Second Brain

Guerrilla User Research in the Cafeteria

The Story

At Meta, Boris’s team building Facebook Groups had no user researcher. Instead of waiting for one to be hired, Boris started going to the cafeteria at lunch, showing new features to cafeteria workers, and watching them try to use the product without prompting.

“Hey, can you figure out how to open a chat?”

Sometimes they’d find it, sometimes they wouldn’t. He didn’t give too much away. He just observed where people struggled and what they got right. This is what professional researchers call an “observational user research study,” but Boris was doing it with zero budget and zero formal training.

He taught the rest of the team how to do it. Pretty soon, multiple engineers were going to the cafeteria at lunch to run informal tests on cafeteria workers as representative users.

Lesson for Creators

You don’t need a research budget. You need proximity to real people who aren’t already familiar with your product. Show your work to someone who’s never seen it before and watch what happens. Don’t explain. Don’t prompt. Just observe where they struggle. The cafeteria is closer than you think.

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