User research is essential to content strategy. It provides a deep understanding of your audience, informs content decisions, enhances the content structure and on-page content, and drives engagement and conversion. This research both validates and negates assumptions as well as supports change management. Some organizations can be afraid of doing user research as it might bring up things that are too political or too big to change or too overwhelming. The more frequently you do user research, the more you can iterate without making full-scale revisions.

Task testing is a way to run a client’s site structure through some typical scenarios and get quantitative feedback on how easily users can navigate to relevant or appropriate content. It is normally used as a quantitative research method, although it can also be a qualitative method. In this article, I talk about the quantitative method.

User research allows us to improve our information structures (such as metadata models, data models, websites, intranets) in ways that are helpful to the people using the structure. When I work with clients who are new to user research, they need to know what the process of user research is like and what to expect as an outcome.