Understand Your Users

Introduction

To improve evidence uptake, it is essential to keep your users in mind when building your products and services, as well as when disseminating evidence. The outcomes of user research are vital for understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience; they provide valuable insights that guide resource development and communication decisions. This enables you to enhance user satisfaction and the overall uptake of your resources.

Contextualization, a sense of relatedness, and a degree of applicability are all elements that district leaders look for when assessing resources from evidence creators like you. This tool is designed to help you maximize these elements by walking you through the stages of user research, including research methods and objectives for each phase. The information in this tool is applicable to researching many different audience segments, including but not limited to district buyers, professional learning providers, and content developers.

At a glance

Understand the importance of user research in optimizing your products and/or services
Learn the different steps in user research
Learn different research methods in user research

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5 Stages

Understanding your users involves having a multifaceted approach to capture your users’ profiles, preferences, and experiences (in general and more specifically, with your materials). With this in mind, we highlight five stages of the user research process below.¹

01

Empathize

Understand the problems that district leaders face when consulting resources for adoption by working with them.

02

Define

Assemble the information gathered in Empathize to narrow in on the exact problem(s).

03

Ideate

Think about ways to solve the problems that district leaders experience when reviewing resources.

04

Prototype

Assemble the information gathered in Empathize to narrow in on the exact problem(s).

05

Test

Socialize the updated or new resources with district leaders, understand how they respond, and iterate as needed.

01 – Empathize

The “Empathize” phase is a qualitative exploratory phase that serves as a point of entry into your user profile. This is an important stage to understand details about your target audience that you had not anticipated. Interviews are an important tool in this process, which can be conducted in-person or virtually.

Curriculum, EdTech, and professional learning purchases in school districts are often conducted through committees.² However, it is still important to recruit at least 5 interviewees who are the primary decision-makers when purchasing products/services like yours (the individuals who determine whether or not a purchase is made)

.

Identify district leaders who you (or others in your network) know

Provide tokens of appreciation (monetary compensation or otherwise) or in-kind support to increase response rate

Interview Protocol Outline

Introduction

Thank the interviewee for their participation, explain the details of the project and how the information you collect will be used, and ask for their consent to record/transcribe the interview.

Grand Tour

Ask about the characteristics of the interviewee’s district as well as their roles that are relevant to your product/services. Be sure to include questions on their involvement in purchasing decisions.

Process and Pain Points

Ask about the interviewee’s purchasing process, including what prompts them to purchase, how they identify vendors to evaluate, how they decide on which vendor to select, and their key challenges throughout.

Signals of Quality

Ask what the interviewee looks for when they’re evaluating vendors and how they determine whether or not those signals of quality are present in the vendor they select (i.e. what resources do they use and why?).

Explore your Value

Ask the interviewee what their “silver bullet” would look like and explore how your product/service does or does not align with that. This is your opportunity to assess your value.

Closing

Ask if they have any questions or points to clarify, thank them again, remind them of what will be done with the information from this interview, and provide an opportunity to stay in touch.

02 – Define

Now that you have an understanding of your users’ preferences, what do you do with all this information you have collected? There are three avenues be that can be most beneficial: coding pain points, sketching proto personas, and mapping the decision-making journeys. Ideally you should try to do all three, but depending on your data of interest, it is possible to benefit from just one or two.

A

Pain Points

Identify and group key user pain points or challenges.

Grouping the pain points of your users will allow you to fine-tune your communication to ensure that district leaders understand how you can address their challenges. It can also help you cater your products/services to better meet those needs.

Read through each transcript and identify themes (called “codes”) of pain points. For example, you might find that one interviewee talks about being too busy to look for ample evidence while the other talks about not having enough human resources. In this case, you may want to categorize both of these statements as “time constraints.” You can do this by:

Using the “comments” functionality of your word processor
Creating a separate document where you track the themes that were present for them

Remember to use short and consistent codes across transcripts. By the end of this process, you will know what are the general pain points for your interviewees and which ones are most prominent among them.

B

Proto Persona

Sketch user data to find lightweight personas of your target audience (e.g. district buyers).

While personas are typically developed through robust quantitative methods, these lightweight proto personas can help you roughly gauge how to think about grouping your users based on their needs, processes, and motivations. This way, you can vary your outreach efforts or your products/services to target a single (or multiple) persona(s).

Populate these four quadrants with 3-4 short bullet points for each of your interviewees. Identify the bullet points (in one or more of the quadrants) that are most relevant for your product/services when thinking about your target audience (try to avoid relying too heavily on demographics). Use this as a starting point to identify your target audience persona, and test it by going back in the field for validation.

C

Decision Journeys

Map the decision-making process.

Decision-making journeys are a systematic way of understanding the purchasing timeline so that you can determine key points in time (or in district leaders’ purchasing process) where your specific efforts can be most helpful to your users. This will enable you to fine-tune your efforts and optimize their impact.

Review the interview transcript for each interviewee and identify key touchpoints where decision-makers are engaging with specific individuals or resources in their purchasing process (starting from when they are prompted to seek out a vendor and ending with their decision to purchase).
Prepare descriptions for each touchpoint and highlight any necessary substeps for each touchpoint.
Brainstorm any relevant factors that are helping ?(driver) or preventing (barrier) the user from accessing or using your products or services along their decision-making journey.
Now that you have a map of the journey, if time permits, go back to your interviewees for to collect any additional information needed to complete the map.

