The Why and How to Starting Community User Research
Tips and lessons that I have learned along the way
One of the best parts of working as a community builder is being able to develop products and resources that add value for the community members. In order to know how and what you should be building for your community, you have to start with knowing what members value, and that's accomplished through user research.
One of the traits of being a great community builder is being able to conduct user research. Unfortunately, it's not a skill many of us in the community world have been trained on.
Why it’s important
So why implement community user research in the first place? One of the main reasons is that in order to build things for your community, you should be building with your community. Not to say that the community needs to or should be making all of the decisions, but members should have a say in how this product will benefit them and give you and your team more insight that might have been missed.
Community builders get pulled in a lot of directions, and usually run more programs than they can actually manage effectively. User research plays a significant role in helping you determine what to keep doing, what to stop doing, and what to invest more in. Community builders that do this well are able to prevent burnout while also delivering more value to the community and their internal stakeholders.
Where to start
When you’re just starting off on your user research project, it is important to have a solid framework to map out how these interviews will take place.
An example of this is:
Create and communicate a hypothesis and what you will do based on the outcomes
Identify participants
Track interviews
Distribute findings
Take appropriate action
Also, when looking to begin community user research, it’s important to plan out the tooling that you’ll be utilizing. At SuperHi, we use Notion for all of our documentation purposes so for us it made sense to create new research projects within our current ecosystem.
What this looks like for us is having a main documentation page that lists what this research is for, the goals of the project, timelines, and so on. Think of it as the one-stop shop and main reference point for you and your team to check back in on during this process.
Interviewing different member types (super users, inactive members, etc.)
When conducting user research you should always be interviewing a diverse set of people in the community from all backgrounds and member types. A common mistake that I have seen happen is just wanting to interview the super users of the community, but by doing that you’re going to have biased feedback.
When conducting community interviews, look for all types of members including inactive and detractors. When I conduct interviews I aim to have an equal amount of members from each group. This will give you a wide range of different viewpoints and allow your team to make better adjustments that fit all members.
Be prepared to reach out to more members than you plan on interviewing due to scheduling conflicts, etc. For example, if I wanted to interview 10 members, I know that I would have to at least reach out to 15-20 just based on members’ availabilities. Even if you don’t have a lot of members in your community to start out with, it’s still a good exercise to reach out to more than you intend to interview.
Another good tip to keep in mind is to keep track of personas as you learn more about members. One thing that may be surprising is that there may be a drift in the direction of the community vs. the persona that originally joined. Being aware of that will also prevent you from over-valuing feedback that comes from the wrong persona. Doing this may also help you refine your strategy and messaging so that you keep the member quality and fit in a good place.
Prepare ahead of time
When I first conducted community interviews I was nervous. I have been a part of many interviews in my lifetime, but never had the opportunity to host one myself. When I asked for advice, a co-worker reminded me that these are just casual conversations and that you should treat them as such.
Remember that one of the main reasons why you’re hosting community research interviews is for both the community member’s benefit of having the product and resources that they need to succeed and also alignment for your team when building these resources.
Before I begin the community interviews, I meet with the team first to dial in on what questions we’ll be asking, and what’s the most important information that we need feedback on. A good example of this is to choose your questions based on the hypotheses and outcomes that you and your team set out to validate when starting this research project.
If you were looking to launch a new program such as community ambassadors, some questions you might want to include could be:
How likely would you be to recommend the community and why?
What are some of the best aspects of the community and how has it helped you?
Would you like to play a larger role in telling that story publicly? If so, what are some of the ways that you'd like to contribute?
What are other ways that you could see this community evolving to support related personal goals?
How to share feedback
Now that the interviews are over it’s time to share the feedback with your team. This can be one of the trickiest parts of community interviews because you want to capture as much context as possible so that your team members can feel like they were a part of the interview even if they weren’t there.
This is why it’s a good idea to distill the information from the interviews beforehand so that you can give your team a high-level overview of the most important insights.
An example could look like this:
85% of our members would recommend our community to their friends
65% of our members would like to play a bigger role in the community
More than 50% of our members who wanted to play a bigger role in the community mentioned that they wanted to help with moderation.
Having a main project page as mentioned in an earlier paragraph in the where to start section helps with this because you can capture all of the important information in one place. Whenever I conduct interviews I have a main interview database that houses all of the member interviews. If I or someone on my team had to reference anything, they could easily find the information just by clicking in the database.
Also, a good tip when sharing feedback is to discuss the steps of what happens next in the process such as updated project timelines and if the team might need more information from community members before moving forward.
Following up post-interview
After every interview set yourself a reminder to follow up with the community member after a certain amount of time. This way you can stay in touch and update them on any progress.
It helps drive home the point that you’re appreciative of the members’ time and want to make sure that they feel like they played a part in the project (because they did)!
I hope that these tips help with your community member interviews and just remember to have fun with this. More likely than not your members want to help out and this is a great opportunity to work together on improving the overall community experience.