We often talk about how UX designers should talk to users on a weekly basis or why user research is essential to building amazing products. In the process, we often forget about another aspect of research: non-user research.
People who are not users of your app are as valuable a source of insights as your users. You just talk to them for different reasons and get a different type of insight. Let’s dig deeper.
Let’s start by defining who users and non-users are.
Users are people who use or have used your product in the past. They know who you are, have tried to use your product, and have had some experiences with you, good or bad.
Non-users, on the other hand, have never used your product. They might not even know who you are. They should, however, be in your target group (current or future).
In theory, you could say that anyone who has never used your product is a non-user, but that creates an extremely large and ambiguous group of users that’s unactionable. If you were building a vegan app, then meat lovers wouldn’t be a relevant source of insights.
Ultimately, there are three groups of people:
Talk to users and non-users, and ignore the noise.
Most of your research will revolve around users, as they are the best source of insights in general. However, adding some non-user research can also be helpful:
With existing users, you can look for very specific insights. Unbelievable as it might sound, heavy users sometimes know the product better than we do.
This makes this group best suited for the following types of research:
Existing users can help you figure out what doesn’t fully click within the product. Is the navigation unclear? Are any features lacking the capabilities they need?
While many UX experts recommend usability studies with first-time users to get unbiased results, I have a different opinion. We often struggle at first to get used to a new product just to become experts after a few uses. If some of your longer-term users still struggle, then you may have a serious issue somewhere.
If you are trying to figure out where to go next, existing users are your main target audience. What are they lacking with the current solution? If they had a magic wand, what else would they add to the product?
Most importantly, what extra value would convince them to pay extra? This will help you monetize new features and use cases that provide real value to your customers.
User interactions are also a great way to get a sense of invisible product metrics like sentiment, trust, and satisfaction. It helps you gauge if you are heading in the right direction and what impact on satisfaction the most recent changes to user experience had.
Non-users won’t directly help you improve your product and its user experience, but they can still give you very valuable insights as to what to focus on next. A few reasons to talk to non-users include:
If they are in your target segment but are not using your product, how else do they solve related pain points? Do they do so by using a competitor’s solution? If yes, what is it? Or are they just using some old-school methods, such as pen and paper or Excel spreadsheets?
Talking to non-users is a great way to understand what you actually compete with and what its strengths and weaknesses are.
If they haven’t tried your product, why is that?
If that’s because they never heard of you, figure out the following to understand which channels you are missing:
If they did hear about you but never decided to try, figure out why that was. Odds are, your messaging didn’t fully hit the target, and you may want to revisit your customer acquisition strategy.
Whether they use your product or not, they are still your target audience. That means you should understand what their needs are and how they solve these. It can give you a healthy dose of insights into how they behave and how your product can fit within that behavior, also improving the experience for existing users.
At the end of the day, both user and non-user research can help you understand your target audience better and build better products.
My personal approach is to spend 70 percent of the time on user research and 30 percent on non-user research. This seems to be a healthy balance between focusing on what’s most important (current users) while also getting insights beyond that.
But that also depends on your existing priorities:
Talking to existing users and figuring out what works and doesn’t work for them is still one of the most important research activities you can do. But carving out some time for non-user research can be quite refreshing, bringing you a new perspective and insights that you wouldn’t otherwise get from biased existing users.
Ultimately, the phrase “user research” is quite misleading. The intent from the very beginning was to talk to both existing users and potential users. Yet, many designers take it at face value and focus their research activities purely on existing users.
Go beyond that. Talk to non-users and get the full picture. You’ll thank yourself later.
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