How Startups and SMBs Can Drive Business Success by Focusing on User Needs
To increase product success, you need a deep understanding of your target users. This is important, so you can enhance existing products and develop new solutions that meet user needs. User Research is an excellent strategy for achieving this understanding and driving a positive impact on your business. Learn more about how you can benefit from and get started with User Research.
What is User Research?
User Research is the strategic study of target users to understand their behavior, pain points, and needs. Gaining a deep understanding of their users helps businesses – from startups to large corporations – to make informed decisions about their products and services. The key areas where User Research can make a strategic impact include:
- Developing new products
- Enhancing existing products
- Adapting products for international markets
In particular, User Research helps companies to de-risk important decisions about their products and go-to-market approach. This involves defining the key topics to research and using proven methods to provide answers across the various phases of the product development cycle. By learning about the challenges users face and which solutions might solve these, businesses can make confident decisions and minimize the risk of delivering solutions that miss the mark.
While User Research provides strategic value in every phase, it is especially in the early stages of finding opportunities and determining solutions where it has the highest impact. This is because the further along product development is, the higher the cost of changing direction. If you only find out that your product is not as valuable for users after you built it, you wasted precious time and development resources.
Project Phases of User Research
The reason that businesses can make confident decisions based on User Research is that it follows a thorough strategy that is based on established methods. This includes choosing appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods to answer well-defined research questions, selecting the right participants, and using formalized approaches to analyze data and deliver actionable insights.
This strategic project planning and thorough execution for each phase clearly differentiates User Research from common customer conversations. You can certainly gain interesting insights from talking to customers, but these usually tend to be more anecdotal because they lack the methodical rigor of User Research. Businesses therefore should leverage User Research best practices to ensure they get well-founded insights about the topics they need to understand for informed decision-making.
How Your Business Can Benefit from User Research
In addition to mitigating risk across the product development cycle, User Research also provides a tangible positive impact on key business metrics:
Increased Product-Market-Fit
- Learning about users’ context and challenges helps your business to create and adapt products that solve user needs and meet demand.
Reduced Development Costs
- Knowing your users’ priorities helps your product and development teams build customer-centric roadmaps and focus on the most impactful features first.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
- Testing your product with users helps you to ensure tasks can be completed in an efficient way and users are satisfied.
Supercharged Marketing & Sales
- Uncovering which product outcomes are most valuable for users and how they speak about their challenges can inform how you market and pitch your offers.
Reduced Customer Support Costs
- Creating high-quality user-centered products will decrease the number of issues customers face when using your products, thereby decreasing the need for service support.
I want to get started – but how?
Depending on the size of your company and the stage you are in, there are several options for you to integrate User Research into your business:
Scenario 1: You want to take the first steps into User Research with your team
Especially in startups, founders or product managers may want to run their own research to discover user needs. To get the most value out of your research efforts, it usually makes sense to bring in a User Research expert for a few sessions who provides guidance and coaches the team on specific best practices throughout the research initiative. This ensures that you receive impactful results you can base your decisions on.
Scenario 2: You have a specific research need but don’t want to hire full-time yet
This scenario often applies to smaller and mid-sized companies. If you are not yet ready to build up your own in-house User Research team, engaging a contractor for a specific project can be a great approach. User Research experts can join your team as consultants for a few weeks or months and run jointly defined research initiatives from end to end to help you get the answers you need.
Scenario 3: You decided that you want to build up a strategic research practice
In this case, you should hire experienced User Researchers. Many large companies, especially in Silicon Valley, employ User Research experts to drive strategic initiatives. Those professionals are often embedded in cross-functional working teams that include Product Managers, Engineers, and User Experience Designers. When hiring your first full-time researcher, look for a generalist who is adept in a wide range of methods and can determine the best approach for your needs.
User Research Dos and Don’ts
Independent of the stage your company is in, there are some specific best practices for conducting User Research. Follow these guidelines when getting started to ensure you get the most out of your strategic research efforts:
Ready for more? Join our free webinar!
Learn more about how you can leverage User Research to drive strategic success for your business. Join the exclusive free webinar “Strategic Advantage through User Research” with Sascha Noll and learn how to get started, get practical advice and step-by-step guides, and have the opportunity to practice key User Research concepts yourself.
About Dr. Sascha Noll
Dr. Sascha Noll is the founder and CEO of Sascha Noll Consulting. His focus is helping companies of all sizes, in particular startups and SMBs, from Europe and the US to create and launch successful products for customers in international markets. Sascha has 20+ years of experience leading user research, product management, and marketing for large global companies such as ZDF in Germany and SAP and LinkedIn in Silicon Valley. He holds a German Master’s and Ph.D. in Social Sciences, a US MBA in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and is certified in User Experience Research and Management by the world-leading Nielsen Norman Group.
Kontakt: noll-consulting.com | LinkedIn
