Agile User Research: Why is It Worthwhile?

Everyday challenges of working on digital products

Among product owners, we observe high awareness of benefits that stem from research. However, user research is often overlooked in the development roadmaps of specific digital products, where daily work hardly ever happens in the ideal conditions. Design teams often have to face:

• Tight schedules and busy roadmaps that force quick pace of feature delivery
• Budget restrictions that reduce the scope of possible research
• Limited human resources that often push user research into the background due to the lack of dedicated and employed in-house UX researchers.

These circumstances make it difficult to conduct research regularly, despite its clear benefits. Many teams treat user research as a one-time activity at the start of a project, which limits their ability to respond to changing needs and continuously improve the product. That's why traditional and time-consuming research methods don’t always suit dynamic teams. To address this, more research should be conducted throughout the development process, ensuring findings are shared and integrated for ongoing improvement.

How can you run research effectively while keeping it aligned with the day-to-day work on the product? You need methods that are faster, more flexible and well-integrated into the project’s processes, while also emphasizing good research practices to ensure research is timely and relevant.

Our answer lies in the agile approach to research, developed over the years of supporting design teams.

Future Mind’s approach to agile research

Our agile approach to user research is based on the principles that research has to be:

1. Fast – time is the key resource in most projects, that’s why we minimize the time for preparation, execution, and analysis of research.
   
   a. Thanks to using our own research panel for recruitment, we’re able to present conclusions from user tests within a week of the project’s start.
   
   b. We focus on smaller clinical trials (from N=5 to N=8) for qualitative research, ensuring sufficient reliability of conclusions while significantly cutting down on time.
   
   c. Complementary to smaller trials, we advocate for an iterative approach, which, in case we identify a high number of user problems, allows us to address the established recommendations and verify their accuracy. More on the iterative approach can be found in the RITE edition (Rapid Iterative Test Evaluation), published here.
   
   
2. Aligned with the design team’s work – in the agile approach, research can’t be a separate process planned outside the team’s ongoing work.
   
   a. To maximize the benefits of this approach, aligning the research with the rhythm of the design team’s sprints is worthwhile. It doesn’t mean, though, that user research has to happen every sprint or last for the duration of one. Instead, it’s about cyclical monitoring of the need for research and collecting hypotheses for future research for each sprint, thanks to which, after gathering enough data, it’s possible to start the actual research extremely quickly.
   
   b. Huge value also comes from engaging the design team by sharing research sessions through streaming. Thanks to that, each team member gains knowledge and new perspective on the end user, for whom all the daily work is meant.
   
   
3. Cost effective
   
   a. We rely on our own research panel, which, besides saving time, also reduces the costs associated with recruiting participants.
   
   b. We also avoid creating complex reports in favor of quick sharing of insights, in a way that fits the daily workflow of a specific design team. For example, the conclusions of the usability tests can be shared via comments on Figma designs, or written down in a table on Confluence or in an Excel spreadsheet.
   
   c. Some topics are too “small” to warrant dedicated research. But collecting just a few, even unrelated, topics, in one research, leads to significant cost reduction; no matter if the research session lasts 20 minutes or 1 hour, the preparation and recruitment costs are very similar.
   
   
4. Cyclical and cumulative
   
   a. Collecting knowledge on the user is like making a snowman – in both cases, the snowball effect is key. Each successive research paints a clearer picture of the user of our product, which is why conducting it regularly and adding to the existing knowledge is so valuable. A good practice is to create a dedicated repository for research conclusions and to manage it adequately.

Summary

The agile approach to user research is the answer to the challenges of modern work on digital products, highlighting the importance of research in agile for modern product development. Thanks to faster, more flexible, and cheaper methods, research becomes easily accessible even in the dynamic environment of a design team'’s work. Including research as a constant element of idea validation and solution design not only helps avoid design mistakes but also ensures that the products you build fit user needs as best as they can.

If you want your products to be more intuitive and engaging for users, contact us to discuss how we can work together to implement agile research into the daily processes of working on your product. Research in agile should be integrated into your workflows in the same way as other core development activities, ensuring continuous learning and improvement.