The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide

by Leah Buley

Users almost always prefer a simple product with fewer features executed extremely well over a feature-bloated product with a lot of capabilities that are executed only marginally well.

Guerilla User Research What concerns are top of mind for users? How do they really behave? How are people using your product today? There is one key requirement of user research, and it’s simple but not always easy: You have to actually talk to users. It doesn’t have to be a lot of them.

Ask open-ended questions. There is an art to user research. The goal is getting people to open up and share relevant information about themselves without leading them into answers. One technique that helps is to ask open-ended questions—questions that require more than a single word answer. Open-ended questions begin with words like “why” and “how.” Avoid starting questions with words like “did” or “was.” When in doubt, employ this powerful one-word sentence: “Why?”