The real situation and solutions for user research in small and medium-sized factories

Most companies have already established their own user research teams, but the results of the teams produced by different companies vary greatly. This article analyzes the common misunderstandings and limitations of small and medium-sized enterprises when establishing user research teams. Come and take a look.

User Research Industry Observation Series

Last time I wrote an article about how big companies do user research, the response was pretty good. But in China, there are only a few big companies at the top of the industry, and 99% are small and medium-sized enterprises, so this time I will talk about the real situation and solutions of doing user research in small and medium-sized companies based on my own experience.

01 Most user research teams in small and medium-sized companies are makeshift teams

The market and user research industry has a history of about 30 years in China. User research has been valued as an important tool for companies to understand users, gain insight into user needs, and improve user experience. In the past decade, there has been a wave of self-built user research teams.

User research teams are no longer a luxury for industry-leading companies, but are beginning to become an indispensable part of internal business operations for small and medium-sized enterprises, just like product, operations, design and other teams.

This is something to be happy about.

However, small and medium-sized enterprises are too hasty when building user research teams.

Many small and medium-sized enterprises will ask a person in charge of an original department to form a user research team. This person in charge may be from the brand department, the design department, or the marketing department, but he or she does not have a professional user research background.

Letting someone who doesn't understand user research to form a team is a typical example of an amateur leading professionals.

In addition, when setting up the user research team, they do not recruit senior user research experts to serve as the technical backbone of the team, but instead recruit a group of newcomers with not long years of experience to form a makeshift team.

I can understand that, because small and medium-sized enterprises have no money, but I think the fundamental reason for this situation is that they have a misunderstanding, that is, they think that market research or user research is a profession with very low technical content and a very low threshold.

In their perception, doing user research is just sending out questionnaires, conducting interviews and seminars, and hiring a few new people to give them some training so they can get started quickly.

What they don’t know is that user research is a type of social science research. A user research project can be broken down into dozens of links, each of which has its own technical difficulties and professional standards.

For example, questionnaire design is a link that requires extremely high professionalism and experience. The overall framework of the questionnaire design must be logical, and the design of each question and option under the overall framework must follow the MECE (Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive) principle. The questionnaire's comprehensibility, acceptability, objectivity, privacy and confidentiality must be considered as well as the questionnaire's recovery rate and response quality. The quality of the questionnaire design directly affects the reliability and validity of the research results.

Sometimes we receive some survey questionnaire links. As an insider, I can only say that there are too many unprofessionally designed questionnaires. It is hard for me to imagine the quality of the data and research results after the questionnaires are collected.

For example, after the questionnaire is designed, it needs to be programmed on the questionnaire platform. User identification, question display and jump all require corresponding logic to be set in the background. Some simple logic is fine, but for complex logic, only programming languages ​​can be used. Party B market research companies have dedicated questionnaire programmers.

For example, the cleaning, analysis and coding of open-ended questions after the survey data is collected requires knowledge of statistics and the ability to use data processing software such as SPSS; not to mention some advanced modeling and analysis, such as structural equations, CBC joint analysis, etc., for which the second-party market research company also has professional data DP (Data Processing) personnel.

For example, interviews and seminars fall under the category of qualitative research. Third-party market research companies have specially set up qualitative research teams, which are composed of professional hosts who understand research. Not just anyone can conduct interviews or hold groups. Qualitative research also has many professional detection techniques and models (such as population segmentation models).

There are so many subdivided and professional roles in the third-party company, but they are integrated into one profession within the enterprise, that is, user researcher.

In other words, a user researcher must be able to do both quantitative and qualitative research; he must be able to design questionnaires and interview outlines, as well as questionnaire programming, data processing, analysis, and even modeling.

It is conceivable how big a challenge this is for a user researcher, and how many complex abilities and excellence are required to be competent.

But the reality is that most user research teams in small and medium-sized enterprises not only lack professional guidance from leaders, but also lack technical support from senior user research experts. Instead, they only have a group of hungry and inexperienced industry newcomers.

