GV’s Guide to UX Research for Startups
How to learn more faster
Published in
3 min readOct 1, 2019
Since 2010, we’ve helped hundreds of GV startups (like Nest, Foundation Medicine, Flatiron Health, Slack, Gusto, Lime, and Uber) use UX research to answer critical business questions and to build more successful products. We’ve shared our lessons on Medium and in the GV Library. This table of contents will help you quickly find everything you need to learn more faster about your customers, your ideas, and your designs.
Why do UX Research?
What research does your team need?
- Questions to ask before starting user research
- How to prioritize customer research when everything is a priority
Plan Your Research Approach
- Start at the end: How to do research that has real impact
- Field guide to UX research for startups
- The shopping shortcut: How to design for your customer’s mindset
- 8 shortcuts for better, faster design research
Different Types of Research
1. UX Interviews
- “User research, quick and dirty” workshop: An intro to scrappy UX research (video, slides, and templates)
What equipment do you need?
- How to build a simple UX lab anywhere
- Lessons from a truck stop: how to conduct field research without a hitch
Recruiting participants
- How to find great participants for your user study
- Finding “hard to find” customers for research
- The GV research sprint: Start recruiting participants (day 1)
- The GV research sprint: Schedule participants and draft interview guide (day 2)
- No more “no shows” — how to make sure your research participants actually show up
- Beware the consumer advisory board — instead, always be recruiting
Is it a good idea to test my product with friends and family?
Drafting interview guides
- The GV research sprint: Schedule participants and draft interview guide (day 2)
- The GV research sprint: Finalize schedule and complete interview guide (day 3)
- Free prototypes
Interview techniques: Getting the most out of conversations with customers
- How to test prototypes with customers: The five-act interview
- Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips
- How to build better rapport for better research interviews
- How to hack your body language for better interviews
- The GV research sprint: Interview participants and summarize findings (day 4)
Observing interviews
- UX Watch Parties: How to help your team get the most out of research interviews
- The GV Research Sprint: Interview participants and summarize findings (day 4)
2. Surveys
- Improve your startup’s surveys and get even better data
- Micro-surveys: a faster way to learn about your users
3. Online Research
- Seven tips for lean market research
- Rapid user research: How to survey 400 users and interview 10 in three days
- Tips for testing your designs with UserTesting.com
How to Measure Success
- Change aversion: why users hate what you launched (and what to do about it)
- How to choose the right UX metrics for your product
- How to beta test your top-secret product
- Net promoter score considered harmful (and what UX professionals can do about it) (This excellent article is by Jared Spool, not GV. I’ve included it here because every founder, PM, and UX researcher and should read it.)
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Please leave a comment or tweet @MMargolis with suggestions for other topics you’d like to see here.
