Conducting Research, Extracting Insights, Highlight Reels

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.