03 – Ideate

Once you have a better understanding of your users’ pain points, proto personas, and decision-making journeys, you’ll want to identify ways to then determine what you’ll need to change about your organization’s operations to either:

Better meet the needs of your users.
Better communicate the solutions you already have so that users can more easily find your resources.

Ideating (or the creative process of generating and developing new ideas through brainstorming and exploration) allows you to bring your team together and brainstorm ideas freely. The following 4-step “Yes, and” approach allows each member of your team to build on the ideas of another in a systematic way.

4-steps of “Yes, and”

Collect Ideas

This may include brainstorming sessions, virtual suggestion boxes, and interactive workshops to foster a creative environment, encouraging diverse perspectives and generating a pool of ideas that can be evaluated and implemented for organizational improvement.

Review Ideas

This process might include criteria such as feasibility, alignment with organizational goals, and potential impact, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation and selection of ideas that best contribute to the organization’s objectives.

“Yes, and…”

This systematic method fosters creativity by allowing team members to constructively contribute to and expand on each other’s ideas, promoting innovation and collective problem-solving.

Discuss Ideas

In this final step, team members can share their perspectives, discuss potential challenges, and collectively refine the ideas, ensuring a comprehensive exploration and development of innovative solutions.

Need more help to define your goals?

Refer to this tool to explore how to articulate your organizational goals

External Resource

Miro

Digital whiteboard platform tool for collaborative ideation.

External Resource

Figma

Collaborative design tool for building meaningful products

04 – Prototype

Now that you have a plan and general way forward, you need concrete and actionable steps to put it into practice. The prototype stage is to help you envision the ideal process that a district leader within your target audience would go through from being a non-user of your resources to a user.

Mapping this process out via a storyboard like the example below will allow you to think more deeply about how the new ideas you have generated in the previous step will be incorporated into this user journey.

Practice going through this process individually by using a sticky note for each phase, then share your storyboard with your teammates and have them do the same. This allows you to come up with more ideas that you can then work together to combine or select from.

05 – Test

By following steps 01-04, you have consulted your user, taken the time to meaningfully assess key components of your users’ experiences, developed your target personas, and identified the ideal path for your users to take as they engage with your resources to help them fill a gap they have (the value of your organization). The last step of this process is to validate the accuracy of your assessments in these previous steps by checking in with your users again and re-introducing the updated version of your products/services that now better cater to their needs and experiences.

Recommended Process

Recruit 5 or more users

These users can be the same ones you interviewed in step 1 but it is preferred that they are not. The same recruitment process and tips apply as in step 1 of this process.

Conduct a brief interview

Set up an interview with each user you recruited. Based on the scenario you anticipate will lead to users becoming aware of your organization (the first step of your prototype), ask each interviewee questions to help you understand if your scenario would work.

Conduct a usability test

Now that you understand users’ chances of actually becoming aware of your organization, test how they would engage with your resources. Without providing any guidance on where to go and what to click on, watch what they do and ask them to share out loud what they see and why they are clicking on anything they click on.

Document and Revise

Document your usability test results in detail for institutional knowledge and revise your prototype to be better aligned with your users’ actual interactions. Now you have a prototype that you have validated with your users and is therefore much more likely to be successful.

Tool Quiz

Once you have understood these steps, you can answer the questions in the following quiz to test your knowledge.

What can increase the likelihood of recruiting district leaders for your user tracking research?

a. Recruiting via mutual contacts

b. Compensating users

c. All of the above
Why is it important to explore the pain points of your users/potential users?

a. To show that I care

b. To be aware of my users

c. To adjust my products/services
How do you start a “Yes, and” ideation process?

a. Have each member share an idea

b. Collect all member ideas then share

c. Go around the room & build ideas
Why is it helpful to have multiple people on your team come up with individual prototypes before combining them?

a. To be fair to everyone on the team

b. To increase the number of ideas

c. To save time on brainstorming
What are some examples of ways you can test your prototype through a follow-up survey with a relatively easy lift?

a. Keep the survey short

b. Survey fewer than 5 users

c. Test the survey with colleagues

Tool Quiz – Answers

Once you have understood these steps, you can answer the questions in the following quiz to test your knowledge.

What can increase the likelihood of recruiting district leaders for your user tracking research?

a. Recruiting via mutual contacts

b. Compensating users

c. All of the above ✔
Why is it important to explore the pain points of your users/potential users?

a. To show that I care

b. To be aware of my users

c. To adjust my products/services ✔
How do you start a “Yes, and” ideation process?

a. Have each member share an idea

b. Collect all member ideas then share ✔

c. Go around the room & build ideas
Why is it helpful to have multiple people on your team come up with individual prototypes before combining them?

a. To be fair to everyone on the team

b. To increase the number of ideas ✔

c. To save time on brainstorming
What are some examples of ways you can test your prototype through a follow-up survey with a relatively easy lift?

a. Keep the survey short ✔

b. Survey fewer than 5 users

c. Test the survey with colleagues

Summary

Identifying the “who” and “how” of partnerships upfront is very important. Waiting for opportunities to find you will make you dependent on who is easily available and will not best serve your strategic plans for your organization. By defining your goals and collaboratively pursuing and maintaining partnerships, you can identify win-win opportunities that optimize your bandwidth.