Research across phases

User research should be conducted across all phases of the service life cycle. Getting the most out of your research requires careful and detailed planning.

User research does not just spontaneously happen. You need to carefully plan your research to ensure it provides good answers to your team’s most important questions.

The purpose and type of research will likely change between phases of the project, as you need to know different things at different points, but there are some things that will happen in all phases. For example, you should think about your service from end to end and consider all the ways that users interact with it (including all tools, transactions, support and offline steps) in every phase.

User research can also be done to inform decisions prior to a product life cycle. For example, when policy is being designed or when ideas for new services are being generated, user insight should guide these decisions.

Research aims in each phase

These are the general research aims you would have in each phase of the service life cycle. If you need a reminder of what happens during each phase, you can go back to step 2.4.

In discovery, the research aims to find out:

• who your likely users are and what they’re trying to do
• how they currently do it (for example, what services or channels they use)
• the problems or frustrations they experience

In alpha, the aims are to:

• improve the team’s understanding of your users and their needs
• test different design ideas and service prototypes with likely users
• learn how to build or improve your service so that it helps users achieve their goal

In beta, the aims are to:

• test the developing service with likely users to make sure it meets their needs
• understand and resolve usability issues

In live, the aims are to:

• assess people’s experience of using your service
• understand evolving user needs
• test new features, changes or improvements to your service

In retirement, user researchers aim to find out:

• is a product or service still fit for purpose?
• what are the user needs that will be met by a new product or service?

User research is a team sport

Research activities and analysis sessions should be built into the team’s regular schedule, so everyone knows when they’re happening and can make time to take part.

Throughout each development phase, user researchers will typically:

• work with the team at least 3 days a week
• run user research sessions at least every 2 weeks

User research is most effective when user researchers are embedded in service teams, and team members are actively involved in user research activities. Team members can actively in research through contributing to the research design, reading notes, watching and listening to recordings and participating in analysis work.

All team members should watch real users interacting with your service and talking about it, ideally for at least 2 hours every 6 weeks. These ‘exposure hours’ can involve interviews, home or workplace visits, lab-based usability tests or any other research activities where people can watch and listen to real users.

Team members who observe research can then take part in analysis sessions to help agree on the findings and any resulting actions.

This will help your team:

• understand the highs and lows that people experience when using your service
• learn the language that people use when talking about your service
• think and talk about users in terms of real people with real needs to develop empathy for the people they’re writing or designing for

At the same time, user researchers can work closely with designers, developers and content designers on design decisions and prototypes.