How To Ask Business-Centric User Research Questions - Part Two
By Kerstin Huang, Senior Researcher at TikTok
& Claudia Natasia, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Riley AI
Think about the last time you shipped a feature and wondered why users aren’t coming back to use it as frequently as you expected. Perhaps you have also been part of a larger discussion on preventing customer churn? User retention remains one of the hardest, yet arguably most important, problems to solve. Companies with fantastic retention often benefit from strong market positioning through growth-accelerating mechanisms like network effects and flywheels.
We’re back to share a list of tried-and-true research questions to help you explore the factors that improve retention.
Onboarding
A poor onboarding experience and initial impression of the product can deter users from returning.
What helped you get started with using our product?
What was your experience like when you first used our product?
Did you face any challenges when you first started using our product?
Which features were the easiest to understand or use?
Which features were most confusing?
Were there any functionalities that you expected to find but could not locate?
What additional information or support would have made your onboarding experience even better?
Are you currently helping others in your company learn how to use the product?
If yes, how are you doing this?
What are others finding most challenging to learn?
Thinking back to your experience, what would you change to improve the onboarding experience for other users?
Usage Patterns
Understanding how people currently use the product and integrate it into their daily lives can help uncover additional areas to improve the product's indispensability.
Tell me about how you’re currently using our product in your workflow.
How often do you use our product? Why?
What challenges, if any, does our product help solve for you?
Have you ever considered stopping using the product?
If so, why?
How would you feel if your company decided to stop using our product?
How would this impact your daily workflow?
What specific value does our product provide for you?
Would you recommend this product to others?
Who and why?
Competitive Alternatives
Having close alternatives makes it challenging for users to see how using your product adds value.
Do you currently use other products as alternatives to ours?
If yes, what are they?
What’s your experience like using these products?
Why do you choose to use this other product instead of ours?
Are there features in these other products that you wish our product had?
What keeps you coming back to this product?
Churn Exploration
Understanding the reasons behind why a customer has churned can help prevent future customers from churning.
What’s the main reason you are canceling your account?
Were there any specific functionalities or features that were missing?
Why are these features important to you?
How did you find our pricing?
Would you consider our pricing to be reasonable and fair against what our product delivered?
What could we have done differently to keep you as a customer?
Are you switching to a different solution?
If yes, why?
Kerstin is a Sr. Researcher at TikTok, focusing on User Growth and Campaigns for TikTok Shop. Prior to that, Kerstin grew her career by being the first researcher at a series A Sales Enablement startup and helped evangelize data and research as the company scaled to series F. Kerstin met Claudia in her previous role and was able to quickly bond over their passion for collaborating cross-functionally to integrate revenue metrics, product data analytics, and research to develop data-backed strategies to drive businesses forward.
Kerstin is studying for her MBA at Berkeley and has a Bachelors of Science in Informatics from the University of Washington.
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Claudia is the CEO & Co-Founder of Riley AI. Prior to founding Riley AI, Claudia led product, strategy, and data science teams across the Enterprise and Financial Technology space. Her product strategies led to a $5B total valuation, a successful international acquisition, and scaled organizations to multi-million dollars in revenue. Claudia is passionate about making data-driven strategies collaborative and accessible to every single organization.
Claudia completed her MBA and Bachelor degrees at the University of California, Berkeley.
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