You Don't Need a Research Team to Do Research

Most designers think user research requires a dedicated researcher, a lab, and a budget they don't have. So they skip it entirely and design based on assumptions.

That's backwards. You don't need fancy tools to figure out if your design actually works. You need five people and 30 minutes of their time.

Guerrilla testing is exactly what it sounds like - quick, scrappy, and effective. You grab a prototype, find five users (coworkers who aren't on your team work fine for early tests), and watch them try to complete a task. "Can you find the checkout button?" "Where would you go to change your password?" You're not running a formal study. You're watching whether people get stuck.

Five users will surface about 85% of your usability problems. Not because that's a magic number but because after five people, you stop seeing new issues. They all stumble on the same confusing navigation. They all miss that critical button. The patterns become obvious fast.

The other method that costs nothing is analytics interpretation. You already have data on where people click, how long they stay, where they abandon. You just need to look at it with intent. If 60% of people drop off at the same step, that's not random. That's a red flag telling you exactly where to start fixing things.

Research helps you find out you're wrong before you ship, when it's still cheap to fix. That's the whole point.