User Research
Building the right software for your business starts with understanding your user.
What is user research in software development?
User research is about understanding how your users behave, what they need, and what they like. It's all about learning directly from your users to help create your software product. We use methods like interviews, observation sessions, and surveys to get important insights that guide our software development.
Who are software users?
A "user" in software development is an individual who engages with a product, service, or interface. Many types of users can exist, including customers, vendors, employees, and business owners. Users are not always human, as they can also be other computer programs.
You may have many different types of users, but they don’t all use your software the same way. Creating “roles” is an excellent way to distinguish between users and control what those users do within your software product. User research can help reveal these roles and what they need from the software to complete their tasks and goals.
Do I need user research?
User research is about understanding how your users behave, what they need, and what they like. It's all about learning directly from your users to help create your software product. We use methods like interviews, observation sessions, and surveys to get important insights that guide our software development.
Benefits of user research
What do I get from user research?
User research should provide you with a wide range of insights that matter most to your business, industry, and solution-type ideas. While user research processes may vary from company to company, at Steelhead Software, we can provide any of the following components depending on your needs.
What are Steelhead Software’s user research methods?
Our methods include building and delivering a user research report so that you have all the information in one handy packet. We generally build the report during the discovery phase of our development cycle. In case you didn’t know, the discovery phase is when our business analysts and custom software developers listen to your specific problems and present the best solution options that provide the most value to your business.
Sometimes, we recommend completing a user research report to fine-tune the solution options we provide. Doing so allows our team and your stakeholders to dive deep into your ideal user profile and ensure potential solutions are right for your users and business goals.
Not all software solutions need a full user research report, and we can provide recommendations on whether we think conducting it is the best plan for your needs. We can identify which user research components listed above would work well for your project and capabilities.
When we begin the user research report, we will need you to work with us. For example, if you want us to conduct interviews, and your ideal users include your internal staff members, we expect you to introduce us and explain why we are interviewing them about their daily tasks. Likewise, if the primary user for the solution is your potential and existing customers, we would expect you to introduce us to those groups and take part in the explanation of why we’re conducting interviews or surveys.
After we’ve gathered all the preliminary user research during the discovery phase, we will present that information to you as an asset. We will also use this information as we work through designing your solution.
While the bulk of the user research report takes place during the discovery phase and sometimes into the design phase, we will continue to gather user feedback throughout the entire development process so we can continue to iterate and optimize your software.
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