User Research: Stop Guessing and Start Talking to Real People

Be honest: How do you decide what your users need from your site or app? Do you take the time to research and find out or do you just make your best educated guess? If your answer is the latter, you’re not alone. Most digital teams create experiences without ever once talking to the real people who will interact with the product. They make decisions for their users based on a set of guesses and assumptions about who those people are and what they want online. The problem with guesses and assumptions, even educated ones? They are almost always WRONG.

We can’t create great user experiences without understanding the people who will be interacting with them. When we guess what people need and get it wrong, we end up solving the wrong problems. Our real users get frustrated that we didn’t help them and either fail at to interact with us successfully or take a very long time to get simple tasks done. When we get it wrong, our sites and apps are all but ineffective.

It’s possible to get it right. But it means engaging with real people at every turn. Join us to hear from an expert panel of user research professionals who will discuss how and when to conduct what kinds of research. They’ll also talk about their methods for success: including getting buy-in from stubborn stakeholders, avoiding data bias, and putting participants at ease.

EXPERT PANEL
-Alice Rhee, Senior User Researcher at Mozilla Firefox
-Jill Reed, Senior User Researcher at XPO Logistics
-Phillip Higgins, Director of Marketing and Digital Strategy at Richland Library
-Moderator: Dean Schuster, Partner & UX Lead at truematter

TIMELINE
6pm: Networking and happy hour begin
6:45pm Panel starts
8:30pm: Wrap up

VENUE
SOCO Vista Suite 220
823 Gervais Street · Columbia, SC
*Take the stairs or elevator to the second floor. Enter through the first door in the hallway, to the right as you come up the stairs.