Why is user research an important step to improve product UI/UX?

UI/UX insights can improve speed-to-market – the sooner you incorporate user research into your product development process, the faster you can assess product-market fit and create an MVP. User research makes your development timeline more efficient by ensuring that you only dedicate resources to building features that have been tested and validated by real customers.

Focusing on user research accelerates customer acquisition – when your product is built based on user needs and preferences, it’s easier to attract and onboard your first real/ paying customers. Good post-launch traction sets a positive tone for the longer term and can make it easier to build momentum.

Fundraising is easier with a well-designed, high-traction product – traction and positive user metrics make it easier to demonstrate that you have a valuable, investment-worthy product. These indicators can also help bootstrapped companies reach profitability more quickly.

User research reveals product weaknesses and the relative importance of potential areas of improvement – if you don’t commit to the process of testing your products with real people, you will inevitably miss critical improvements that will significantly impact product performance. Similarly, UI/UX research lets you make data-driven decisions about what changes your product needs, and when.

Staffing UI/UX

Who should own a UI/UX research project? What functions need to contribute?

As the product visionary, product owners should own the projects and make key decisions – input from the full engineering and UI/UX team is invaluable, but you need one person to take ownership of the product, delegate tasks, balance user and engineering feedback, and make decisions when faced with competing points of view. 

Anybody across the organization should be able to access user research and share ideas – increasing access helps the entire team feel a sense of ownership of the product while providing opportunities for more people to interact with the interface and share insights and new perspectives.

When should a company bring a UX professional into their organization?

Professionalize your UI/UX during the concept phase – this will help you win faster. In the B2C space, product design can often determine the competitive success of your company (look at Apple or Amazon). If UX is an afterthought in your product development process, you’re giving yourself a competitive disadvantage. 

Engage a consultancy or agency if you can’t afford a full-time UX/UI professional – technical founders and product visionaries can’t also act as a UX/UI professional. It’s invaluable to have someone in your organization or network whose top priority is advocating for the user and the user experience.

Conducting Research

What are the two types of design audits?

	Description		Process		When is it useful?
UX Audit	~6-week process involving a professional evaluation of the product that: • Notes areas where users might get confused • Assesses the flow and number of touchpoints required for key tasks • Identifies design inconsistencies • Checks for accessibility issues		1. Professional evaluation 2. Round of user testing sessions to validate assumptions made in the audit 3. Make adjustments based on feedback 4. Test the new iteration		When you need to ensure that mature products are ready for development
Design Sprint	~4-day intensive, time-boxed process involving key stakeholders from the company. This intensive process is an effective way to super-charge your product development flywheel and reinvigorate a team that’s been working on the same project for a long time.		Day 1: Identify riskiest assumptions and most critical areas of the product Day 2: Brainstorm potential solutions and features for prototype Day 3: Design a clickable prototype Day 4: Conduct ~5 user tests of prototype and analyze results		When you need to reimagine existing products or develop new features

In addition to sprints and audits, lightweight ways to review your UI (before or between formal projects) include:

• Watch a user engage with your product – this is a great place to start before investing significant time and money in developing a robust user testing process.
• UX audit with new hire or external team – this can be a good first engagement with a new individual or team because it introduces them to your product and customer and helps you understand how they evaluate different kinds of information.

What kinds of participants should company seek for their user research?

Include all key personas who will interact with and make decisions about your product – a persona is a detailed profile of a subset of target users that helps you understand their needs, pain points, and role in their own organizations. For example, you might have individual contributors using your product, as well as leaders or admins who need to administer the product and review reporting from users. Ensure you account for both.

How should you approach conversations during the user testing process?

The most efficient strategy is to conduct 3 sets of 5-person tests, making iterations between each set – this is based on the law of diminishing returns, the incremental value of each new user test decreases until it’s no longer efficient to increase your sample size. Generally, one user test reveals 33% of a product’s issues, and 5 tests reveal 85% of its issues. After 15 tests, you should have identified all the problems (but 5 tests is considered to be the sweet spot). 

Encourage customers to tell you a story during 1:1 interviews – more conversational answers can reveal hidden insights and important priorities or pain points for your customers. Open-ended questions increase the likelihood that customers will tell you things that you might not think to ask about directly. 

