User research uncovers problems people don't know they have. Surveys ask about assumed pain points like small buttons, but observing elderly WhatsApp users revealed they type with a pen, a workaround no survey would catch.
Chapters
So this is a question that we get asked quite a lot when we're working with corporate clients. Why do we need user research? What value is user research going to bring us? And in short, user research is going to allow you to come up with problems that your users didn't even know they had themselves. And to demonstrate this, I usually tend to go towards this example. Say that you are a product designer at WhatsApp, for example, and you are looking into redesigning the WhatsApp experience for elderly people. And if you're gonna be doing traditional market research, what you might do is you might set up a survey and you might have a ton of assumptions about what it is that these users are experiencing in terms of pains today. And these might include that they find the size of the buttons too small. Maybe they don't like the location of the toggle menu or the icons aren't clear for them. And you might put that in a survey and, and see what type of results you get out of that and say that you would do user research. You might go into the daily lives of these elderly people, and you might discover that they are typing their messages by using a small pen to actually type the messages to their friends and family. Now, if you would ask in a survey if these people had a problem with the size of the buttons, they would have probably said no, because they are solving that problem themselves. If you go into the daily lives, you would have seen that they are solving that problem, and that, for you, is an opportunity as a designer to create a better experience. So that's, in short, why user research is valuable.
