The Four Quadrants of User Research
There are four quadrants of user research vital to understand for any organization, team, and individual. This knowledge, when used as a framework, enables organizations to evaluate their structure and processes, and thereby optimize product creation for the people that they serve.
Quadrant A
Gather what people think by direct feedback.
Quadrant B
Gather what people do by direct observation.
Quadrant C
Gather what people do by indirect observation.
Quadrant D
Gather what people think by indirect feedback.
From Individuals and Teams
Within these quadrants are user research methods, which also include those employed by marketing and sales teams. On an individual level, anyone can learn to facilitate these research methods. More than that, it is important that multiple people on a product team can initiate, facilitate, and analyze research.
Without evidence gathered from research, you are building a product blindly. As much of an expert as you may be, you are not the user. As long as you rely solely on experts, and not evidence, you have just increased the risk of your product and put your organization in needless financial jeopardy.
There is huge opportunity here to reduce risk, save costs, and create better products. All it takes is this fundamental knowledge, the application of this knowledge, and a curiosity that begins to ask questions.
Natural, high-level questions include:
“Who is collecting what types of evidence?”
“In what quantities?”
“How is this evidence being used, stored, shared? If at all?”
“How is my organization performing with user research?”
To answer this, do a fascinating exercise.
Draw the user research quadrants chart. For each silo of your organization, circle areas of the research quadrants that the silo is currently responsible for. Why is this helpful? Let’s look at an example.
Organizational Structure Based On User Research Quadrants
Organizations that dismiss the value of early product behavioral research tend to collect far too much attitude-based evidence. They fall into a trap of “we know best”.
Organizations that don’t have perspective brought by user experience teams tend to isolate designers from the people they are designing for. They fall into a trap of “design is just a pretty button”.
Organizations that ball-and-chain developers to billable hours, or other inhuman business models, tend to isolate developers from the people they are building for. They fall into a trap of “developers are just code-churning monkeys with burn-up charts”.
Organizations that do not show early prototypes, prototypes that do not have polish, or those that look like less-than-marketing material, tend to forego any behavioral-based research. They fall into a trap of “we fear our customers if we show them anything except a shiny box with a bow”.
Some organizations fall into all four of these traps. They look like this:
Business units (1), sales teams (2), marketing (3), and customer service (4) all primarily collect attitude-based evidence. They collect what people think: I love this, I hate that, I wish I could have a button here. Design (5)? Not on any quadrant. Development (6)? Not on any quadrant.
This exercise makes it painfully obvious the direction for strategic organizational improvement of talent.
Would you build an entire product solely based on what people think, as opposed to what they habitually do day after day? Would you invest millions of your organization’s dollars into a product without testing your early prototypes in front of people for critical behavioral research evidence?
Would you do this when you know that behavior is more valuable than attitude when creating products? Would you waste countless hours of your employees time on ineffective enterprise innovation labs or hackathons that just don’t work?
Applied Knowledge
The point of this knowledge is to identify where your organization is at currently with its user research practices. It helps you find the gaps in your organization. Maybe you realize you have no idea what marketing does. Go ask them. Explain the user research quadrants. Tell them to draw a circle for what they do. Complete the story of your own organization’s research methods.
Then take that story to your organization’s leadership. Or, at least, your boss.
Be straightforward with them. Tell them you heard of this user research and that you wanted to see how you can help the organization better connect with customers and build products that matter. Make it a discussion, not a presentation. Appease their curiosity, if they have it. If they’re intelligent, they’ll listen and act immediately. If they’re dumb, but not stupid, they’ll listen and begin to act as they learn. In the unfortunate case that they are stupid, you should probably leave the organization.
Understanding these four quadrants, their relationship to your organization, your product teams, your colleagues, and yourself, is fundamental knowledge for thriving products and the organizations that make them. This framework is here to be used by individuals seeking to conduct research and organizations seeking to improve organizational structure to facilitate the creation of better products for the people that they serve.
