Continuous Research Methods

The need for answers about user needs, preferences, and pain points doesn’t go away after you launch a product—and that means the need for UX research doesn’t go away, either.

Things break, new features need to be launched, customer needs evolve.  All these things require research.

Continuous research (or ongoing research) is an important part of maintaining a great customer experience. Ongoing listening methods like NPS surveys, user analytics, continuous customer interviews help keep your product useful, relevant, and valuable to users.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about:

• How to use product analytics like in-app behaviors, user flows, dropoff rates, activation rates, and other product metrics to support your research and keep track of changes over time.
• Continuous feedback surveys—like net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and custom intercept surveys—and how they can help you stay on the pulse of user sentiment.
• Using sales, support, CS, and product data in user research. Support tickets, bug reports, customer quotes, and first-hand knowledge of customers can be a goldmine of both qualitative and quantitative data if you know how to use it
• Continuous user interviews—or regular, 1-1 meetings with your customers—to augment one-off studies with fresh insights, prioritize your product roadmap, contribute to agile functioning throughout your org, and create a research-first culture on your team.