Yes, COVID-19 Will Affect Your User Research
A once-a-century pandemic is going to affect your user research. I appreciate this post which approaches the dilemma around current user research into three central questions: recruiting participants, validity of data, and will the research hold up? Iâm not sure those are the real questions depending on what youâre researching at this time.
First, letâs think about why weâre researching in the first place. Ask yourself and your team whether you canât postpone user research until later. Sometimes, testing is time sensitive. Maybe youâre developing a tool that has major life-saving implications or might reduce significant friction in dealing with an existing product or service. Talking to users during an (otherwise) stressful period of time might help them cope with the fallout from COVID-19, simply by being heard and recognizing there are people doing the work to help.
If youâre running customer feedback sessions where people are paid to provide feedback about a particular service, running sessions right now might make a lot easier to recruit than at a different time. Â (Of course, unless those sessions are remote, youâd have a hard time doing them in-person.)
On the other hand, if youâre just asking people for unpaid labor to discuss a tool that wonât have a direct impact, maybe itâs worth waiting until things have returned closer to normal.
Why the COVID crisis is different
Even if someone isnât directly affected with the virus in their life, few parts of our societyâââgloballyâââare left unscathed by this emergency. Attempting a semblance of normalcy is admirable, but given the stressors across society, itâs hard to ignore the changes COVID-19 has made to our everyday lives.
If you wrote a research protocol or interview script a month ago, the world youâd be presenting in has been changed differently. Everything from scheduling complexities to navigating the issues that might be affecting your interviewees ability to provide you with the feedback youâre looking for.
Whether your research is valid or not isnât the right question. You might get valuable feedback from people. Treating COVID like just âanotherâ problem underestimates its significance. Would you try to run user testing with people who just lived through a hurricane or tornado? The logistics of doing so much be difficult, even if you could.
Use discretion
Look, Iâm not at your company. Itâs hard for me to read this and not want to be glib about people using a catastrophic event to canvass distressed people. All UX research isnât the same. For every thoughtful protocol thatâs well-researched and aimed to dig deeper into an audience to better a holistic experience, are people looking to make a buck and less interested in the impact societal stressors have on people.
Itâs true that the problems people have with your website, app or product might be more amplified in a pandemic. Those stress cases might mine research that a protocol canât ferret out easily. The problem is, now isnât the time for a lot of people to sit still and give you the feedback you want.
COVID-19 has given me a chance to discover the joys of unsubscribing from dozens of email newsletters, but if thereâs anything weâve learned about this period, things are bigger than our products. Maybe thereâs a good reason to press on with your UX research, but if you can wait.
You should wait.













