🏫
Obvious University
Website
  • 👋Welcome to Obvious University!
  • Strategy
    • Sprints
      • 1️⃣Map
      • 2️⃣Sketch
      • 3️⃣Decide
      • 4️⃣Prototype
      • 5️⃣Test
    • Benchmarking
    • Research
      • 1️⃣Research guide
      • 2️⃣How to recruit users
      • 3️⃣How to conduct an interview well
      • 4️⃣How to take notes
      • 5️⃣How to prep for remote research
      • 6️⃣How to throw a watch party
      • 7️⃣How to create artefacts
  • Working with Features
    • Building with AI
      • 1️⃣Understand the tech
      • 2️⃣Map your product
      • 3️⃣Build a proof of concept
      • 4️⃣LLM Inputs
      • 5️⃣LLM Responses
    • Building Help and Support
      • 1️⃣How to scope a support experience
      • 2️⃣How to design discovery for support
      • 3️⃣How to design a support centre
      • 4️⃣How to write good support articles
  • Product Design
    • Microcopy
      • 1️⃣How to write well
      • 2️⃣How to write phrases
      • 3️⃣How to write messages
      • 4️⃣How to create a voice
    • Typography
      • 1️⃣How to compose type
      • 2️⃣How to create a type scale
      • 3️⃣How to pick typefaces
      • 4️⃣How to pair typefaces
    • Design System
      • 1️⃣Introduction to design systems
      • 2️⃣How to audit a design system
      • 3️⃣How to run a design system pilot
      • 4️⃣How to set up a design foundation
      • 5️⃣How to build components
      • 6️⃣How to document a design system
      • 7️⃣How to enable adoption and govern a design system
    • Mobile Engineering
      • 1️⃣Trunk based development
      • 2️⃣Agile development terminology
      • 3️⃣Git commit messages
      • 4️⃣Code review and pull requests
      • 5️⃣Readings
  • Delivery
    • Project Management
    • Collaboration
  • Hiring and Growth
    • Growth
      • 1️⃣Design growth framework
      • 2️⃣How to give ongoing feedback
      • 3️⃣How to check-in every quarter
      • 4️⃣How to address underperformance
      • 5️⃣FAQs
    • Hiring and careers
      • 1️⃣The Hiring Process
      • 2️⃣Diverse and Inclusive Hiring
  • PEOPLE EXPERIENCE
    • Benefits and Perks
      • 1️⃣Paid time off
      • 2️⃣Insurance and healthcare
      • 3️⃣Continuing education
      • 4️⃣Speaking at conferences
    • Starting at Obvious
      • 1️⃣Introducing Obvious
      • 2️⃣Set up your workspace
      • 3️⃣Onboarding
      • 4️⃣Finances
      • 5️⃣Code of Conduct
    • Employment policies
      • 1️⃣Equal opportunity employment
      • 2️⃣At-will employment
      • 3️⃣Employee records and privacy
      • 4️⃣Prevention of sexual harassment
      • 5️⃣Drugs and alcohol
      • 6️⃣Fraternisation
      • 7️⃣Non-compete and non-solicitation
      • 8️⃣Non-disclosure
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • 👋🏼 Introduction
  • 1️⃣ Build hypothesis
  • 2️⃣ Test with users
  • 3️⃣ Synthesise Insights
  1. Strategy
  2. Research

Research guide

PreviousResearchNextHow to recruit users

Last updated 1 year ago

👋🏼 Introduction

3 steps is all it takes to do research. Do it as often as you can. It’s the best way to build your intuition for the product space, for consumer sensibility, and conviction in your designs.

Get started with the !

1️⃣ Build hypothesis

Before you start your research, it’s important to answer what you are testing and how you plan to test it.

In the , fill the first three columns.

  • Identify a hypotheses: These are assumptions in your proposed design which you are testing. Be clear and opinionated about your hypothesis to get the clearest reaction to your designs.

  • Create an experiment: Write down the specifics of the task, the hypothetical situation, or the question you’ll ask to test each hypothesis. Be open ended in the phrasing here. “How, what, why…” type questions rather than “Would you do x or Y…” type questions.

  • Define success criteria: This helps you be clear about what counts as successful performance of the design. It could be a click, it could be the time taken on the screen, it could be selection of the specific option based on what you’re testing

2️⃣ Test with users

  • Take notes during interviews: Take notes yourself or with the help of a note-taker. Observe behaviour, comprehension, and inferences. Note these observations down rather than taking verbatim notes.

  • Determine results: Mark overall success / failure of each hypothesis with each participant. As a rule of thumb, if it’s not a strong yes, it’s a no. This default will help avoid mediocre designs and help the team take the harder decisions necessary to build performant products.

3️⃣ Synthesise Insights

  • Write your insights: For each hypothesis, identify number of success / failure across participants. Go through the notes you’ve taken and identify reasons or patterns for the result. Continue this step for all hypotheses to gather all the insights from the study.

  • Create recommendations: Once insights are in, step back and identify the unsolved aspects of the designs, or new Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) that might have surfaced. It might even be aspects of designs to retain as is. Stay away from ideating at this point.

  • Assign next steps: The study is incomplete until each recommendation is either assigned an owner or is clearly marked as not important to act on at this time.

Recruit users: If you have a user base already, that’s an easy place to recruit from. Make sure you filter for the kind of users you are likely to use the feature you’re testing and are active users of the product if that’s important. For additional help with recruitment, refer and .

Prepare an interview guide: Use the to identify your warm-up and wrap up questions to put participants at ease.

In the , fill the “Notes” and “Results” columns for each participant:

In the , fill the last three columns.

1️⃣
How to recruit users
Recruitment Script
Interview Guide template
Experiment Table
Experiment Table
Research Template [Duplicate me]
Experiment table