Whenever I’m confronted with “Your user research costs too much. We know our customers.” I always reply with, “Ahhh. But you don’t know your users.”
For the sake of brevity, we can’t go through every product or service model. But we can get a better understanding of the foundational issues with lumping your users into one bucket. It will be your job as the researcher to determine the specifics once you’re familiar with the user types.
CUSTOMER
This is an offline customer base. They love the products and may even love the company culture, etc. This is the first group of people you need to research. The app or site will not be mentioned. You’ll talk product (or service), culture, brand, customer service, lifestyle… you get the idea.
USER
A user is someone using the platform. Could be an admin, a customer, an SEO advisor, help desk, a window shopper, an advertiser. Your interview will revolve around the interaction they must perform to be successful (or converted, or retained).
PRE USER CUSTOMER / POST CUSTOMER USER
These are customers that followed them to digital (app or web). These fans will undoubtedly have a much different experience as users that found them for the first time online. Your interviews should lean on whether their offline expectations are being met online:
POST USER CUSTOMER / PRE CUSTOMER USER
These are users that found you online and you’ve converted them to a customer. First off “Hell yeah!” Great job. Now let’s retain and grow this base. These are questions about the product that they received after the online experience:
While these are both CUSTOMERS who became USERS, the interview will have different objectives based on how you are viewing them. An example would be in the CUSTOMER portion of the interview I’m asking them product/service question based on my knowledge of their pre-online fandom.
In the USER portion of the interview I’m asking them usability questions based on the knowledge that they already love the company and may have greater patience than #4 interviewees.
Conversely, these questions will be about whether or not the goods lived up to the hype. Obviously we ask all the usability questions as well. We want to know how to improve the experience. But we do so under the lens that these users converted and our most important job at this point is retention.
Know who the subject was and what order they experienced the brand is critical. Regardless, your focus should be split between CUSTOMER and USER. Remember, you will have users that never become customers. These are of evaluative analytical importance because at the end of the day:
CONCLUSION:
The results of user interviews without context of origin can be devastating to your product. Always know the origin of the data and how it was collected. Furthermore how you archive findings can be equally powerful.
Original article, posted Sep. 2022 for Design Bootcamp, can be found on Medium.
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