UX has become a buzzword recently, with user-centric design dominating the web design industry. But sadly, only a handful of experts understand what UX really is. In a nutshell, it refers to the design of digital products with the end user’s interest in mind. And who can tell about user interests better than the user? That’s what informs UX design and gives fuel for the UX efforts.
The best way to capture user insights, behaviors, and attitudes to your product is to conduct UX research. Here we examine various UX research tools that can help you create genuinely user-centric design solutions and enjoy enormous product success.
Contents
Why Should You Do Research?
The importance of UX research can hardly be overestimated. It’s the bridge between design teams and users to whom they cater in the form of new digital product offerings. Thus, by doing regular field research, UX strategists can better understand what problems their target users currently experience.
Besides, UX research gives valuable insights into the context of user interaction with the offered digital products. Contextual thinking gives a broader image of how users make choices for this or that digital solution, what challenges they experience, and how they resolve their pain points.
The value of UX research is in the availability of primary, first-hand data from users. It takes all guesswork out of the design process, giving you tried and tested data for design choices and decisions. So, using UX research methods helps you transform assumptions into objectives, which is critical for any project’s success.
Research Types
Let’s start with the basics. There are two broad categories of research – qualitative and quantitative. You need to decide which data is necessary for your UX design decisions. Qualitative data is in words and opinions people share at interviews and focus groups. Quantitative data is in numbers, which you can get from a survey or secondary analysis.
Another broad distinction is between behavioral and attitudinal research. The latter means that you examine people’s attitudes by asking them what they think about your product. The former examines how people interact with your MVP, what actions they do, and how successful their interactions are.
Research Tools
Once you’ve chosen between the research types discussed above, it’s time to pick a suitable research technique. They also differ by objective and collected data, so you need to think twice before going for any of them.
The initial acquaintance with your target users is best made via a field study and competitor analysis. Field studies give valuable data about who your users are, what products they currently use, and what they lack. Competitor analysis sheds light on the range of available products and gaps you can close with your innovative business idea.
Another popular UX research method is user testing. It may be used once you have an MVP or prototype and want to test your idea’s feasibility. You need to offer the product to target users and ask them for feedback. It may be either an interview or a quick survey in Google forms. Your key goal is to collect user reviews and analyze what they liked and didn’t like in your product.
You may also try A/B testing or tests with more variants of design. This is a handy tool for checking out which design option works better with your end-users. As a result of A/B testing, you choose a more successful design based on factual evidence, not guesswork.
Interviews with existing customers are also helpful for product improvement and updates. You need to understand what may go wrong in the process of using your app or platform. Users can share the flaws and problems to point at the functionality gaps, thus giving you insights for UX adjustments.
Finally, a workable method of applying UX research is to design user personas and stories based on the collected data. Let’s suppose you have a specific dataset from users. You can break it down by socio-demographics to develop unique user personas to show how your product helps different user categories. Besides, persona reviews and scenarios are a creative tool for UX designers, giving insights into the needed features and functions for a frictionless, positive user experience.
Source: from Designorate
The Research Process
As a UX specialist, you might be happy to know that there are several systematic approaches to UX research. For instance, you can use the research cycle developed by Erin Sanders at Frog. It has become trendy because of its effectiveness and reliability. The process features five steps.
#1 Setting Objectives
At this stage, you need to define the overall objectives for your product. You should identify product benefits (pain points your product will resolve), business benefits (how your firm will advance by creating this product), and user benefits (users’ gains from adopting this product).
#2 Testing of Assumptions
With a set of benefits you have formulated at stage 1, you’re now developing hypotheses. For instance, you need to test your assumptions like:
- How will users feel when using your product?
- What will they do with your product?
- What features will they find the most valuable?
These questions will form the basis for market research. Answering them will give you factual data for moving on with UX design decisions.
#3 Choice of UX Research Methods
Now you need to choose methods of collecting and analyzing data. Which technique is the most suitable? Will your UX research be qualitative or quantitative? Who is your target population? Are you targeting primary or secondary data?
#4 Actual Research
This stage involves conducting actual research. You go out to the market, observe people’s behavior, ask respondents, etc. But don’t forget to target your carefully selected population in the process of research. Otherwise, you may waste time collecting irrelevant data.
#5 Synthesis of Data
The final step in the UX research process is to make sense of the collected data. You should apply the collected material to see what users like and don’t like, what they want from new products, and what features they lack. This dataset will be a powerful starting point for your product design.