User research education program

A user research education program is an education program within an organization that strives to educate more individuals within the organization about customer research and testing to help build awareness, knowledge, and skills so human insight can scale across the organization.

What should user research education content cover?

Generally, any content you create will fall into one of three categories: awareness, knowledge, and skills.

  1. Awareness: Is the content intended to create awareness about a topic? For example, a document showing that conducting a user interview is a way to collect user feedback is intended to create awareness.
  2. Knowledge: Is the content intended to increase knowledge about a topic? An Intranet page describing the steps required to complete a set of user interviews would build the reader’s knowledge. They may not be able to execute the interviews themselves, but they’d come away knowing more about what activities are required and how long it might take.
  3. Skills: Is the content intended to build a skill? Skill-building is most successful when it involves hands-on activities. A how-to course with activities along the way can build the learner’s skills.

What’s the best approach to creating user research educational content?

  • Decide: Decide what you’re going to try to deliver. What topics are most important and who needs to hear about those topics?
  • Discover: Discover more about the needs of that target audience, as well as the mode of delivery that works for them. As with any good iterative process, discovery may make you revisit the decisions you made in the previous step.
  • Design: Design the content and delivery. Use learning objectives identified in the previous step and build your material around those objectives.
  • Deliver: Then deliver and iterate. You may deliver to a friendly audience first so that you can refine the content and delivery before expanding the audience

What topics should we cover, and how do you evaluate a user research educational program?

You can learn more about all the ins and outs of establishing a user research education program here.