Honing Your Mobile Apps With Savvy User Research

You’ve spent months developing your app. You’ve managed to deal with the intricacies of MVC and emerged victorious with a clean, flexible and scalable architecture.

On top of that, your app has some amazing features incorporating the newest iOS technologies that will definitely increase your user base. It’s as close to perfect as possible. It’s certain to be a hit!

You release the app and wait for the flood of downloads.

You wait a day, a week, and nothing seems to budge. You think, “it’s the users, they just don’t seem to get it!”

What if it’s you? What if you don’t get your users?

In this article you’ll learn what user research is and how it can help you improve your product and iOS app development skills. We’ll introduce and compare common user research methods, point out several tools you can use, and present real-world examples of how user research has informed new releases of the Rent the Runway iOS app.

What is User Research and Why Should You Do It?

To create a product that people love, you first have to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. The problem has to come before the product. Before diving head-first into development, ask yourself:

• What problem does this product actually solve?
• Do people need this?
• Does it work in a way that they can understand?
• Will this benefit their day-to-day lives?

Conducting user research can help you answer these questions in three ways:

1. It will help you uncover and understand common problems.
2. Once you’ve brainstormed some potential solutions, user research will help you validate how usable and desirable those solutions actually are.
3. Continuous user research can save precious design and development time.

User research has an extremely high return of investment. For example, you can discover around 85% of the usability issues of your product by testing your ideas with just five people.

User research methods are traditionally divided into two categories: qualitative and quantitative. I find that separation a little confusing, because every research method has aspects of both qualitative and quantitative reasoning and analysis. Instead, I tend to think of the different user research methods in terms of active and passive.

Active User Research Methods

Active user research:

• Is always initiated by the developer.
• Requires your active involvement throughout the process.
• One research session takes a finite and relatively short amount of time.
• Results can be analyzed immediately.
• Research usually happens outside of the app.

Some examples of active user research are in-person user testing, online user testing, surveys & forms, and focus groups.

In-Person User Testing

In-person user testing means asking people to accomplish different tasks on your prototype and observing what they do and say.

This type of user research includes anything from asking your friends to try out your app, to fully-fledged research scenarios that involve scripts, two-way mirrors, and gift cards. The more formal you are the more difficult and expensive to set up will be the test. However, it’s also the most dynamic and flexible method that lets you adapt on the fly.

Your familiarity with the product makes you prone to intervene while the user is exploring your prototype. This can heavily bias the tester’s opinion and behavior, leading to useless results. It’s better if you come up with a list of questions you’d like answered, and hand them off to a coworker that will lead the session.

Finding participants for in-person testing can be tricky, especially if you’re just starting out. If you have a well-established product, you can reach out to your existing customers, offer them a gift card, and they’ll come running. If you’re rolling solo, you can talk to people you meet in coffee shops. They’re normally eager to offer their opinion, and you might even make some friends in the process. :]

Online User Testing

When you lack the time and resources to test in-person, online user testing is the next best thing. Services like Loop11, UserTesting, Usability Hub and several others will facilitate your remote testing.

Using these services, you can quickly reach a large number of users that fit specific criteria. For example, you can specify the demographics, habits and salary range of the people that you’d like to test your product. The users will go through your prototypes and tasks, and when the testing is over, you’ll end up with a lot of feedback!

There’s a small downside to using these remote tools. On most sites, the users testing your product are rated for their performance. Such a rating incentivizes users to improve their testing skills, which ultimately influences their payout. At times this rating system can backfire, because testers are primed to be alert and vigilant and will potentially notice many more details than a user in-the-wild would. Unlike face-to-face testing at the coffee shop, it’s complicated to control the amount and level of feedback that you gather from online user testing and you might need to filter out some data before analysis.

Surveys and Forms

Surveys and forms let you gather a lot of data very quickly with minimal effort. This can be crucial when you’re just starting to build your product. Whether freeform or multiple choice, this type of research is best when your questions are broad and your product not yet defined in detail.

Some popular survey tools are SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, SurveyGizmo and Google Forms.

Tip: before you invest in a tool, make sure that you can export the data in a format you can work with. Research can quickly become a nightmare of data transformations if you don’t pay attention to formats.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are another great way to gather a general reaction to your product, as they can provide more granular feedback than online surveys, and are less expensive than in-person user interviews.

While they can be effective they also suffer from some drawbacks. The most important is Groupthink, which can lead to a skewed perspective about your product based on the most vocal person or due to the general group tendency to conform to a common opinion.

Active user research methods are very effective but sometimes they might be too expensive. No worries, you can resort to passive methods :]