Being a successful company means being on the same page as your customers. The earlier you can do this, the better you’ll notice you’re exceeding your goals and outperforming your competitors.
To make this possible, you need to conduct a user experience research. UX research allows you to discover the keys to unlocking the secrets of what your consumers want and need.
What Does UX Mean
UX or User Experience is the consistency of a user’s interaction and impressions with a system. It emphasizes a thorough understanding of users, including their value, need capacities, and limitations.
Aside from this, UX also considers the group in charge of the project’s business priorities and objectives. Its best practices aim to improve the consistency of a user’s engagement with your product and any associated services and their impressions of it.
What Is UX Research
Through conducting UX research, which is a dynamic set of techniques, businesses are more able to understand how their markets, consumers, and clients think and act. A researcher can gain insight, create evidence, identify issues, and come to new conclusions during UX study.
Through UX research, individuals can dive deep into an end-user’s motivations, goals, and preferences. This allows the creation and production of more complex product and service design. To fully grasp the user experience, researchers must establish a clear connection with the users to conduct a targeted study.
The Importance Of UX Research
Imagine spending a lot of money on a product just to find out your target market isn’t interested in it and doesn’t care about it at all. With UX research, these scenarios are easily avoided.
Aside from this, UX is important:
- To develop a product that is useful to consumers
You have no way of knowing if your design would be relevant unless you have a good understanding of your users and their mental models. A product that isn’t useful to its intended audience will never be successful. UX research gives you an idea of what your end users want, need, and the reason why they are looking for answers.
- To design a product that’s enjoyable and convenient to use
If your end-user is having a difficult time using your website, then that may be a problem. It’s either you have a poor website design or the entire website’s feature is just faulty. There are many tips to resolve web design problems, some you can even do on your own. Through conducting UX research, you may also know the initial problem your users will face when browsing your website.
If your user experience is poor, customers will most likely move on to another product and will no longer consider your product further. This scenario results in missing your chance to introduce them to your brand thoroughly. By utilizing UX research, you may improve the product you currently have in the market.
- It gives the idea of which feature should you prioritize
The overarching goal of user research is to identify opportunities for a product’s improvement. It usually starts with user interviews in the field. To produce insights, you must first learn about the users’ challenges, behaviors, or needs. After that, you’ll use your findings to come up with ideas and identify requirements. Finally, you’ll be able to build a roadmap by ranking and prioritizing those requirements.
Types Of UX Data
When conducting research, you must consider what type of data would collect data and look for. It’s a good idea to cover all of your bases and look for qualitative and quantitative results, just as for other research styles. This is to ensure you get a broad and deep understanding of your results.
To do this, it’s crucial to determine which type you should use because the two yield different results.
- Qualitative data are information gathered to describe rather than to quantify a subject.
- Quantitative data is used to gather information such as statistics, behavior, and numbers.
It would be best to consider what is happening and why it’s happening to get a complete picture of your user experience. If you only have quantitative data, you could be losing out on important insights that could change how you understand your user experience.
Meanwhile, if you only use qualitative data, you won’t be able to identify whether the result represents a more significant number of a particular group or if it only covers a small number of your user.
Types Of UX Research
Below are some research types that are commonly used by UX researchers.
- Behavioral
Behavioral research approaches attempt to quantify what consumers do on the website by presenting objective data on how they communicate with it. A participant’s behavior is often different from how they previously identified or communicated their feelings and attitudes.
In simple terms, behavioral research aims to learn how people behave, what they do, what tasks they perform, and what their instincts and experiences are in relation to your products and services.
- Attitudinal
Attitudinal research looks at what people believe, think, and feel about your product or service, as well as their emotional reaction to it. It’s an excellent way to get contextual information about a user’s experience. When redesigning a service or product, attitude research methods allow you to collect quotes and anecdotes that can be used as powerful proof.
Though they’re often confused, attitudinal and behavioral studies are not the same thing. The evaluation of users’ preconceived perceptions or thoughts about an experience is the purpose of attitudinal research. For example, before using a feature on your site, you might ask a user why they like or hate it. Behavioral research, on the other hand, is concerned with what the end-user does.
- Evaluative
Many UX researchers conduct evaluative research to assess something that already exists, such as a design or an application. Its goal is to identify flaws and difficulties in the current product or design and try to come up with alternatives.
Evaluative research also analyzes a particular issue to ensure usability and ground it in real people’s needs, wants, and desires.
- Generative
Generative research (also known as foundational, exploratory, or discovery research) aims to understand the bigger picture of a user’s experience. This form of research is done at the start of the product cycle when you don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve for your customers yet. The goal is to formulate a problem to solve while still being reasonably sure it’s a relevant problem—generative research aids in the identification of the problem for which you wish to develop a solution.
What UX Research Method You Should Use
It’s essential to know what you’re trying to accomplish before deciding on a research method to use. It will depend on where you are in the process and your research goals and priorities.
Some UX research methods are:
- Card sorting is a qualitative research method for efficient grouping, labeling, and describing information based on consumer or user input.
- Customer feedback is information provided by a self-selected sample of users, usually through open-ended or closed-ended review link, form, or email.
- Interviews are where a researcher talks with participants one-on-one to learn more about their perspectives on the product or application.
There are many other methods known for UX researchers out there. You can use a combination of all of the UX research types and data previously mentioned and come up with a method that will reaps the best result.