To make the most out of user research, learn how to preserve your findings

Don’t waste good user research that your team can’t tackle right away

Photo by Eva Bronzini: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-pouring-water-on-pickled-cucumber-jars-5503110/

If you can’t user test as much as you used to, learning to preserve user insights becomes critical.

To understand what this means, remember the last user test you did. You probably encountered some insights that the team couldn’t act upon immediately.

Perhaps users provided great user suggestions for future iterations of the product. Or, more commonly, they ran into usability issues that weren’t that high priority.

What happened to the medium (or high) priority issues your team didn’t tackle immediately? Are they sitting in a folder, essentially forgotten? Or are they preserved adequately with all the context needed, ready to access whenever?

While it’s not like you can’t find these issues again with testing, preserving user findings properly can help you keep past findings in mind, but it can also help build a record of long-standing issues with your product.

For example, it may be time to revisit that issue if users are frustrated across two user testing sessions with a low-priority feature.

So, to make the most of each user test, you need to learn how to preserve your findings. Here’s how to do that.

Find which user insights you want to preserve

It may be tricky to consider what user insights you should preserve. After all, these should be bite-sized pieces of user research and critical insights that you want to be able to reference quickly.

Moreover, these should be user insights that can help inform future product iterations or address existing issues we’re currently running into.

Here are some tips to identify candidates for preservation:

1. They give insight into an upcoming feature: The most common user research findings to preserve are opinions or suggestions for an upcoming feature. You’ll be building and testing it in the future, so any insights this person gives (i.e., what they imagine the product to be) will be helpful.

2. They express an underlying need that isn’t covered: Perhaps some value is missing for the user of your product. Remember that while users may be talking about a missing feature, it’s essential to read between the lines and touch on the need that’s not being covered.

3. They ask a question you may need the answers to: Sometimes, users will take you by surprise with the questions or insights they pose. For example, they may know about the product-market fit, business use cases, legal requirements, etc. These are some of the findings you’ll most want to keep track of because they can offer much value.

4. They ask for small-scale changes or suggestions while also expressing their rationale: Lastly, sometimes it may be that the scale of what they’re asking isn’t enormous, but it’s still essential. In these cases, perhaps it’s worth revisiting.

These are some of the significant categories that often make good insights to preserve. You’ll be able to act on some of them right away, while others may take more time. However, preserving these findings doesn’t stop here: we must think about how we might address these insights.

If you’re unsure about your team’s response, create a proposal

One of the most common problems with many user suggestions is that teams rarely give an outright rejection.

The most common rejection from the team is for them to say, “Not right now,” or “We’ll do it after MVP,” and then forget about the suggestion entirely. If they’re putting out fires in the present, it can be hard to give a concrete date to revisit these things.

Likewise, some of the suggestions that users give could be more reasonable. It takes next to no effort to talk about a feature that might take six months to build and may not even be in scope.

You need to figure out when to revisit an issue and understand what this user feedback might entail.

One way that you can do this is to create a ticket for the backlog (assuming you’re in an Agile environment) and try to give some estimates for the amount of work it would require.

Doing so would require you to think about specific questions, like:

• How many tasks and subtasks would you have to do to complete this?

• How much effort/hours would it take?

• Is this a simple feature, or is this a large Epic?

• Who else needs to be involved with this?

• Etc.

You don’t have to have all the answers right away, but a basic estimate of this can help you understand how large of an ask (and your team’s likely response) this is.

You would also want this ticket to link to your user research (and a specific finding) to give proper context.

If this seems like a massive feature request, we can shelve this ticket and revisit it later (or gather more data about it).

If everything seems minor in scope and easily fixable, putting it as a ticket and bringing it up during Backlog Grooming is a way to get this finding in front of the team and get approval for further actions.

However, one last thing we must emphasize is this: it will likely not be a 1:1 translation of effort.

Preservation means figuring out which form is best for findings

I used the word “Preserve” for a specific reason: the user finding might take many forms when preserved.

For example, if you preserve freshly picked apples, the final product may take many forms, like apple cider, apple preserves, apple butter, and more.

Your user findings may act similarly. Imagine that you’ve uncovered five critical usability problems your team is tackling, but you also have several high-priority issues you want to preserve for the future. The high-priority issue you want to address, in particular, is about onboarding a user.

Here are some forms that issue may take.

The next in line:

The best-case scenario is often that after the team finishes the sprint working on critical issues, they’ll start to work on this finding. Essentially, they approve of this feature 100%; it’s literally that they don’t have the time to work on it right now.

However, this is only one form your finding can take.

The alternative design solution:

Another common way to preserve a user finding is to design it as an alternative solution. You might, for example, build the onboarding how your team wanted as the ‘default’ design for testing but also have an alternative design for onboarding that you would introduce to users.

This way, you could get user feedback around both versions of the onboarding and see which one they like better. If they like the alternative, some work has already been done.

This approach is useful when your team is not 100% sold on an idea.

Digging deeper with future user research

Another way to preserve this finding is to incorporate that question into future user tests to gather more data around it. For example, if users voiced issues with onboarding on mobile devices, ask future users what types of devices they typically use to perform specific tasks.

Being able to iterate on user research, especially figuring out new research questions to ask, can be incredibly helpful to get a clearer picture of your user and their needs.

If it doesn’t seem like you can design a feature with a finding, but it gives additional user insights, this may be the best approach.

Having a ticket to tackle UX Debt

Lastly, sometimes your user findings can exist as a ticket that you can tackle in some future sprint as UX debt. Sometimes, these are just design issues you’ll need to find time to tackle. Whatever the case, ensuring it doesn’t remain forgotten is one of the most important things.

Preserve user findings to avoid wasting user testing efforts

If you work for an organization that does user testing every two weeks with dozens or hundreds of users, perhaps you don’t need some of these techniques.

But I suspect, during this economy, that your user testing sessions are becoming less frequent and farther apart. If that’s the case, ensuring you can preserve and re-use user insights can be helpful.

I’ve learned these techniques working with notoriously busy users, such as doctors and field workers. When you find yourself interviewing surgeons at 4 AM or only talking to your users every other month, you want to ensure that none of their insights are wasted.

What’s more, you’d be surprised how often your product team may be fully on board with revisiting some existing user suggestions, needs, or features once they put out all the fires. However, putting it in a format that is not only easily accessible but also easily palatable makes it much easier to act on these insights.

For this reason, learning how to preserve your user insights (and revisit them later) can be essential.

Doing so can help you build better products and incorporate user suggestions beyond the ultra-specific time period of “what can we handle next sprint or two.”

Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.