The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
What is Continuous UX Research?
Dear Reader,
Amazon releases new production code every 11.6 seconds.
That's nearly 7,500 deployments every single day. Why?
Today's digital products are never "done." They require constant iteration...shifting and changing like a complex, living organism.
Amazon doesn't deliver code once a year via CD like AOL. They deliver continuously in tiny iterations, and design must evolve to keep up.
A designer working at a continuous delivery company like Amazon might find themselves drowning in the task of delivering solutions for this lightning-fast production.
How are we supposed to make time for research if we're releasing it every 11.6 seconds? I'm glad you asked ;)
Without an understanding of customer problems, solutions will miss the mark. So how do we find time for anything but delivering visuals? How do we ensure that our product stays connected to the customer?
Continuous UX Research is how the top teams are doing it.
Q: What is Continuous UX Research?
Continuous UX Research is weekly exploratory UX research conducted by product people without project timelines, briefs, or set outcomes. It's done through weekly rituals rather than big projects.
This is modern research for modern product teams. It's not taught in schools because it's only just emerging into the mainstream thanks to books like Continuous Discovery Habits.
The emergence of Continuous UX Research doesn't mean you stop doing traditional UX research. These two types of research serve very different purposes.
Traditional UX Research is project-based and usually starts with a question, topic, or brief. It goes through the process of planning > recruitment > data collection > synthesis > insight presenting > application.
Research specialists carry out traditional UX Research, and they work outside of the team applying their research. Product managers might conduct this research to discover requirements for a project, or UX Researchers might do this in preparation for a future OKR.
Continuous UX Research is product-based and starts with a general desire to improve the product by connecting with the users. Rather than seeking out specific answers or information, it seeks inspiration for the continuous delivery work that is already taking place.
Anyone on the product team can conduct continuous UX Research. While the whole team participates, ownership generally follows people with research skills.
Since the application of continuous research is so near-term, UX/UI and product designers make great facilitators of continuous research, especially if they have research skills like interviewing and synthesis (something our new course can help you with).
How to Do Continuous UX Research
How do you do your research continuously? You have to automate and simplify if you want to do impactful research every week. Here's what might change as research goes from traditional to continuous:
- Project planning → One-time setup
- Interview scripts → Discussion guides
- Project-specific recruitment → Automated recruitment
- Custom-designed surveys → Always-on, contextual surveys
- Synthesis workshops → Team debriefs after research activities
- Presentation of insights → Searchable research database
- Research reports → Not needed when everyone researches
Turning 3-month research projects into a few hours a week requires a lot of work and a massive mindset shift. It won't happen overnight, but luckily, we have a FREE event to help you out!
Join the Event
Next week, we're running a FREE webinar next Wednesday, January 26th @ 6 PM London Time, 12 PM New York Time
We'll be sharing some of those tools, processes, and methods of Continuous UX Research.
| Get Your FREE Ticket |
Upcoming Live Courses
Continuous UX Research →
Learn how to run exploratory research weekly and discover product opportunities with the whole product team.
February 7-28, 2022, Live & Online
Click here to stay updated via email
Designing Product Experiments →
Learn how to design rapid product experiments to test ideas and start measuring customer behavior.
March 14-April 4, 2022, Live & Online
Click here to stay updated via email
Until next week, think about how you can shift your research activities from a quarterly project mindset towards a weekly product mindset!
Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute
P.S. We just finished our new course brochure for Continuous UX Research. Download it here.
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Ready Beats Perfect (+ four habits from Hatch Conference) By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Last week I had the pleasure of hosting the Dome Stage at Hatch, a design-leadership conference bringing product and UX folks together to share what’s working (and what isn’t). Q&A with Iris Latour, co-founder of THEFT Studio. Photos from Hatch Conference Photographers Rebecca ruetten, Indigo Lewisohn, Not because I’m fearless, but because I’d done two simple things: I prepped my intros for each speaker,...
10 Design Diagrams To Study Instead of Staring Into the Void by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, It's that time of the year. Another boring Q3 earnings call, and all you want is to go back to the beach. You look at yourself in Zoom, and all you see is a bottomless void. Hey. Stop that. Instead, check out some of the best Jeffing diagrams on the internet. At least you will look like you are kind of working... 1. Diverging and converging in action by Nicholas Frota Designers talk a lot about diverging...
Level-up your critiques in 3 questions By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, You know the critique that starts with “quick feedback” and ends 45 minutes later with five conflicting opinions and no next step? Or the one where a senior voice speaks first and the room quietly aligns, even when the data points elsewhere. Here’s a simple pattern, adapted from Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), that pulls critiques out of taste debates and into clearer decisions. What VTS is (in 60 seconds) VTS is a...