Posted on 2024-4-27 by Chris Gregori
User research is the practice of studying users of your product to gain insights into their behaviors, needs, and motivations.
It employs various methods like interviews, usability tests, surveys, and observation to understand users and craft successful, user-centric product experiences.
Let’s look at how user research transformed products at companies like Slack and Mixpanel:
Before building their now ubiquitous workplace chat app, Slack lived in the offices of prospective users. Researchers shadowed professionals at work, observing how teams improvised workarounds across multiple outdated communication channels.
This intensive user research revealed an appetite for a simpler, more unified messaging solution tailored specifically for workplace collaboration. It validated Slack’s potential product/market fit.
Continued dialogue with users then shaped Slack’s UI/UX, unveiling needs like archiving, workflow automation, seamless file sharing and more.
For companies like Mixpanel that offer user analytics platforms, practicing user research on their own users is essential. The Mixpanel team interviewed hundreds of product managers to understand how they analyze user data and their key frustrations.
These insights revealed product managers wanted more flexibility to explore data at a granular user level, not just high-level metrics. This drove the development of Mixpanel’s Space analytics solution for open-ended data exploration.
By living in users’ shoes, Mixpanel improved relevance and usability for the customers they aim to empower with rich user insights.
Whether transforming an entire brand experience or optimizing analytics software, rigorous user research paved the way for each of these product reinventions.
There are many methods and examples of shedding light on user needs, but the common thread is this: Never stop observing, questioning and cooperatively designing with your users. Their motivations and behaviours can be inspiration for truly great product breakthroughs.
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