Challenges of user research in B2B product design
By: Flávio Bezerra
Tags: User Research, Product Design, UX, B2B, User Experience

For the last years, I have been working with B2B companies and startups across the globe. As a designer, I did code, interviews, illustration, and film to build products for both consumers and industries. In this article, I would like to share a bit of my experience doing this, and to talk about some of the challenges I faced, and ultimately how I solved them. The points I will discuss here focus on the product environment of the B2B world, so if you work in this field, I hope you can relate!

The one challenge which keeps coming back over and over again is how to do user research. If you ask any Product (or UX/UI) Designer what is a “must have” in order to create a good product, the answer will hopefully be something like “we need to understand the user better.”. Because B2B products are generally made to work in closed environments, it can be a bit more challenging to get access to your users compared to B2C products. So in the next few paragraphs, I will talk about the importance of doing it and also the strategies I used to solve it.

Why is it so important to reach your users?

In most of the projects I have been involved in, my team got hired by stakeholders in upper management to improve their performance and productivity. As a consequence of that, there is not much detail surrounding the description of the problem — or even an admittance that there is a real problem in the first place. This situation doesn’t happen because upper management can’t see the problem, but rather because they are too far, and can only see data that suggests things like “production speed is decreasing while costs are increasing.”. Talking with people who will be using the product in their day-to-day work gives you a completely new perspective to your research. This is why it is important to reach your users. While managers and consultants are always trying to find the additional value they could bring to their company, and can even be sugar-coating problems, end users in the B2B world are the ones with the war stories. They are the ones that can better tell you the struggles and show you how your product can really impact their world. Therefore, it is our job as “the product team” to be the detectives that will dig deeper, and to get our hands dirty by touching the product itself and communicating with the real people it is built to serve.

To prove the value of talking to real users, I would like to share a real-life example that I experienced during my work at a software company. During the development of our product, we had an IoT device connecting the production line to the cloud, allowing us to collect data from Siemens machines that had been operating since the 1970s. This was done to predict malfunctioning and understand bottlenecks. To visualize that, we had a dashboard with KPIs to monitor the line, adding sense to all the data we collected. This dashboard had a predominantly dark color scheme, featuring, white letters for data imposed on a very dark background, coupled with different colors for different statuses. When shown in the office, customers liked the dark theme a lot and gave it much positive feedback. However, that was not the case for those who had actually to use the product. As soon as it was introduced in the factory production line, the first rounds of feedback pointed out that we did not hit the mark. This was despite all the internal reviews with factory management and consultants showing us that the new dashboard was pointing us in the right direction.

It turned out that the screens were not helping the workers to faster see and understand where and what they needed to fix to improve productivity. In fact, the color theme was doing the opposite. During our installation of the monitors and sensors, some of our internal team members overheard operators (the end users in the factory) saying that they “don’t understand it.”. Then and there, our team members asked them informally about the issues they had. They told us that since the monitor was about two meters away from where they would stand and work, it was too hard to read and make sense of the information on the screen because the dark tones had lower readability from that distance. In true product design fashion, we decided to switch to a theme with lighter colors, and increased contrast turned to be much better for the operators, as they could quickly read what was displayed.

Now, imagine if we never went to the factory line, and trusted only the consultants and directors that saw it? We would have failed in the project, meaning we would not have delivered any value to the end-user. They would not be using our solutions, and we would have lost the client in the long run and even worse — our reputation. Observing how people use the product and directly interacting with them allows us to ensure successful delivery. It also helps us to prevent failures that would be detrimental for the company.

Now, that the value of real user feedback is clear, I would like to talk about strategies to close the gap and get closer to users. What can I do to reach out to participants for user research? I use the following strategies: the guerilla strategy and the political strategy.

How to get users for research?

