Conducting Research, Extracting Insights, Qualitative Research

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.

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.

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.

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

Video is the most effective way to share and highlight the findings of user research. Video triggers emotion and is more memorable than other forms of communication. The production of chemicals like cortisol and oxytocin are triggered by video. If you want to inspire empathy and understanding of your users, video is the key. 

Additionally, people are becoming more familiar with sharing and watching videos for business, especially in the wake of the coronavirus. This increased adoption makes video an even better tool for sharing information than ever before. Read More

For this study, I tested the usability of the ‘Your Lists’ feature on Amazon.com with an aim of evaluating its design in terms of functionality and intuitiveness for first time users. ‘Your Lists’ is a feature that allows Amazon users to construct shopping lists that can be edited, shared, and organized to the user’s liking. Tetra made it easy to generate clear insights on this feature! You can read more about the research focus of this study in the testing plan. Read more.

“Fine. You can stay out all night with your friends if you want”. If it’s your significant other speaking, you may want to tread lightly. Language isn’t easy. Scratch that – communication isn’t easy. People are complex, using multiple intricate cues to convey meaning. Words alone that seem ‘safe’ may not convey the true emotion(s) […]