How can you expect such an unprofessional and immature team to achieve outstanding results?

User research belongs to the professional service industry, is a representative of intellectual intensiveness, and is within the scope of business consulting (user research has long been a consulting industry in China, and merely providing data results will be looked down upon). It is not an executive role, nor is it a "mouthpiece for users."

The user research team is not a simple team that collects user voices, collects user data and then communicates it. It is an analysis team and, like business analysis and strategic analysis, is part of the think tank.

It is best to use the standards for building a business analysis and strategic analysis team to build a user research team. The requirements for people in the business analysis team and the strategic analysis team should be the same as those for user researchers.

Otherwise, it is better not to set up a user research team.

Of course, we cannot be like the strategic team, who are either senior consultants from well-known consulting companies or graduates from top universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, but the personnel background of the user research team cannot be too bad. You can take a look at the background of user researchers in large companies. They start with a master's degree and most of them are from top 985 universities.

Small and medium-sized enterprises will say, I don’t have that much money.

There is a solution to this problem, which is to ensure that there are at least 1-2 senior user researchers in the team. There is no need to find a user research leader from a large company who has led a team before. Many of them have lost the basic skills of project operation because of management. It is only necessary to have senior soldiers endorsed by large companies, which is cost-effective.

Alternatively, you can build a "small but fine" user research team. The team does not need to be large, 3-4 or 5-6 people in the initial stage. Each of them should be a relatively experienced and professional user researcher, working with interns. This will maximize cost control while ensuring value output.

If all else fails, there is one last way to save money, which is to seek external help and ask external user research experts to provide professional guidance. The specific content includes: reorganizing and building the team's user research system, reorganizing and standardizing project processes, practical demonstrations of special research, outsourcing of research projects, etc.

In short, the professionalism of the user research team must be guaranteed. This is the basis and prerequisite. Otherwise, the theory of "user research is useless" will arise again.

02 User research in small and medium-sized factories is too limited and value output is weak

Taking my previous employer as an example, the user research team at that time completed a project in as short as two or three days, or as long as one to two weeks. They emphasized quick and easy completion. In terms of research resources, internal channel research was basically free, and external channel research relied on finding college students to work part-time to make phone calls, and there were no external suppliers. In terms of research project types, the entire life cycle was covered, from market entry feasibility studies to product post-market verification. In terms of research output, only one or two projects were recognized by the business bosses, and the other projects did not make any splashes.

Limited research resources, tight schedules, unprofessional teams, and no emphasis or focus on research directions can only result in low-quality research outputs. This low-value output then leads the company to question the value of user research, which then leads to further compression of resources and schedules, and control of user research team costs, thus creating a vicious cycle.

The worst case scenario is that the entire user research team is laid off, and this happens quite often.

This situation arises, on the one hand, because small and medium-sized enterprises (especially team leaders) have never seen how regular user research personnel conduct research, what the output of serious user research results is like, and there is no mature and advanced industry experience/solutions as a benchmark and reference. Therefore, they rely on subjective judgment to believe that a user research project can be completed with a limited research budget, a limited schedule, and a limited amount of unprofessional manpower.

On the other hand, it was done by the unprofessional and immature user research team themselves.

For example, research resources are up for grabs.

Usually, a user research through external channels (which involves users of competing products, so it cannot be conducted through internal channels) usually requires more than 5 product brands for the product and competitors, with 200-300 samples for each product brand (if there are fewer, it will be impossible to do a very detailed dimensional analysis, and if the digging is not deep enough, it will be blamed on the uselessness of user research). With this calculation, the total number of samples must be more than 1,000, usually 2,000+.

The selection of sample library is very critical. Generally, the sample library that comes with a third-party questionnaire platform or other third-party self-built sample library is usually in the millions, and two or three million is considered good. Their samples are cheap, averaging around 10 yuan. For example, Tencent Questionnaire, the more population labels pushed, the more expensive it is, and the more questions there are, the more expensive it is, but no one can guarantee the quality of the data recovered by such a sample library.