The Guerilla Approach

I wish I could give you a magic recipe that you could easily follow, and you suddenly have an excellent contact list of people willing to talk, provide feedback and anything else you would need. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. In my career, I have tried different approaches to find participants for user research — from asking people I know if they know someone who could help, to hiring a casting agency responsible for finding interviewees — They end up being similarly efficient depending on the situation. In my experience, the best way is to go to LinkedIn (or some other relevant platform for connecting people working in the needed field of work) and start writing people with a touch point with the area of your project. Do this until Linkedin tells you that you reached the limit of messages you can send. With this approach, it will likely happen that you will conduct some interviews, and it can sure also happen that there will be interviews from which you can not extract much, but I promise you that in most cases, you can at least learn a bit more about users, the area and how it impacts your work. It will help a lot to have a better understanding of the users, and hopefully, it will reveal yet undiscovered possibilities of co-creation partners and areas of opportunity that may increase the value of your product. What’s important is not to focus on high-level management, but instead, try to go for what you think your user should be. As an old professor of mine used to say, apply the GYBOC (“get your butt off the chair”) method and try to gather all information about your users in that phase.

The Political Approach

What do you do when your target group is not a heavy internet user — especially when this group of users is usually not as active online as in the B2C world. Many users merely have a bunch of tasks to accomplish mechanically, which means that they might not be as eager to explore the crazy world of the internet and all its innovative solutions. In these kinds of situations, collaboration with the clients or partner’s company is essential. To get in touch with these kinds of users, you need an internal partner — someone on the client’s side that really buys the idea, and is fighting to get all stones off the path. This person may be the hub to access all contact points, to get you up-to-speed and help you to talk to the user groups you need in order to refine your concepts and provide good ethnographic insights.

Lately, I worked on a project where we had a very motivated director involved. He was doing everything in his power to open the doors for us, so we could side-step politics and the bureaucracy from a big OEM group we faced, in order to better to reach out to our users. He succeeded. We ended up doing interviews and learning a lot about the opportunities and problems of the area, talking with users on behalf of this OEM. All the information we gathered with that method gave us a much better head start than interviews organized by our casting agency.

However, one trade-off in these situations where people are imposed to talk to you is trust. In at least 30% of the interviews, we had to overcome the suspicion that we were there to report their flaws to the “mothership” as if we were scouts for a bigger team investigating their mistakes, and pointing them out so they would get in trouble.

One example of “trust” is the following: In this project, we conducted our interviews at a dealership with the goal of understanding its employees’ main struggles with their OEM partners. The OEM organized the interview and selected the dealers that would be our interview partners. We had scheduled a talk with one of the owners of the dealership, a man that had taken charge of his family business for the last 30 years. Sounds great right? So it was! It was a great opportunity to learn more about that market, but we had to win the interviewee’s trust before he started giving us real insights. The second we arrived and sat down together with him, his first words were: “Oh, what can I do for you? Did mom send you to check if we are behaving well?”. Again, his first words, the starting point. What should have been a pleasant ice-breaker, felt more like a jab in a boxing ring. However, after we explained our purpose carefully, and proving that we were not specialists in the field, everything went smooth. During the interview, we had to reiterate over and over again that he would never be directly quoted to the OEM and that we were there to help him and his employees. The political approach, as you can see, can also be very challenging, so brace yourself and think of possible setbacks in advance in order to be ready with answers to any doubts the client can have regarding your motivations.

To recap, I hope that during your read you could learn a bit more about:

- Why it is so important to close the gap between your product and the end-user, even if you don’t build a consumer-facing product: keep your eyes and ears open because feedback also comes when you are not expecting it. Seize every opportunity to get closer to your users.

- Recruiting people for product research in B2B: get off your butt and ask people straight up in a guerilla tactic. It can’t hurt!

- The importance of co-operating with clients during product development: an internal partner invested in your project can open doors and speed up the process for your team.

I think in general if I have to summarize all the lessons described above in one single word, I would say: inclusion. Bring your clients and your users as close as possible to your product. I know, you are probably thinking: “tell me something new, dude!”, but believe me, it is so evident that many companies forget the importance of doing it. So, be the police and don’t be afraid to remind your product team about it.

Moreover, remember what Frank Chimero in his famous quote said:

“People ignore design that ignores people.”

Thanks for reading! I’m happy to hear about your tips and tricks on doing user research for B2B products.

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