Introduction To UX Research ( User Research)
Welcome to the Article on the ‘Introduction to UX Research’ 👋. As I am so excited to walk with you through this article, let me begin this by giving you a small Introduction to UX Research (User Research).
Let us get a headstart with a quote😎
Performing user research is the best way to ensure that you are creating designs that are truly relevant to your users and that your designs are easy and pleasurable to use. So, user research is essential for placing your users or customers front and center in your design process.
Now you got a headstart, without taking any more time, let us start to go through the content of this article.
🔴 WHAT IS MEANT BY USER RESEARCH?…🔴
Let me start by saying that without taking to and understanding our users, we won’t know what to build them.
This means we do user research to focus on deeply understanding our user’s needs, goals, pain points, and motivations through an array of methodologies and placing people at the center of your design process and your products. This allows us to connect with users on an empathetic level and positively impact the success of a design/product/service.
UX research encompasses a variety of investigative methods used to add context and insight to the design process. In other words, UX practitioners have borrowed many techniques from academics, scientists, market researchers, and others.
UX Research or User Experience Research takes many different forms. These methods are divided into qualitative and quantitative. In fact, most impactful research studies often combine both types of methods.
The goal of User Research
User research depends on your work process as well as your reason for doing user research in the first place.
So the goal of design research is to inform the design process from the perspective of the end-user. This is done by understanding and building empathy for users to make better decisions, build better product experiences, and create solutions that people want.
Here are three excellent reasons for doing user research:
01) To create designs that are truly relevant to your users:- Do user research to ensure that you create products that are truly relevant to your target group. If you don’t have a clear understanding of your users and their mental models, you have no way of knowing whether your design will be relevant. A design that is not relevant to its target audience will never be a success
02) To create designs that are easy and pleasurable to use:- Do user research to ensure that your products deliver a great user experience. Because, if your user experience is not optimal, chances are that people will move on to another product
03) To understand the return on investment (ROI) of your user experience (UX) design:- Return on investment (ROI) is a financial metric used to analyze the efficiency of an investment. If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you can do a much stronger user research to show the ROI of your design efforts by showing.
- An improvement in performance and credibility
- Increased exposure and sales — growth in customer base
- A reduced burden on resources — more efficient work processes
When to do User Research
You cannot specifically say you have to do the User Research at this stage. Because you can do User Research at whatever stage you are in right now. There’s something useful to learn in every single stage, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
In fact, as with everything in our life, if we can find a problem at the earliest then from the beginning onwards, we will be on track. Same as that in User Research also earlier in the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product.
Is User Research and User Testing the same thing?
This is one of the questions that I struggled with, so I thought, why not let you all know that.‘User Research and User Testing’ are two terms which are quite different from each other.
User Research focuses on understanding user behaviours, needs, and motivations through interviews, surveys, usability evaluations and other forms of feedback methodologies.
While User Testing is a type of user research in which participants are asked to perform tasks, typically within a specific interface.
🔴 TYPES OF USER RESEARCH?… 🔴
Research is the most widely used tool to increase and brush up the stock of knowledge, which will ensure a final product delivers on users’ needs. As I have mentioned above there are two different forms of User Research, such as Qualitative and Quantitative.
01) Quantitative Research
Quantitative user research methods seek to measure user behaviour in a way that can be quantified and used for statistical analysis. It typically involves collecting and analyzing data from a large number of people to unambiguously answer questions like “how much?”, “how many?”, and “how often?”
Examples:- Surveys, Formal Experiments etc…
02) Qualitative Research
Qualitative Research is often more exploratory and seeks to get an in-depth understanding of the experiences and everyday lives of individual users or user groups. It directly involves assessing behaviours and beliefs to produce data on user preferences, motivations, and pain points. Due to its often subjective nature, qualitative methods ultimately rely on researcher analysis and interpretation to uncover patterns and answer the question: “Why?”
Examples:- Interviews, Field Studies etc…
🔴 USER RESEARCH METHODS… 🔴
The research process consists of single studies we conduct to learn something new. Every study is a set of steps, whether a usability test, benchmark study, or user interview.
Let’s understand this with an example. For instance, just imagine you got to design an app. The first step is to clarify what knowledge you are looking for. So at different stages of product development, you need different insights. Then with those insights, you build the prototype and test the product prototype to see whether you’re moving in the right direction. Finally, you can ask for feedback when everything is ready to see if any improvements need to make.
To do this, we split our user research into four different methods as Discovery, Explore, Test and Listen.
01) Discovery:- Determine what is relevant for users.
The discovery phase is a way to deal with the uncertainty that is inevitable at the onset of any project, which means this stage is used when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need.
Discovery helps to clarify the goal and the direction of further movements. If your assumptions make you do the wrong thing or a right thing but in the wrong way, this stage is your chance to figure things out.
This could be done using follows
- Contextual inquiries — Interview suitable users in their own environment to see how they perform the task/s in question.
- Diary studies — Have users record their daily interactions with a design or log their performance of activities.
02) Explore:- Examine how to address all users’ needs.
During this phase of exploration, you dig deeper into the topic to solve applied problems of design that appear in front of you in the working process by understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.
Then, You compare your features against competitors and detect their user experience shortcomings that you need to rectify. This can be done by splitting the audience into personas and building user flows to define risky areas for losing customers along the way.
Whenever you need to validate your design assumption, you use one of the exploring methods. Therefore, this research phase overlaps with your active phase in the design process.
This could be done using follows
- Card sorting — Write words and phrases on cards; then let participants organize them in the most meaningful way and label categories to ensure that your design is structured in a logical way.
- Customer Journey Map — Create user journeys to expose potential pitfalls and crucial moments.
03) Test:- Evaluate your designs.
This research phase would ensure that your design is easy to use and works well for people who use them.
This is done by choosing a moderated usability testing, where the person interacts with the interface while continuously verbalizing their thoughts as they move through the tasks.
This can be done using follows
- Usability testing — Ensure your design is easy to use.
- Accessibility evaluations — Test your design to ensure it’s accessible to everyone.
04) Listen:- Put issues in perspective, find any new problems and notice trends.
Your final and your most reliable test team is your actual users. So after your product is released, you should listen carefully to the feedback and monitor user problems, successes, and frustrations.
This observation may trigger a new circle of design and development changes to improve the user experience even more.
This can be done using follows
- Surveys/Questionnaires — Use these to track how users’ feel about your product.
- Analytics — Collect analytics/metrics to chart (e.g.) website traffic and build reports.
Now you have come to the end of the article. Since this article is about Introduction to User Research, I didn’t go in-depth into user research. I’ll end this article hoping I have covered all the necessary information you need to know about Introduction to User Research.
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Refer Following links for the Additional knowledge👇🧠
01) In-depth content about User Research Method:- UX Research Cheat Sheet
02) In-depth content about Qualitative and Quantitative User Research:- Qualitative vs. Quantitative UX Research — What’s the Difference?
03) Intro to User Research:- What is UX Research?
