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.

Exactly as the so called “normal start” of a bright career in the IT industry, after completing my Bachelors of engineering I started out as a Software developer in my home city. Soon my skills brought me an elevation to Senior software developer at the same company. This company was providing software services to it’s clients. As a PHP developer, I worked on the most widely used website making software — no prizes for guessing, “WordPress”. This was my entry point into the deep understanding about the delivery of complete real web development projects. Before this time, I had acquired the basic skills that most beginners need: mastery of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, alongside familiarity with CakePHP, Yii, CodeIgniter, and Laravel.