A blog by Becky Rowland, Senior User Researcher (Health Research Authority) and Lilly Lee, Lead User Researcher (PA Consulting).
What is user research?
Imagine you're building an app or launching a new online service. Do you dive straight in, relying on your own ideas of what people want? This happens, but it rarely ends well.
That’s where user research comes in.
User research is about listening to the people who will use your service. It helps us understand what they need, what frustrates them, and how they expect things to work. Instead of guessing, we learn directly from users, so we can design services that actually work for them.
We're using this approach as we build our new digital service, Plan and Manage Health and Care Research. This will replace and expand on existing Integrated Research Application System (IRAS) services used to approve health and care research in the UK.
If we don’t put user research at the centre of this work, we risk building something based on assumptions or outdated processes that no longer serve people well. By involving users early and often, we make sure we’re building a service that’s simple, inclusive and effective.
Our user research in practice
Based on feedback from current systems, we created a clickable prototype to test the new service for making changes to approved research. We invited researchers, sponsors and reviewers from across the UK to try it out.
Some sponsors told us they were confused by certain labels, like "contributors", and weren’t sure why they were seeing full team details. Based on that, we simplified the language and only showed the roles that were relevant.
Reviewers also shared that seeing a “category” column in the table would help them understand how much effort a change might take - a small change versus a major one. We added that in, so they could better prioritise their work.
These are small changes, but they make a big difference. And they came directly from listening to the people using the service.
What's next
We’re now moving into usability testing - checking how well our service works in practice. That includes testing with people who use assistive technology or have accessibility needs, to make sure our service works for everyone.
Get involved in user research
We’re always looking for people to volunteer to test our digital services.