This was the start of a project to create an entirely new content type at Reforge, called Units. It was the first round of user validation and testing we'd done. 

Ahead of creating this document, we had a ton of questions about what Units were going to be, so there’s a lot of big questions we were grappling with at the beginning.

This Figjam structure proved easier to engage with senior leadership on vs. another Notion doc. They appreciated the structured, yet informal approach to organizing a user research plan.

I took inspiration from UIPD’s decision-first framework for this. I love this format for user research because it forces you to go top-down instead of bottoms-up. I hadn't done that before and it was an “Aha!” moment for me. This is the only way I'll lay out conversational research from now on.

I think it's a good example of how you can be scrappy and test things before you have something in product. A lot of product builders believe they have to code and build the product and show a real thing or even a wireframe. We didn't have any of that.

One successful aspect of this process was in finding how to navigate Units - whether we wanted to allow people to see content labels so they could jump around the different parts of the Unit or to force a linear structure. We went with the former.

We were less concerned with taxonomy and what we were calling Units or “stacks,” or whatever we were going to call these - we were more focused on ensuring the content strategy was right.

The challenge here was to decouple that in our research process.

We didn’t end up formalizing all of these questions and because of the number of things we wanted to cover on a user research call, we made a judgment call as to what to ask. These sticky notes represented a lot of notes happening during these calls so we could analyze afterward.

Wendy Lei

Looking ahead to User Validation and Testing for Reforge course Units, we created this Figjam to inform our approach to testing and what questions we wanted to ask users. This was early and pre-wireframe and very useful to our process.

This Figjam structure proved easier to engage with senior leadership on vs. another Notion doc

I took inspiration from UIPD’s decision-first framework for this. I love this format for user research because it forces you to go top-down instead of bottoms-up.

One successful aspect of this process was in finding how to navigate Units

We were less concerned with taxonomy and what we were calling Units or “stacks,” or whatever we were going to call these

We didn’t end up formalizing all of these questions and because of the number of things we wanted to cover on a user research call, we made a judgment call as to what to ask

User Research Prep for Unit Validation at Reforge

User Research Figjam Board

Sign up to see more