4 easy tips to run a successful user research field trip
By: Anna Herasymenko
Tags: Researchops, UX Research, Product Design, User Research, UX

It’s easy to take for granted habits and attitudes surrounding food and eating, especially when designing for cultures that are similar to our own. My gut feeling can tell me a lot about what an East-European user will feel when opening the app. But as the business focus of the brands I was supporting is currently mainly on the Asian market, I’ve faced a challenge to see the interface I’m designing from our users’ perspective.

One of the countries that made us ask ourselves “Why?” multiple times when analyzing user behavioral patterns was Pakistan. So we decided to take a deep dive and run on-ground user research there.

There were a lot of insights that we brought back from it. But now I would like to focus on my biggest learnings of how to organize a trip like that and get the most out of it.

How to learn more than others about your users?

Lesson #1. Preliminary research helps to refine the testing goals

The more specific and defined goals you have, the more valuable insights you’ll get. For example, instead of “Learn how users are ordering food” better use more narrowed down goals, like “Learn how and why registered users in Pakistan are canceling orders.”

To set specific goals it’s important to do preliminary research and gather all high-level findings. I recommend to get in touch with users and run a remote user testing before the actual trip. To make the recruiting process easier start arranging user research sessions in advance and offer valuable incentives to participants. You can find a practical step-by-step guide about organizing user research at the Steve Krug book “Rocket surgery made easy”.

Talking about remote user research sessions at Delivery Hero, we are using Lookback integration into our apps for this purpose. With a proper setup, you can observe and record both user’s screen interactions and his facial expression from the frontal camera. It helps to correlate users’ behavior with their reactions.

Lookback setup. Me starring.

Here is an example. After doing initial remote research it seemed that some users just don’t know how to fill out a delivery address form, because their houses sometimes don’t have an address in a requested format. Users told us that to get their pizza they have to guide the delivery person by describing landmarks and giving directions.

“My house is opposite to the Noble Grammar School, the second entrance from the right, next to the green wall”.

After doing this preliminary work we had a general view on a problem space and build a bit of empathy with our users. We were prepared for in-depth research with clearly stated goals.

Lesson #2. Properly selected research format is half of your success

After setting goals, you are ready to define a research format. Basically, the research methodologies can be categorized into quantitative and qualitative methods. It also depends on the nature of your research — if you want to learn about behavioral or attitudinal patterns of your users. Try to see where are your research goals and questions falling on this scale.

In this article by Christian Rohrer, you can find a great overview of when to use which user research method.

Here are some examples of research methods we at Delivery Hero are using depending on the research goal.

Behavioral quantitative. When we want to get answers on the questions “how many or how much” based on users’ behavior we usually use Analytics tools to dig into the big pool of numbers and detect quantitative patterns.

For example, How many orders did we get last month? Behavioral qualitative. To learn more about “why” users are behaving in a certain way we use on-site or remote user testing, field studies or guerrilla testing.

For example, Why people are ordering food online? Attitudinal quantitative. When we want to zoom in and learn more about specific user habits we use user interviews, surveys or ask questions during the user testing.

For example, How often does specific user order food only for himself vs placing the group order? Attitudinal qualitative. And lastly, when we want to learn about a specific user attitude and understand what the user thinks about the reasons for his behavior we are also using user interviews, surveys and ask questions during the user testing.

For example, Why the user prefers us to the competitors?

One of the methods we’ve used during our Pakistan research trip was participation in a user’s daily life activities while they were using our app. We have been delivering food together with riders. Without making our hands dirty it was impossible to understand the feelings and needs of the person delivering food under the burning sun on the busy roads of Karachi city.