When it comes to user experience (UX) research, many approaches can positively or negatively impact a product’s success.
Achieving a positive user experience requires analyzing user goals, tasks, and activities. It also includes assessing business requirements and technical constraints.
UX research is an integral part of a great user experience. With UX research, businesses can gain actionable insights into end-users needs and expectations to build better products.
Significantly, the data from UX research helps business leaders and designers test their assumptions before committing to a feature or redesign.
This article will discuss what UX research is, its common methods, and advantages.
What is UX research?
UX research is the process of understanding users and their needs. Businesses must capture customer insights to create a better user experience.
UX research can be done through the following methods:
- Usability testing. Business conduct usability tests at any point in the product development cycle. This is ideal for identifying problems with interfaces and features.
- Interviews. It is a method to gain information about the users’ expectations and motivations face-to-face or remotely.
- Surveys. Another popular method for understanding users’ expectations and preferences is through open-ended questions or multiple-choice questions.
- Card sorting. It is often used for UX researchers to organize large amounts of information into categories that make sense to people who use the site or app regularly.
Simply put, it’s about understanding their pain points, needs, and motivations. Zippia’s latest report shows that 70% of online businesses fail due to bad UX, which highlights just how important UX research is.
Companies use this process to better understand their users and how they interact with their products or services.
Why is UX research important?
The ultimate goal of UX research is to create a product or service that meets people’s needs and wants better than anything else — even if it doesn’t exist yet.
It is a great way to empathize with users to find out what they want and, more importantly, what they don’t want.
Businesses use UX research as a necessary part of any product development process for creating better products and services.
Developers or product managers rely heavily on UX research before they start building anything. Considering what people think about the product category or even whether they would use a certain feature in a product.
Most UX researchers try to understand how people interact with technology or a completely new product. Typically, they develop personas based on research data to inform product design decisions.
Common methods of UX research
UX research is an important part of the UX research process. It’s an essential step in understanding your users’ needs, wants, and perspectives. This can be done with different methods.
Here are the common methods of UX research:
Quantitative vs qualitative
- Quantitative UX research
Quantitative research uses numbers and statistics to analyze user behavior or preferences. This can be done by asking questions or performing surveys on a large group of people.
It’s typically used to measure customer satisfaction, identify customer needs, evaluate a potential problem in a product or service, or support decision-making.
The results of qualitative UX research are analyzed to provide insights into patterns and trends that can be applied to improve designs.
- Qualitative UX research
Qualitative research involves collecting information through observation, interviews, and focus groups. The results will help identify usability issues that need to be addressed during the design phase.
This type of data is in the form of words and sentences researchers analyze to understand underlying motivations and attitudes.
Attitudinal vs. behavioral
- Attitudinal UX research
Attitudinal data refers to people’s thoughts about a product or service (e.g., satisfaction). Attitudinal UX research gathers information about users’ preconceived attitudes or feelings toward an experience.
- Behavioral UX research
Behavioral data measures what people do with it (e.g., usage). It provides more data into how customers actually use products or services over time.
This determines whether users follow instructions and whether they succeed at completing tasks successfully.
Context of use
Context of use can be defined as the environment in which users interact with the product.
It’s a combination of situational factors that influence how people perceive and respond to a product or service. This method involves observing and interacting with users in their natural environment.
It’s crucial to observe users in this context because it’s not possible to fully understand how they use products if businesses don’t know what their environment is like.
Advantages of UX research
Creating something that people want is difficult, especially when building new products from scratch.
Without UX research, it can be difficult to know if a product is going in the right direction or if it will be successful when launched.
The following are some of the advantages of UX research:
Ensures product-market fit
Product-market fit is the concept that a company has found a market for its product or service and that there is an audience willing to buy it.
It’s important to find this fit prior to launching any new product or service since once it’s out there, brands can’t change it as easily as they would like.
The most important role of UX research is to help determine whether there’s a real need for a product or service and whether customers are willing to pay for it.
Usability and accessibility
Developers ensure that the product is usable and accessible to everyone. This is especially important if the product will be used by users with different abilities or who speak different languages.
UX research allows companies to test products before launching them so that they can identify any possible barriers for people with disabilities, such as color blindness or low vision.
Checks personas for accuracy
Another important advantage of UX research is that it allows businesses to check whether their personas are accurate.
Businesses need to include certain factors when creating customer personas. With UX research in place, it can validate or invalidate the existing personas, revealing new insights into who customers are.
Features and product development
UX research allows companies to prioritize features based on actual user needs rather than assumptions about what people want.
By prioritizing features based on real customer feedback, companies will develop products that better meet their customers’ needs while saving time and money.
Moreover, UX research helps plan the product development process, as well as manage all stages of it effectively.
It helps determine what users need and wants, which helps in creating products that meet those needs and desires.
Integrate your product development process with UX research
UX research help companies identify what users want and make sure the product development process is aligned with those needs.
UX research is a great way to make decisions in improving customer experience.
By integrating UX research into the product development process, it can help developers build a better product and avoid common pitfalls in the design process.
Better user experience from a product that comes from research significantly helps businesses increase revenue, lower support costs, and improve user satisfaction.
