Stop Guessing: Lightweight User Research for Web Teams

Web teams make decisions every day based on assumptions about users: what they need, what they'll understand, where they'll look, and what will help them succeed. User research can replace some of those assumptions with evidence, but that doesn't always require a large study, a huge budget, or weeks of work.

In this session, we'll walk through common questions website teams face and explore the research approaches that can help answer them. How can you learn what users actually need? When is concept testing useful? When should you run usability testing? What can qualitative research uncover when analytics tell you what is happening but not why?

We'll also look at how to right-size research to the question. Sometimes a few interviews or a focused usability study may be enough. Other times, particularly when a product is evolving across multiple prototypes or releases, it may be worth conducting iterative rounds of research or following users over time to understand adoption, learning, and how the experience changes with continued use.

Rather than providing a catalog of research methods, this session will use real-world scenarios to help designers, developers, project managers, content teams, and other stakeholders recognize what kind of research may be appropriate at different points in a website's lifecycle.

We'll also cover some of the limits of DIY research, common mistakes that can lead teams astray, and how to recognize when a research question calls for deeper expertise.