Working with Users
These activities find the people who will use what you build, ask them questions that get useful answers, and learn from what they actually do. They’re also how you grow your product once it ships.
“You are not your user.” (A common saying in UX research)
The Mom Test
Section titled “The Mom Test”Read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick or the book’s summary. Keep the handbook’s Mom Test cheat sheet open while you plan and run the interviews; it condenses the rules into a one-page reference.
- Identify Interviewees: Select potential users, customers, or stakeholders relevant to your project.
- Plan Questions: Create a set of interview questions that avoid biases and assumptions, based on the lessons from The Mom Test.
- Conduct Interviews: Interview at least 3 people, focusing on gathering useful, actionable feedback.
- Reflection: Write a summary of what you learned, how it influenced your understanding of user needs, and any changes to your project direction.
These interviews also start your user access plan: the named people you can actually reach when you need real users.
A good output is the interview plan, notes from the interviews, and a reflection on how the book’s approach changed your project.
Create Good Survey or Interview Questions
Section titled “Create Good Survey or Interview Questions”If you’re collecting data through surveys or interviews, write clear, unbiased, non-leading questions, i.e., good questions. You’ll also have to consider what type of data (qualitative, quantitative) you’re collecting, their purpose, and how you’re going to analyze the answers.
For this activity, explain what medium you’ll use to collect the answers, write your survey or interview questions, the expected types of answers for each, and how you’ll use them for analysis and answering your research question(s).
A good output is your question set, with the data type and purpose of each question, and a note on how you removed leading or biased phrasing.
Ideate About User Activities
Section titled “Ideate About User Activities”Generate a list of 5-10 ideas for user activities that you might do at some future point. For each kind of activity, generate at least one (but preferably two or three) different ways in which you might apply that activity in your project. For example, there are multiple ways one might use A/B testing.
To get started, you can read NN/g’s When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods and UX Research Cheat Sheet.
Here are some more in-depth guides:
- Quantitative User-Research Methodologies
- 27 Tips and Tricks for Conducting Successful User Research in the Field
- Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Consider splitting the readings between team members.
A good output is 5 to 10 candidate user activities, each with at least one concrete way you’d apply it to your project.
Find Users
Section titled “Find Users”Once you’ve created your user profile, find the places those users are. The internet has communities for every niche; try searching for communities relevant to your product on Reddit, Twitter/X, Hacker News, and other forums. Post on these platforms and engage with potential users. There are also many modern platforms that product and technology enthusiasts browse to discover new solutions to their problems, such as Product Hunt, Beta List, and Indie Hackers. Finally, you can reach out to your local community (fellow students, friends, clubs, etc.) as well.
Consider reading You Are Not the User: The False-Consensus Effect.
Keep a running summary of the outreach you’ve done, the mediums you’ve used, and the returns, e.g., people who have agreed to do user activities with you. This list of reachable people is your user access plan. Consider the following marketing activities:
- Post a demo on Reddit, Twitter/X, Hacker News (or similar)
- Launch on Product Hunt or Beta List
- Distribute cookies for trying your software (or similar)
- Present at a conference or workshop
A good output is a written list of the communities and platforms where your users actually are, with the outreach you’ve already made.
Engage Users
Section titled “Engage Users”Once you’ve found a good pool of users, engage them to gather feedback on your product. This can be done through social media posts, emails, surveys, demos, a public Discord/Slack channel, etc. Interview-style conversations should follow the Mom Test cheat sheet.
Write up the outreach you’ve done, the mediums you’ve used, and the feedback you’ve received from users.
A good output is a write-up of the outreach, the mediums used, and the feedback received.
Do a User Activity
Section titled “Do a User Activity”There are dozens of activities you can do with real users (see previous section). Select one that’s relevant for your project at this point in time and do it.
A good write-up includes:
- the type of activity,
- the goal of the activity or hypothesis being tested,
- details on how the activity was conducted (e.g., questions asked, test groups),
- key findings, data, or patterns observed,
- an analysis of what the results mean for the project, and
- actionable changes or decisions based on the findings.
A good output is the write-up described above: activity type, goal or hypothesis, how you ran it, what you found, and what changes because of it.
UX Design Maturity
Section titled “UX Design Maturity”Read The 6 Levels of UX Maturity (Absent, Limited, Emergent, Structured, Integrated, User-Driven) and complete the UX Maturity Quiz.
Write what needs to happen for you to move to the next stage. If your project involves user experience and no other significant technical elements, aim to reach at least Level 5, Integrated, by the end of the project.
A good output is your quiz result plus a written list of what has to happen to reach the next level.