Don’t waste good user research that your team can’t tackle right away
If you can’t user test as much as you used to, learning to preserve user insights becomes critical.
To understand what this means, remember the last user test you did. You probably encountered some insights that the team couldn’t act upon immediately.
Perhaps users provided great user suggestions for future iterations of the product. Or, more commonly, they ran into usability issues that weren’t that high priority.
What happened to the medium (or high) priority issues your team didn’t tackle immediately? Are they sitting in a folder, essentially forgotten? Or are they preserved adequately with all the context needed, ready to access whenever?
While it’s not like you can’t find these issues again with testing, preserving user findings properly can help you keep past findings in mind, but it can also help build a record of long-standing issues with your product.
For example, it may be time to revisit that issue if users are frustrated across two user testing sessions with a low-priority feature.
So, to make the most of each user test, you need to learn how to preserve your findings. Here’s how to do that.
Find which user insights you want to preserve
It may be tricky to consider what user insights you should preserve. After all, these should be bite-sized pieces of user research and critical insights that you want to be able to reference quickly.
Moreover, these should be user insights that can help inform future product iterations or address existing issues we’re currently running into.
Here are some tips to identify candidates for preservation:
- They give insight into an upcoming feature: The most common user research findings to preserve are opinions or suggestions for an upcoming feature. You’ll be building and testing it in the future, so any insights this person gives (i.e., what they imagine the product to be) will be helpful.
- They express an…