User Research talks

User research is the practice of learning about the people who use a product: their needs, goals, behaviour and context. It includes methods such as interviews, observation, usability testing, surveys, diary studies, experience sampling and analysis of data from A/B tests, each suited to different questions.

For UI, UX and product design, research is what keeps decisions grounded in reality rather than in the team’s opinions. It shows which problems are worth solving, how people actually behave as opposed to how they say they behave, and whether a design works. Doing it badly, by asking leading questions or researching too late, can be as misleading as not doing it at all.

The 16 talks here run from 2010 to 2019. Tomer Sharon gives “Perfectly executing the wrong plan” at Google I/O and “Don’t Listen to Users, Sample Their Experience!” (2014). David Travis covers “The 7 deadly sins of user research”, Moishe Lettvin shares “What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google”, and Aaron Gustafson talks about “Designing with Empathy” at beyond tellerrand. Karl Gills, Maurits Kaptein and Christine Perfetti cover A/B tests, persuasive profiling and evaluation, while Tania Douglas, Johannes Ippen, Kelly Goto, Razan Sadeq, Trine Falbe, Aaron Walter and Stephen Anderson contribute further talks. Sub-topics include empathy and experience sampling.