User research

And we experienced that with evolving design system work, especially.

And UX research, when everybody's using AI, how do we make sure that the AI also understand the intent from the users? But to answer your question, a designer who's been technically sound in terms of what's possible has always been my focus to find, and I've always encouraged people to do that.

But to some extent, just understanding the technology is just as important these days.

Yeah, you raise a good point about UX research, where this goes into it, because I feel like a lot of teams are also relying so much on AI to now do that for them.

I'm curious to know your thoughts on that.

It's terrifying and terrible for many reasons, but I'm a strong believer in humans talking to humans, and I don't like speculating, really.

So AI, to some extent, with the right setup, technically strong setup and good design documentation and great user research, can help us a ton with new features, which previously, you know, a designer had to open Figma, move a lot of pixels around, and that was fine.

Give that to a developer.

Sure.

So I'm Katie Rotella, and I am a principal UX researcher at Microsoft, and I work on Copilot, and particularly on the enterprise end of Copilot, and looking at how people interact with it, how different features are being shaped before they come out, and how we can make the AI experience better for people.

So our audience are enterprise technology leaders and practitioners for the most part, and, um, I'm not sure how much UX has made it into their world.

So can you just give us a, a quick definition of what it is?

This is Optimal Work Daily, Why I Interview Five of Your Ideal Customers to Create the Best Website Possible by Jenny Lee of hellobrio.com.

This one-woman studio conducts user research for her clients.

Ooh, major cringe on the third person stuff, huh? Sorry about that.

Work with me, and you'll soon realize that in creating your holistic website, I also take time in the beginning to interview five of your ideal customers to learn more about them and find out what their wants and needs are in their own words.

What? Why? Because user experience research is super valuable to entrepreneurs.

In this article, I'll dive into what user research is, its benefits, how it's different from market research, and what my process involves.

A quick note, I use user experience research, UX research, and user research interchangeably in this article, but note that these are quite different things when you go deeper into the topic.

What is user experience research, UX research? Entrepreneurs, you know what market research is.

But I think we also know we have to make use of it in a great way.

I like you can just smell the number of like UX research reports that get scant like that.

You know, you need to be able to make sure you're getting still the quality insights.

Humans are still important for discerning and understanding what is key in sort of these insights.