User research is the process of learning what real users need, think, and struggle with, rather than guessing — it typically splits into qualitative methods (interviews, usability observation) that reveal why people behave a certain way, and quantitative methods (surveys, analytics) that reveal how many people behave that way or how often. A well-run interview uses open-ended questions ('Tell me about the last time you tried to...') rather than leading questions ('Don't you think this feature is useful?'), because leading questions bias the answer toward what the designer wants to hear. Skipping research is one of the most common causes of wasted development time — teams spend weeks building a polished solution to a problem that it turns out users did not actually have.