Although the UX scene in Southeast Asia is admittedly less mature than in the West, there are plenty of local and cultural nuances in Southeast Asia that can throw a researcher off-guard if he or she does not know the local culture. What with Southeast Asia rapidly growing to be a region of tech start-ups and e-commerce, any UX researcher who works in Southeast Asia should take note of these best practices.

To start, Malaysia has a low score of 26 on the Individualism dimension of Hofstede’s model of national culture, compared to the United States at 91.

When AirBnB went from failure to $10B valuation, Joe Gebbia attributed the success to user research.

“When we started talking to our customers and seeing how they used our service, it was the defining moment of success that turned the company around,” said Gebbia, in a chat with First Round Capital in 2013. “If you ever want to understand your product, go stay in the home of your customer.”

To recap the popular story of AirBnB in 2009, AirBnB’s revenue was flatlined at $200 per week, and the team sat down with their investor from Y Combinator, Paul Graham, to go through search results of their New York listings.

I can vouch that this topic comes under heavy debate since a minimum of last six years because I had read this article in early 2012. More commonly than ever before, in the ‘consider’ phase of purchase journey, people looks for relevant, authentic, credible content on the Internet. For your potential customer, getting informed via user generated content about your products/brand is highly valuable. Content generated by you on the Digital Ads and Website has started to fall towards the perception of ‘overselling’.

At UXArmy we have a rule for user research — do not proceed with a user research until the goals of that research have been fully established. Clear goals linked to business objectives are fundamental to derive the purpose of user research. The purpose is then further broken down into scenarios and associated questions that users would be asked during the research.