Articles on User Research
Building for Intersectionality in Tech: Intersectionality and Design
By Nicole Thayer & Tiffany Wong Note: This is the second post in this blog series on intersectionality in tech. Check out the first, third, and fourth posts. Welcome back to our ongoing series about how employees at Carbon Five are approaching conversations about intersectionality in tech. For more information on why we’re doing this and what …
Pivoting and User Research During a Pandemic
Creating a consistent feedback loop with users through quantitative and qualitative user research is the foundation of any lean, user-centric product team. Get your Free Guide to User Research Help your team understand your users’ behaviors, needs, and motivations. We often invest the most in user research when the product roadmap is new and unproven. …
Ground Control to Major Tom: How to Excel in Remote Research
At Carbon Five, we believe that to make a successful product – you need to talk to your users often. What, when and how, always looks different as each project has unique circumstances, assumptions, and goals.
Approaching Gender in Software Products
It is a delight to use software that seems to really ‘get’ you as a person! To achieve this, it requires that the software has been built by people who sought out to understand their users. When software isn’t built with its users in mind, it has the potential to leave its users feeling alienated. …
How to save 90% of your development budget
Carbon Five was recently brought in to build a new product with a planned budget of 6 months. As the first step, we conducted a few rounds of customer development to try and validate the concept. After a month of experiments by a product manager and designer, we ultimately recommended that the company not pursue …
The Carbon Five Guide to User Research: Wrapping It All Up
If you’ve been following along with the Carbon Five Guide to User Research, we’ve worked on developing and confirming a business hypothesis by talking to users and synthesizing the results, then generating a feature set and prototypes, higher resolution design, development, and usability testing. Hopefully you’ve already run a user test and learned something valuable …
The Carbon Five Guide to User Research: The What’s, How’s, and Why’s of Prototyping
If you’ve been following along with our guide to user research, great! By now you’ve defined your feature set and are ready to try out your ideas. You know your product will be validated by user research and match user needs. You know that you need a version of the product to test your solutions …
The Carbon Five Guide to User Research: Feature Definition
Welcome to the 4th of our User Research series where we share our insights into how to generate a list of features. In the coming paragraphs we’ll talk about how User Research can help with stakeholder management, generating a feature list, and prioritizing a feature list. This post focuses on feature definition, and making what …
The Carbon Five Guide to User Research: Interview Synthesis
So you’ve conducted a round of user interviews. Great! You’ve got video or audio you can revisit if you or your partner weren’t able to jot down everything in time. Wonderful! You recorded your thoughts during the session and kept track of conclusions and interesting observations immediately after. Amazing! We’ll be using a fictional story …
The Carbon Five Guide to User Research: Interviewing
You’ve written your script. You’ve screened your respondents and you’ve scheduled time with them (which you learned to do in our Guide to Recruiting Participants). You’ve got a big day of learning about your users ahead of you! We’re going to cover what to do during the interview and what to prepare ahead of time. …