Identify the most important things that you want to learn, and work backward to build your questions – be sure to understand what your riskiest assumption is before the user testing process begins so that you can talk to customers to discover if that assumption is correct (or incorrect) and then adjust course accordingly. Get input from founders or product visionaries before you finalize your question set to ensure that your user tests focus on the right areas.

Examples of questions to ask during interviews

Have/do you ever…?

Tell me about the last time you…

Then tell me what happened. Tell me more.

What was awesome about that experience? Describe the best day you’ve had using this product.

What was frustrating? Describe the worst day you’ve had using this product.

If someone gave you a magic wand what would you change?

Describe what you do on a daily basis. When do you use this product during those activities?

For more guidance on how to structure user testing conversations, reference this Customer interview  template and User testing guide.

Design for Cybersecurity and Other Technical Products

What are some best practices for designing intuitive user experiences for complex or technical products (including products first designed to work in the terminal)?

Good design is about simplification without oversimplifying – make your interface as simple as possible without compromising on necessary functionalities. “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy”; a simple design can still be complex, but it should be as straightforward as possible. 

Prioritize the ease of accomplishing the most important and common use cases – not all user tasks are of equal importance. Identify the most common and most important tasks your users need to accomplish, and prioritize making those tasks as intuitive as possible. Don’t overcomplicate the experience of 80% of your users in order to accommodate the most complicated 5% of tasks. 

Draw on examples from other products in your industry or market – take inspiration from the UI patterns of successful apps inside and outside of your industry. Your users might already be familiar with these patterns, which can help reduce the learning curve for new users. 

Offer just-in-time documentation as needed – provide context-sensitive help for users who need more technical guidance to do certain tasks. By having tips, explanations, or definitions pop up proactively as users might need them, your design remains clean while still providing the guidance different personas might need as they progress through your app’s flow.

How should companies plan for different user types in their UI/UX?

Balance value with cost when making customizations for user type – while completely bespoke solutions can often create the best overall experience for every user type, it’s usually best to find a solution that works “well” for each user type and leverages repeatable components. This requires less of the engineering team’s time while still accounting for different user needs.  

Map out the critical workflows and priorities for each persona – you should have a clear understanding of what different personas need to get out of your product before development is complete. Create a design system that makes it more efficient for you to provide different levels of detail or technical access based on the type of user/account.

How should UI/UX provide order, consistency, and clarity to products with many features, or multi-product suites?

Recognize the important elements of the UI with design prominence – every aspect of a user’s interaction with your product is not equally important. Focus on the main use cases each user type needs to accomplish in your interface. Make those tasks prominent and easy to accomplish.

Treat language with the same rigor as the rest of your UI – language is as important as placement and layout. You can have the simplest interface in the world, but if your users don’t understand what a certain interaction will do, they won’t be able to use your product the way you intended. 

Leverage design systems to improve consistency – it’s more intuitive for users to follow workflows or patterns that they’ve clicked through before. Interfaces don’t need to have a unique design simply because their products do different things.  

What additional considerations do cybersecurity companies need to make when forming their UI/UX?

Most key stakeholders for cybersecurity products are more technical than key stakeholders for other industries – while the person doing day-to-day work with your product is always very technical, the person making the buying decision doesn’t need “dumbed down” explanations to the extent that buyers usually do for other types of products. Cybersecurity buyers might care more about certain reporting dashboards and integrations than the technical person does, but they’ll still have a strong understanding of your technology, which requires less interface differentiation between buyer and user personas. 

You shouldn’t skimp on UI/UX just because you’re a B2B business – it can be tempting to prioritize functionality and consider UI/UX as an afterthought, but as Steve Jobs said, “design is how it works”. UI/UX isn’t making things pretty; it’s about using design thinking to make a better product faster and more efficiently, and then ensuring that your product is better set up for success. 

Engineering talent is highly valued – perhaps more so than in some other industries – because the consequences of subpar engineering are so high, engineering talent is invaluable in the cybersecurity space. The bandwidth and resource allocation of your engineers should be managed accordingly. An experienced UI/UX team should ensure your engineers are only working on features customers want and will pay for

Making Changes

How do you handle design handoff to development teams?

