When do you know you have done enough user research?

Part of my job is to always advocate the importance of research and talking to customers to understand the pain points to solve, or opportunities to create new products and services that meet the needs they might not even realise they have.

Although this step is CRUCIAL, it is often the step many people want to skip altogether. Why?

Research is often the most time consuming and ambiguous phase of design and the step that makes lots of people feel uncomfortable. This unease can lead to people wanting to rush the step, skip it or make it “easy” by just sending out surveys rather than conducting interviews, for example.

I have observed that too many projects and startups happen with not enough time spent on their discovery and research of what their real value is, so they are basing the project solely on the experience of the executive or founder. This narrow view can mean way too many resources (time, money, effort) are producing products and services without a clear idea of what their value is.

Key takeaway: You need to slow down to speed up. Give yourself and your team plenty of time to do research and really understand your customers and the rest of the project will be able to gain momentum much more quickly.

Once people are convinced of the value of research, often they ask - when do you know you’ve done enough discovery and research?

That question is like asking how long is a piece of string. It is hard to know the answer until you know the answer. A bit of common sense, trial and error, intuition and data analysis does the trick. But here is a list of questions to ask yourself to help you figure out the answer to that question:

Have I interviewed a true representation of my target group?

For example, if you work for an airline and want to understand people’s personal travel preferences. Only researching people who travel with their family means you’re missing out on other key groups such as retirees, students, solo travellers and expats. Ensure you have captured all key groups and be open to discovering new ones. 

Do I truly understand the problems that customers face?

Research can be like going down a rabbit warren. You find yourself so far down a path that you never expected. This is OK, in fact is great, it means you are learning more about your users. But make sure that you only finish your research if you have a good grip on the issues and understand what they mean for users and your business.

Am I hearing the same thing?

There is no perfect number of the amount of interviews you should do. But if you start to hear similar themes and the same topics are coming up again and again, you can then confidently wrap up your research.