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Failing to collect and apply user feedback is one of the biggest - and most overlooked - risks a company can face. Without input from real users, it's difficult, if not impossible, to create successful user experiences. This post covers the most common methods for gathering user feedback, the two most underused approaches, and how the Jobs to Be Done framework helps you actually put that research to work.
What Are the Biggest Risks Companies Overlook?
Most companies worry about the usual suspects: a competitor blindsiding them, legal or compliance headaches, or the endless struggle to find and keep good people. All valid concerns. But there's one major risk that consistently flies under the radar: not collecting and applying user feedback.
You can't design memorable, meaningful products by guessing. You need real input from real users.
What Are the Most Common Methods for Doing Customer Research?
Whenever a new design initiative kicks off or product improvements are on the table, it's tempting to skip the research and just dive in. Who has the time and money, right?
Everyone. That's who.
A better question: can you afford not to do research? The resounding answer is no.
As design leader Erika Hall puts it: "Research is necessary for a successful design project because it gives you a shared basis for decision-making, grounded in evidence rather than in sheer authority or tenacity. And this saves time and money."
Customer research comes in all shapes and sizes. It doesn't have to break the bank or eat thousands of hours. Here are the most common methods, along with their pros and cons.
Surveys
Surveys ask users a series of questions about their needs, wants, and experiences with a product or service. Some organizations use professional research firms; others manage the process themselves.
Primary pros:
- Good for gathering basic feedback about how users feel toward your brand or product, once you've already identified your primary user types
- An easy way to collect input from a lot of people without requiring extensive time and resources
Primary cons:
- Surveys collect a large quantity of responses about user preferences, but that data is rarely in-depth or relevant enough to be useful and actionable, especially for UX
- Questions and participants can be unintentionally skewed, leading to biased responses that steer you in the wrong direction
- There's a gap between what users say they want and do versus their true desires, needs, and actual actions
Focus Groups
Focus groups bring together a group of target customers to gather feedback before a product launch, or a group of current users to discuss their experience with an existing product.
Primary pros:
- Allow you to ask follow-up questions and gauge user emotion through facial expressions and voice
- Helpful for confirming ideas and validating existing concepts
Primary cons:
- Participants influence each other, leading to groupthink, a few people dominating the conversation, and other dynamics that skew results
- Not as effective for uncovering genuinely new ideas
Stories from the Front Lines
Customer-facing teams like Sales and Support interact with users every single day. They're goldmines of information. Sharing anecdotes and real-time trends with executives and UX teams brings a level of depth that written data simply can't match.
Primary pros:
- Real feedback grounds strategic planning and design in reality rather than pure assumption
- Anecdotes offer depth and context that written data and surveys miss
Primary cons:
- These filtered stories pass through a game of Telephone from person to person, and the interpretation shifts along the way
- The person who originally heard the story interprets it through the lens of their own experience and organisation, so they don't necessarily see additional opportunities or perspectives that exist outside their bubble
Analytics Software
Tools like website trackers, heatmaps, and other analytics software collect behind-the-scenes data to show user behaviour while people are actually using a product.
Primary pros:
- Tracks what users are actually doing, not what they say they would do
- An easy way to collect data from a large number of people without requiring extensive time and resources
Primary cons:
- The data tells you what users are doing, but not why, making it harder to interpret and act on
- Data is often incorrect or skewed due to technical issues
- If the software wasn't set up strategically with your goals and desired actions in mind, it may not track the right activities or provide much usable, actionable information
What Are the Best Customer Research Methods Most People Don't Use?
Any data is better than no data. If you're already using one of the tactics above, you've taken a huge step toward designing successful experiences.
But there are two often-overlooked customer research methods that offer major value for UX and product design.
What Is a Field Study?
During a field study, your team goes out "into the field" to immerse themselves in a typical day in the life of your user. It's the best way to observe how they actually use products in their natural environment, what external forces affect their decisions and actions, and what they actually do (as opposed to what they say they do).
UX veteran Jared Spool describes field studies as "the fastest path to great UX" and explains that you can reap the benefits in as little as two hours every six weeks.
What Is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is about testing your product with real users to see if it works as intended. It's most commonly done after a product is built, but the best results come from testing before, during, and after development.
How Do You Put User Feedback to Good Use with Jobs to Be Done?
If you've already invested in research tools and tactics to gather user feedback, kudos. You're a step ahead. But the next question is: how are you actually applying that feedback to improve your user experience?
