How we do user research in agile teams

Getting user research into agile teams in a way that is timely, relevant and actionable is a challenge that teams the world over are tackling. Working effectively in agile has recently been the driver of some fairly significant changes to the way researchers work at the UK’s Government Digital Service.

We’ve been iterating how we do research in the same way we iterate our product design, and learned that the following techniques seem to integrate good research into agile teams more successfully:

– Dedicated researchers for each team
– Test designs at least every fortnight
– Everyone in the team should take part
– A varied toolkit
– See it through from analysis to action
– Sharing what we learn