One pitfall I’ve seen user researchers fall into is they are obsessed with recruiting a fresh sample of users for their ongoing rounds of user interviews. This

One pitfall I’ve seen user researchers fall into is they are obsessed with recruiting a fresh sample of users for their ongoing rounds of user interviews. This recruitment requirement skips much of the understanding of user needs, priorities, workflows, etc that came from previous rounds of exploration and testing. The real value comes when you gather a small but roughly representative sample of users and collaborate closely with them on the development of feature(s). For example, I recently built a ‘User Advisory Board’ to guide the development of internal tools at a large organization (using software I developed for that purpose). This subset of users was engaged throughout the development process - collaborating with designers and engineers throughout - resulting in a finished product that was closely aligned with user needs. I don’t have data to back this up, but I got the sense users were more satisfied with the end result because they felt they had a hand in ‘co-creating’ it (aka ‘the IKEA effect’). OP claims they did this early on, but my comment is pointing to a larger issue I’ve witnessed that may help those reading this to avoid the issue of users not adopting features they asked for…