer interactions online. 

The recent Twilio / Segment deal is a great illustration of the acceleration of these changes. There is massive growth in digital products and digital ecosystems and the developer tooling for it. This deal is a clear validation of the enormous upside potential in the transformation that is unfurling. Read more.

Product managers come from many backgrounds and often have different ideas about how to define product success. Because of this, it’s important for them to be open to a wide range of success metrics in order to make sure they are taking full advantage of the expertise on their product team.

There are four elements that build upon each other to create a successful set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure product success. This hierarchy starts with the basic functions of the product, followed by the essential business requirements, then considers user experience and, ultimately, the health of the team working on the product. These KPIs are designed to deliver a full vision of the growth of the product. Read more.

While not everyone is a researcher, it’s extremely important to get people across teams to understand and contribute to the research process. Planning for this will help ensure your research is valued and, more importantly, acted upon. 

One distinction to remember is that while it’s important to engage others in the research process, it’s also vital to prevent non-researchers from interfering in and sharing opinions on the research methodology. The methodology, rigor, and research process should be owned by the experts: the researchers and insight professionals. It is their job is to make sure the methodology generates actionable, high-quality, insightful data. Read more.

Designing personas is a UX technique for creating a portrait of users’ preferences, needs, and wants. By doing this work upfront, researchers can incorporate personas into the process of sharing all research, thus reducing the time it takes for both researchers and stakeholders to extract and consume insights. You increase the likelihood that your stakeholders will engage with your insights when you share information that is relevant and personalized to their needs. Read more.

Ask 10 user researchers how they broke into the field, and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. The truth is, there is no single path to a successful research career. However, if this is a goal of yours, you need to understand how to appeal to hiring managers by creating an exceptional resume and portfolio, nailing an interview, and leaving a lasting impression.  Read more.

User research has emerged as one of the most powerful tools in a product manager’s arsenal to overcome the challenges of getting broad buy-in for product concepts and feature development. Properly utilized, research can create shared understanding, provide clarity to skepticism, and enable interest and engagement with stakeholders. Read more.

User interviews are an integral part of the UX process and are an incredibly valuable way to better understand how your users interact with your product. However, user interviews can be complex, and it’s well worth it to put in the prep work necessary to make them successful. Read more.

There are endless variations to how researchers assemble their workflows—not to mention among the myriad toolsets available. However, the overall structure of a user research workflow is generally homogenous and consists of four phases: planning, execution, analyzing, and storing research within a repository. Read more.

There’s a lot of discussion in business these days about moving to a “customer-centric” approach. Customer centricity isn’t a new concept. Companies like Amazon have rooted their strategy in customer-centricity for over a decade. What is new is the recognition that to be competitive and meet the customers’ demands and expectations, customer-centricity must be at the heart of your business. Read more.

Working professionally in the world of user research is an exciting and evolving career choice. Luckily, there’s a path into a research career for people from any background—even for those with zero experience! Tetra’s Senior Researcher Casie Mattrisch writes about the necessary skillsets, common career paths, and educational opportunities for people interested in joining the exciting field of research. Read more.

Whether you’re building a product or hoping to better understand your customers, every user researcher has faced push-back when it comes to advocating for more user research. However, we are living in a quickly changing world, and not only are users’ and customers’ opinions rapidly transforming, so are your stakeholders’ vision and priorities.  Read more.

Here is a selection of my top user research books, which I want to share with you because they have each helped me at different stages of my career. Whether you’re new to the industry, an experienced pro, or simply interested in upping your business-communication game, these are all fantastic resources.  Read more.

Ask any researcher, and they’ll tell you one of their biggest challenges is creating a functional, streamlined research repository. We often hear that most solutions are disjointed and difficult to track and share. At Tetra, we’ve created a toolset that makes storing, sharing, and accessing research easy and efficient.  Read more.

Understanding human psychology is essential for getting buy-in for ongoing research at all levels of the company. As research experts, we know that even when companies invest in user research, they often fail to incorporate the findings into their business decision making. A slight revision of an old existential question might be: If research work is never consumed, did it ever even exist? Read more.

At the INDUSTRY Product Conference several years ago, I had the opportunity to lead an engaging group discussion about essential techniques for product managers to be as effective as possible. Several interesting questions and themes emerged that are critical to building successful products and delighting users.

Top of mind issues for product owners include maximizing the value of user research, collaborating effectively with stakeholders, making great decisions, and navigating complex organizational dynamics. Below are thoughts and actionable recommendations that emerged from these conversations. Read more.

The work of the modern user researcher broadly falls into three tactical categories:

Strategy and planning
Research execution
Analysis and sharing

The most effective researchers are adept at agile, iterative research methods. And to execute this research, they rely on a wide variety of tools. 

Many organizations still rely on antiquated and overpriced research platforms. Fortunately, the modern paradigm for successful research does not need to break the bank or force rigidity of process.

In this post, we’re going to share the most effective research stack for modern research work. These tools are more flexible, cost effective, and, ultimately, better suited to tasks of successful researchers. Read More

Our team at Tetra Insights has completed rigorous user research work for dozens of companies across industries. Through this experience, we’ve uncovered some common pain points and stresses of executing effective research. Among the most common challenges are getting buy-in and ensuring that findings are both meaningful and actionable.

To solve these problems, we developed a simple and reliable method for generating research plans that cater to the needs of stakeholders and ensure that product teams get the insight they need to build great things. We call this simple technique Decision Mapping. Read More

Recruiting participants, and recruiting the right participants, is among the most pervasive challenges in user research. Add in the remote aspect of research and your first thought might be to just avoid it altogether—but please don’t! Here at Tetra, we use a variety of sourcing methods to meet very unique and specific remote participant sourcing goals to effectively find the right people for both our research and our clients’ research. Read More

Establishing trust with research participants is always critical regardless of what type of research you’re doing. However, there are specific challenges to building and maintaining trust while conducting research remotely. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced researchers to move from in-person interviews to remote interviews, many of you are encountering these challenges for the first time.

Tetra Insights has always favored remote qualitative research, and we have developed strategies to ensure researchers can build and maintain trust with their participants when working with them remotely. Here are seven key ways you can build trust and rapport while conducting remote research: Read more.