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Like many things in life, there’s never seems to be enough time for user research. Sessions are too short, and there’s never enough time to analyze the results. What effect does this have on the quality of the research? A lot!  But surprisingly, just adding a little extra time can make all the difference.

Not enough time for sessions

User research sessions are frequently too short, leaving you to decide whether to rush through the session, trying to cover everything at a high level, or you only cover a portion of the questions. Either way, you waste an opportunity.

The time needed for research sessions is unpredictable. The focus of research always seems to expand with additional client requests and topics that you would like to cover. You never know exactly what you’ll encounter during a session. Some participants have more to discuss than others, some encounter more problems than others, and some are just more talkative. So session times can vary greatly between participants.

It’s always better to err on longer sessions. If you plan for more time than you need, no one minds ending early and getting back some extra, unexpected time. For participants, there’s not all that much difference between a one hour session and a 90 minute or two hour session. If they’re coming in to your lab, a focus group facility, or some other location, the biggest obstacle is taking the time out of their day to travel to and from the location. Once they’ve made that effort to get to you, an extra 30 to 60 minutes doesn’t make much of a difference. So plan longer research sessions to ensure you have enough time to cover everything.

Not enough time for analysis

It always amazes me that people will spend so much time and money planning, recruiting participants, and conducting the research and then provide too little time for analysis in a rush to get the findings. Analyzing user research can be extremely time consuming. Unfortunately, you rarely get enough time to analyze the results. Listening to recordings, typing up notes, organizing the notes into themes, analyzing the findings, and then creating deliverables takes time. When this process is rushed, quality is compromised.

Sometimes clients are excited by the idea of conducting research, but are too impatient to wait very long to hear the results. They are usually under the impression that by simply observing the sessions, high-level, overall findings will emerge. They aren’t concerned with taking time to analyze the details. This method often leads to shallow and misguided findings.

Of course there are reasonable limitations in terms of how much a project can wait for analysis and the presentation of the results, but often the time to analyze the results is set arbitrarily. The user researcher then either has to work extremely long hours to fit an enormous amount of work into a small time frame or has to find ways to cut corners.

User research is time consuming and expensive. After putting so much time and money into it, it makes no sense to short change the final step that provides the most value. Providing even a little extra time for analysis can make a big difference in the quality of the findings and in improving the job satisfaction of your user researchers.

The bottom line, provide more time for each user research session and more time for analysis. It won’t add that much more to the cost of your user research, and it will add a lot to the quality of the results.