General context

Doing user research is incredibly valuable. At MUI, each team has a slightly different approach and workflow whenever this happens. This brief guide is aimed towards facilitating the process of doing user research for whoever wants to.

Research plan

As a general rule of thumb, I’d say that any research should have at least these three main components sorted out before any interview begins:

• Audience: who do we want to talk to, and what are possible ways to segment the audience?
• Research question: What is the overarching question we want to answer at the end?
• Interview questions: What questions do we want to ask the user that can get us closer to the research question answer?

Finding the audience

Through GitHub

One obvious resource we can use to find potential users to talk to is GitHub. Regardless if it’s on the Core or X repos, we could try to get ahold of folks opening issues and pulling requests. We should be direct about this straight on GitHub, asking them if they’re willing to talk and where to contact them. That’s because many people have their GitHub profile private (with no exposed email or social networks) or even dummy accounts.

Through Brevo

That’s the app we use for collecting and sending emails. This is the best route we currently have as every Store customer & interested Survey respondent's email is registered there, and there is even some automatic segmentation happening already depending on what they’ve explicitly bought, which is super helpful! We could use other data (such as date recency, company, etc.) to refine the cohort further.

To access the MUI account, use the shared credentials:

• Brevo (emails)

  • Why: limit to 1 account

  • https://www.brevo.com/

  • login: [email protected]

  • password: ^!pmZPeamq5ZQ#

  • You might need to confirm your IP. Open https://groups.google.com/a/mui.com/g/shared-accounts/ to see the email sent.

    

Structuring the research

Writing the research question

It’s ideal to, as much as possible, limit the research to one or two (max) research questions. These are the leading and most essential questions the entire body of data should help answer. One thing that has been helpful for me to discover them is actually writing the interview questions first because, as you do, recurrent themes start to emerge. Eventually, you understand the underlying thing you’re trying to discover.

Food for thought

The below resources are incredible guides to help compose good questions and think about the difference between research & interview questions:

Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions