The Right Hand - Issue #5

It’s time for another issue of The Right Hand! Thanks for your continued support.

In the book and series Game of Thrones (GoT), The Right Hand was an important advisor to the King (or Queen). The monarch commonly turned to them for counsel when they were making important decisions.

But where did the Hand come from?

In GoT, during the Conquest of the Seven Kingdoms by House Targaryen, King Aegon I Targaryen proclaimed his half-brother, Orys Baratheon, to be “my shield, my stalwart, my strong right hand.” And with that, Orys is regarded to have been the first Hand of the King.

Insights teams (UX research, market research, and consumer analytics) are The Right Hand of the businesses they serve.

Take your rightful place. Don’t deliver data. Don’t deliver insights. Deliver counsel.

Check out this week’s issue of The Right Hand.

Again, you are getting a first look at an essay I am publishing this week. And why shouldn’t you—a subscriber—not get the first look? I appreciate you.

I always value thoughts and feedback.

But that doesn’t absolve them from finding—and solving—a customer problem.

Finding the right problems can be elusive, even for companies that don’t have to operate lean. 

Often missing from the resources they have are a dedicated insights team, UX research function, or market researcher, and the responsibility of identifying, customer needs fall to the entire team.

Using this Investigative Research process will ensure that a startup is:

Investigative Research uses an abductive approach to gathering information. Abductive methods start with an observation or set of observations and then seek the most likely conclusion from the observations. 

Surveillance is looking for potential problems you can solve for a particular audience or person. This is where you seek opportunities to improve the lives of others.

Start gathering intelligence on the people and problems you have identified in Step 1. Take a look at reviews, social media, or any evidence that tells you how big the problems you have identified are.

You have identified opportunities to improve the lives of others, i.e. problems people have. Map these problems to the things that people are currently doing to solve them.

Select a specific problem you can solve for them. It is also important to identify who is trying to solve the problem.

Develop a product or solution and leverage that to solve their problem.

Have a bias for action in building your product using a series of “small bets and experimentation. Keep conducting research and incorporating that into your product.

~fin~

The research field is unnecessarily divided.

If I asked 100 researchers, “What is the difference between User Research and User Experience Research?“ I suspect I would get 100 different answers.

I might get answers like:

If you do a Google search, you won’t find a reigning opinion. If you scour the job boards, you will find no single prevailing definition.

There is an incontrovertible fact; if researchers can’t define a distinction, those outside of the research disciplines definitely won’t know the difference.

This begs the question, should people even think about User Research and User Experience Research as two different disciplines? What about when we add Product Research and Market Research into the mix? 

We are overcomplicating this. 

The distinction for me is clear; UX Research, User Research, and Product Research all focus on the "micro” level, i.e. how a person interacts with a product or service. Conversely, Market Research focused on how people (aggregate) interact with a product or service. 

Making a more granular distinction between User Research, Product Research, and UX Research doesn’t make sense. These terms should be used synonymously. 

There is precisely no benefit to differentiating them.

As researchers, united we stand, divided we fall.

~fin~