Now large companies have generally begun to use sample libraries based on precise reach of real active users across the entire network. The sample libraries are in the billions. The advantage is that the recovered data is of good quality and high efficiency, but the disadvantage is that they are relatively expensive, with prices starting at 40-50 yuan per sample. The smaller the target population and the longer the questionnaire, the more expensive it is, with the maximum price being over a hundred yuan per sample.

So, you have to know that if you want to do a high-quality and in-depth external channel user research project with a budget of less than 50,000 to 100,000, you are kidding.

If a user research team has such common sense, they will not save a little money on the number of samples and the price of samples and choose to do unreliable, low-level, and insignificant research. Instead, they will persuade their superiors to obtain more budget and resources to do in-depth, high-value, company-level research projects.

For example, time scheduling is negotiable.

Many times, the demands from the business side are very urgent, and it may only take one or two weeks from the submission of the demand to delivery, and sometimes even shorter.

The correct approach at this time is to evaluate the needs first. If it is a temporary, trivial demand, it depends on the schedule of the team members. If there is a gap and schedule, it can be supported agilely. If not, sorry, you can put it aside or not take it, because taking these projects will not bring much value to the team.

What a user research team needs to remember is that you mainly serve your boss or manager, not the front-line business parties below.

The more you serve the boss and management, the greater your value and influence; conversely, the more you serve the front-line business people, the smaller your value and influence, until you end up waiting to be fired.

Because, in the end, it is the bosses and managers who pay for user research, not the little Karami on the front line of business.

If it is evaluated as a very important demand, and this demand is highly relevant to the company's strategic goals and OKRs, then it can be rated as an S-level project or a company-level project.

This kind of project cannot be solved in one or two weeks. It is best to communicate and spend one to two months on it, work in depth, and work towards the goal of reporting to the business boss.

Why does it take so long?

Because such an S-level or company-level project takes at least one week from questionnaire design to programming to testing and online release; then there is sample data collection, which takes from one week to one month depending on the number of samples, and the more samples, the longer it takes; data cleaning and table output after sample collection takes another two or three days; report writing is the longest step, and it takes no more than a week to write a first draft, but you have to revise a lot of drafts when reporting from bottom to top, and this step can take a month.

Can you please calculate how long it takes to complete an S-level project or a company-level project?

Everything has a price. If you want to do quick and easy user research, you will have to bear the consequences of reinventing the wheel at a low value and low level. If you want to do an S-level project or a company-level project, you will have to invest the budget and manpower to fine-tune it.

For example, research directions can be focused.

Different industry tracks and companies have their most focused business issues at the moment. Some may be user growth, some may be commercial monetization; some focus on product selection/innovation, and some focus on back-end experience polishing.

With limited resources, the wisest choice for small and medium-sized enterprises is to focus on one or several directions, focus on one or several types of user research projects, and then do it in depth, and standardize it through continuous review and iteration.

The most worrying thing is that we take on all kinds of projects and all kinds of demands, but all of them are done crudely and unprofessionally, making the business demanders feel that they are useless.

This is just like when I was learning street dance, I followed the teacher and did every move, but none of them were done well, which resulted in me unable to watch the entire performance.

Dancing requires basic skills, and doing user research is even more so.

You must first focus on doing a certain type of user research project well and thoroughly. For each link, the operation must be standard, with high requirements, and the basic skills must be mastered. Otherwise, the "deformation" of any link will lead to unsatisfactory final research output.

In general, it is a good thing for small and medium-sized enterprises to build their own user research teams, which shows that user orientation is becoming more and more popular. However, due to the lack of in-depth knowledge and understanding of user research, there are many problems in the establishment of user research teams and the execution of projects, which affects the output of user research results and further raises doubts about the value of user research.

This situation requires the joint efforts of people from the entire industry. On the one hand, it requires that the bosses and business leaders who pay the bills be exposed to and understand mature and advanced solutions in the industry. On the other hand, user researchers need to continuously improve their professional capabilities and learn from the user research experience of large companies.

Author: Liu Peilong; WeChat public account: Peron (ID: LongRuiGuanTong)