Involve developers early in the design process – including engineers from the beginning allows them to provide input on technical feasibility, suggest simpler solutions for problems the UI/UX team has identified, and helps drive alignment between teams. 

Actively seek feasibility feedback before finalizing a design – get feasibility feedback on sketches or wireframes so that developers can understand the output you’re trying to create. When they provide feedback, be open to both positive and negative responses, and respect any technical constraints that are mentioned. Then, work together to find a solution that balances design vision with implementational realities. 

Create a comprehensive design system they can use – develop and maintain a design system that includes reusable components, documentation, and code snippets. This helps ensure consistency and makes it easier for developers to implement designs accurately. 

Be collaborative, not territorial – utilize design collaboration tools that allow developers to inspect designs, extract assets, and view specifications directly. Make it as easy as possible for the development team to get everything they need in order to bring your design to life.

How should you monitor and tweak product UI and UX over time?

Strategy	Description	Example activities
Observe product use	Regularly check in on how customers are using your product – and how their usage differs from any assumptions your team has made	Watch real people using your product
Test early and often	Set up a schedule for ongoing user testing, both for new features and existing functionalities	Add tests to your weekly sprints
Create an iterative, hypothesis-driven culture	Get in the rhythm of making assumptions, creating something to test, and testing it on your target audience	Employ a continuous deployment approach that lets you respond faster to user feedback by improving on specific things with each iteration Regularly conduct user interviews and surveys to gather ideas for improvements

How can telemetry tools provide usage insights and inform your product UI?

Telemetry lets you see what your customers are doing without going through a full user research process – tools like FullStory make screen recordings of the user interactions of people going through your app. FullStory won’t tell you why a customer does something, but it can make it easier to pinpoint specific areas that need improvement. 

Use telemetry-driven or quantitative analytics to identify problem areas, and use qualitative data to understand those problems – telemetry can act as an “always on” starting point for teams that adopt an “always improving” approach. However, you usually need to combine telemetry findings with customer interviews and user testing to understand the nuances behind the problems it identifies. Quantitative data can show you where users are dropping out of a flow or having a problem, but you need to have deeper conversations with users to understand why that is happening to determine how to fix it.

How should you think about rolling out large UI/UX changes to your customer base?

Test changes before they come out – similar to how Gmail introduces new changes before they officially launch, you can give users the opportunity to proactively try using a new interface. Observe how they use the interface, and whether they revert back to the old version or prefer the new one. You can also identify potential issues or areas where users will need extra support as they adjust. 

Clearly communicate why you’ve made the change – position the update as a benefit for your user, not an inconvenience. If you make the advantages of your new interface obvious, users are more likely to be patient during the learning process. 

When possible, implement changes through small iterations instead of large overhauls– mitigate risk and create more opportunities for your team to adapt based on customer feedback by rolling out changes in phases or in smaller groups.

Overall

What are the most important things to get right?

Build a customer-centric culture through humility and dedication to user research – companies like to claim that they know what their users want, but they rarely take the time to actually check that what they think their users want is actually what they want. This hubris can be dangerous and create unnecessary risk. Take the time to test internal assumptions and confirm that you really are able to give your customers what they want and need. 

Foster strong communication between those who speak directly to your target audience, and those who design products for that target audience – avoid siloing the conversations and insights that come from talking with your target audience. Sales should be sharing information directly with Product, and vice versa. For example, you can include product decision makers in the testing process, make the process and results accessible to everyone, and/or record user testing sessions and interviews to share with the team.

What are common pitfalls?

Neglecting UI/UX completely because you don’t have access to a professional designer – companies often psych themselves out by believing that they need to have perfect, professional-grade user research in order to improve their UI/UX design. While people with more experience might be able to get to a result faster, anyone is capable of conducting a scrappy user testing session by asking someone unfamiliar with a product to try to use it. The insights you can gain from watching a friend or spouse try to use something are still valuable—and much better than doing nothing. 

Thinking of user research as a project instead of a practice – user research isn’t something that you should turn on and then turn off again when you think you no longer need it. User research should be a continuing practice that influences the way your team operates. By constantly putting the customer front and center, you create endless opportunities to correct unconscious assumptions and create solutions that will make your product more successful.