We hear the same story over and over:
- "We had this research done, but..."
- "The research firm gave us a report, but to be honest, we never really did anything with it."
- "The marketing team has all the survey responses, but we never really get to see them."
Data is only the first step. What you do with that data is the key to success.
Whether your customer research isn't being put to good use or is trapped inside one department, it's essential to bridge the gap and integrate that information into a larger plan that spans silos. Some teams find they can integrate using a grassroots approach (bottom-up), while others find it takes an executive champion or third-party consultant (top-down) to surface the best insights and spread them across the company.
Even once you overcome the barriers to sharing research, there's often too much data to sift through, and people don't know what to do with it. That's where Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) comes into play.
What Is the Jobs to Be Done Framework?
Jobs to Be Done is a framework that helps you see the role your products play in your users' lives, why they use the product, and how it changes their life for the better.
Features and benefits describe the results a user experiences after purchasing your product. JTBD goes deeper: it illustrates the one "job" the user "hired" your product to do in the first place. That distinction provides much more value for both design and marketing.
Think of the Job to Be Done as:
- The main way your product makes your users' lives better
- The new capability they gain when they use your product instead of alternatives or their current way of doing things
- The progress they make every time they use your product, and beyond the moment of use
- The underlying desire that will continue to motivate them over time, even as new solutions come and go
Once the job is uncovered through your field studies, usability testing, and other customer research, you can use it to write a Job Story that summarises all of the insights you've gained into one big idea. That Job Story then serves as a North Star, guiding not just your UX team but aligning your entire organisation around the user's needs.
JTBD in Action: The Milkshake Story
In his classes at Harvard Business School, Professor Clay Christensen tells the story of a popular fast food chain that discovered the power of JTBD firsthand.
The restaurant wanted to boost milkshake sales. They tried everything: studying the problem, giving customers samples and asking for feedback, implementing changes based on customer suggestions. Nothing moved the needle. They couldn't figure out how to crack the code.
Christensen and his colleagues took a new approach. They completed a field study, observing customer behaviour at the restaurants, then used that data to uncover the milkshake's primary Job to Be Done.
What they found surprised them: over half of milkshakes were ordered to-go before 8 a.m. So they dug deeper and did one-on-one customer interviews. It turned out that many people had a long, boring commute and needed something they could hold with one hand, drink throughout their drive, and that would fill them up for hours.
What "product" could they "hire" to do that job?
- A banana? No, it only lasts a minute or two.
- A bagel? No, you need two hands to spread the cream cheese.
- A donut? No, it leaves crumbs everywhere, and then you're sitting in traffic with a mess around you.
- A milkshake? Yes. Filling, slurpable for hours, and only requires one hand.
With the Customer Job identified, the fast food chain suddenly had endless ideas for how to design a better product, market it more effectively, and serve it better.
What Job Do Users Hire Your Product to Do?
JTBD is one of the fastest and most effective methods for putting user research to good use. If your team has been struggling to identify ways to improve your product and align your organisation around the user experience, JTBD might be your ticket.
To learn more about Jobs to Be Done and how this framework could help your company unlock innovation, visit jtbd.info or contact Drawbackwards for guidance on how to try it with your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is collecting user feedback so important for product design? Without real user input, product decisions are based on assumptions rather than evidence. User feedback grounds your design and strategy in reality, reduces costly mistakes, and gives your entire team a shared basis for making decisions.
What is the difference between surveys and usability testing for collecting user feedback? Surveys capture what users say they think or feel, but often lack the depth to be actionable for UX. Usability testing shows how real users actually interact with your product, revealing problems and opportunities that surveys miss entirely.
What is Jobs to Be Done and how does it apply to UX design? Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for understanding the underlying reason a user "hired" your product, what job they needed it to do. It goes beyond features and benefits to uncover the deeper motivation driving product use, which makes it a powerful guide for design, marketing, and product decisions.
Why do companies collect research but fail to use it? Research often gets siloed inside one team or buried in a report nobody revisits. Without a framework like JTBD to organise insights and a clear process for sharing them across the organisation, even good research tends to gather dust.
What is a field study and why does Jared Spool call it the fastest path to great UX? A field study involves going out to observe users in their natural environment, seeing how they actually use products rather than relying on what they say they do. It surfaces real behaviour, external influences, and genuine needs that other research methods frequently miss, and the payoff can come from as little as two hours every six weeks.
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