User Studies are a great tool to conduct in order to uncover any opportunities in your product to improve or market upon. They involve a moderator asking participants to perform certain tasks with a product or service in order to gain insight on the performance of it. While the participants are completing these tasks, the moderator will be observing their behavior and listening for feedback.
The goals of a user study are to identify problems, uncover opportunities, and learn about the target users behaviors and preferences while using the product or service. It can be hard to learn about how well your product or service is functioning without the consumer actually using it and forming opinions about it for you. This is where the user study comes in.
The elements of a user study are the moderator, the tasks and the participants. The moderator guides the participants through the user study process, gives instructions, answers participant’s questions and asks follow up questions. They also ensure results are high quality and the data is valid by not influencing participant’s behaviors.
Tasks should be realistic activities that the participants may actually perform in real life and be specific or open ended depending on the information you are trying to receive. For example, if your product is an app, you may want participants to go through the features on the app as their tasks. Something to be aware of while tasks are being completed is if the task is working. This is when there are small errors in how a task is phrased causing participants to misunderstand what they are supposed to do and influence how they perform the task. It is important that instructions are read aloud by the participants to help them understand what to do and avoid task working.
Participants should be people in your target market that would actually use your product or service. Social posts, emails or word of mouth are all great ways to seek out participants for a user study. During the user study, they are asked to think out loud for moderators while performing tasks in order to give feedback to the moderators. Once all tasks are completed, a survey may be distributed in order for moderators to fully understand what elements need to be improved or marketed upon.
A user study is best to be conducted shortly after a product or service launch so you receive immediate feedback and can utilize it while the product or service is still new. However, anytime one is conducted is extremely valuable for you and your company. User studies are not necessary, but can be a great way to uncover hidden information about your product or service you would not have known about before.
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