Audience Research: Designing Products With Your Users
About this Course
This course is designed to help small publishers gain basic user research skills to understand audience needs and apply that knowledge to product development. By the end of the course, you should understand how to reliably plan, administer, analyze and apply the results of audience surveys, interviews and user tests.
We’ll discuss identifying product-market fit for your product, applying the “Jobs to Be Done” framework for product development, creating a user research database, conducting basic types of user research, applying user research to specific product development opportunities or challenges, analyzing user research and creating a research catalog for future product development, and creating an ongoing strategy for performing user research in your organization.
About the Instructor
Rebekah Monson (she/they) is co-founder and COO of Letterhead. She previously co-founded WhereBy.Us, and works at the intersection of tech, communities and media on global projects from her home in Miami. More on Rebekah.
Course Lessons
Understanding Audience Research
In this lesson, we’ll explore the role of audience research in product development.
Conducting Audience Research
In this lesson, we’ll discuss methods for conducting audience research.
Making Sense of Your Research
In this lesson, we’ll discuss ways to analyze audience research.
Applying Audience Research for Product Design
In this lesson, we’ll discuss how to use audience research in the product design process.
Resource: Understanding Your Users
This resource is a template for thinking through and documenting user research.
Resource: User Test Guides
This resource includes guides for usability testing, user interviews and surveys.
Lesson 1 - Understanding Audience Research
- 12 Things About Product-Market Fit
- Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
- How we used a Jobs To Be Done framework to iterate on our newsletters
- More on applying the Jobs to be Done framework for news products
- Conducting Ethical User Research
- Tips for Getting Started with Web Accessibility
Lesson 2 - Conducting Audience Research
- Erika Hall, Just Enough Research (book)
- When does statistical significance matter for user experience testing?
- How to Create Effective User Surveys
- How to Find the Core Features of Your Product Using a Kano Survey
- How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
- What is NPS? Your ultimate guide to Net Promoter Score
- How to Prepare, Conduct and Synthesize Moderated User Research
- Usability Testing 101
Lesson 3 - Making Sense of Your Research
- The Ultimate Guide to Calculating, Understanding, and Improving Customer Acquisition Cost in 2022
- ARPU: How to Calculate and Interpret Average Revenue Per User
- Defining Churn Rate
- News Outlets Should Build Customer Lifetime Value Into Subscription Strategy
- Loyalty is membership’s North Star. Here’s how news sites & advocacy groups measure it.
- Funnel occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists
Lesson 4 - Applying Research for Product Design
Templates and examples
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