🥽 User Research

User research gives you an answer for whom is your product. Analyzing potential users & customers will help to:

understand users' needs, pains, motivations and decision-making process;
outline product roadmap, key features, UI design and UX scenarios for interacting with your product;
define the right marketing message (positioning) and choose marketing channels to spread this message;
make your marketing & communication strategy.

I hope that I have convinced you that user research is very important. After learning these materials you should be able to make user research, create basic Persona and validate it on real people:

A marketing persona, or buyer persona, is a way to segment target market by common characteristics. It is used to guide media campaigns to target the right audience with the appropriate messaging. Buyer personas usually comes from market research. ... If marketing persona is focused on the WHO, a UX persona is more about the HOW. A UX persona, or design persona, can include all the information in buyer persona, but with additional emphasis on the task-oriented user behavior. What a UX persona wants to uncover is all the steps a target user will take to go from point A to point B.

Design-oriented video on performing basic user research from the UX perspective. More good videos & guides on UX personas and research methods: Creating Personas for User Experience Research, When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
Empathy Mapping is one more technique, which widely used in UX for user research. This Practical Guide to Empathy Maps and video will give you good overviews of this approach.

You need to reach your potential users and validate your Persona & hypothesis. You can get real users insight through surveys, interviews, online & offline meetings, chats, Skype calls, checking existing analytics (Google Analytics, social media data), analyzing competitors' customers, ethical googling your users' emails & names and researching them on social media:

9-min video on creating a Persona, when you already have something to analyze: website, followers for your product on Twitter\Facebook, first users or paying customers.
Simple blueprint for conducting a thorough buyer's journey study. It's a bit old article, but it has a nice plan for making user research interviews (study) with current or potential users.
Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing will be in use when you actually start talking to the potential user (😤 you must do this).

👆 User research is an initial part of the customer discovery process. You should not only research your potential users but also test if what you want to build is needed on the market (it’s called Product Market Fit). If you are not familiar with the Lean Startup approach, I advise you to check these resources. It's more startup-oriented, but still relevant for newbie product makers:

Doing Customer Discovery video + Validation video by Steve Blank.
16-min video from Stanford online course on Customer Development and Lean Startups.
What is Customer Discovery? video from Coursera course. You can watch it without registration.

📌 Useful tools:

Google search (here you will find how to make clever googling with advanced search).
Twitter Advanced search and comprehensive guide how to use it.
LinkedIn search and brief article from the LinkedIn team on how to use their new search (it's very easy!).
Pipl helps you to find information about email's owners.
The Buyer Persona Word Doc Generator from HubSpot can help you to make the first hypothesis for your persona.
TypeForm is an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that's great for gathering online surveys. You also can use Google Forms for making online surveys.

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