At DeveloperTown, we believe in validating our product assumptions and designs with users ensuring we are building what users want / need. Often times, product teams engage UX Research during discovery phases, at DeveloperTown we believe that UX Research should continue to be assessed throughout the design and development into when the feature or application has launched. This approach can be applied to both system replacement / modernization as well as blue sky products.  

So how should you get started with involving users in your design and development cycle? 

Look to build pipelines of users that can be engaged with user interviews and user testing sessions as well as larger groups that can be sent surveys and other quick touch by valuable information gathering.  

We like a tool called Maze to organize these groups and manage all correspondence and research gathered. Maze is a SaaS based UX Research tool that can be used to created user groups for products as well as conduct research right in the tool. We can create surveys to send to users or embed figma prototypes to get feedback on application interactions. This gives our team quick access to data that we use to validate our approach. 

Ideally, we would advocate for product teams to create two groups of users.

  1. Product Advocates - These are stakeholders, sales, customer support and users who are key influencers that help drive product roadmaps. We would expect this group to be the smaller of the two. This group could be as small as 3-5 and as large as 40-50 depending on the number of stakeholders
  2. General Research Pool - This group consist of users of the application and is a much larger group. This is a group that as we have questions, we could send surveys for their thoughts or send Figma prototypes for quick feedback on flows and interactions from boots on the ground.

So what happens if I can’t get access to actual end users of my product? 

We would start to look at services that can help identify individuals with advanced attributes to pair down and invite those users into our groups. This is a paid service that is pretty quick but also comes with a cost to get access to those hard to identify networks.