The importance of scientific research cannot be overstated. User research is crucial to the success of any UX design, and this article will explain all the reasons why.

But first, we will explore what UX research is and how it can give you valuable tools. Then we will analyze why user research is an ongoing, dynamic process.

By the end of this 5-minute read, you will know every efficient research method (qualitative and quantitative) and how to choose the right one(s) for a new or existing UX project.

What is UX Research?

In a few words, we could say that UX research is about observation techniques, feedback methods, and analysis of the whole user experience of a project. As in any scientific research, UX research analyzes how users think and what their motivations and needs are.

The research methods of UX can be divided into two main types: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Research Methods

These methods are all about statistics and focus on numbers, percentages, and mathematical observations. UX designers later transform such numerical data into useful statistics that you can use in UX designs.

To be precise, there are numerous data collection platforms that UX designers use like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, etc.

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research aims to understand people’s needs and motivations through observation. This includes numerous methods: from interviews and usability testing to ethnographic and field studies.

In general, qualitative research is crucial for us UX designers because it is easier to analyze than quantitative and we can use it quickly in our projects.

Why is UX Research an Ongoing Process?

Suppose you are about to create a UX wireframe. The process is pretty simple. You start with research, proceed with sketching, then prototype and build. But how many times have you gone back to the previous step of the process?

A UX design is completely dynamic and rarely finished. For this reason, UX research should be viewed as an ongoing process. When I stopped worrying about going through this loop over and over again, I immediately became a better UX designer.

Why Should You Invest in UX Research?

There are many reasons why you should always conduct UX research before you start sketching and prototyping a wireframe:

Stay relevant: Via UX research, you will ensure that you understand what your users need and tailor your product accordingly.
Improve user experience: With comprehensive UX research, you’ll be one step closer to delivering a great user experience.
Clarify your projects: With UX research, you can quickly identify the features you need to prioritize.
Improve revenue, performance, and credibility: When you successfully use UX research, you can boost the ROI (Return on Investment).

9 Effective UX Research Methods

It becomes clear that UX research is very important to the success of any UX project. All successful approaches derive from three basic foundations: Observation, understanding, and analysis.

So let us take a look at the most popular and effective qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Interviews

UX designers can conduct one-on-one interviews to communicate with users and analyze the context of the project. This is a very effective UX research method. You just need to set your goals.

Difficulty: Medium/Low
Cost: Average
Phase: Predesign, During Design Phase

Surveys And Questionnaires

This is a very effective approach if you want to gather valuable information quickly. There are many tools like PandaDoc and Wufoo that allow you to create engaging questionnaires and surveys.

Difficulty: Low
Cost: Low
Phase: Predesign, Post Design Phase

Usability Tests

Usability testing is an essential method if you want to test your product in terms of user experience. It can be applied during or after the creation of an app, site, etc.

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Average
Phase: During Design Phase

A/B Tests

A/B testing is by far the best way to overcome a dilemma. If you do not know which element to choose, all you have to do is organize an A/B test and show each version to a number of users. Based on their feedback, you can then decide which version is the best.

Difficulty: Low
Cost: Low
Phase: During Design Phase

Card Sorts

With card sorts, you can help your users by providing them with some product content categories (labeled card sets). This is a very cheap and easy way to understand what your users prefer and how they interact with the content you have just designed.

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Average
Phase: During Design Phase

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing what your competitors are doing differently is critical to the initial stages of a UX design. This will help you identify their strengths and weaknesses and optimize your product.

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Average
Phase: Predesign

Persona And Scenario Building

Creating a user persona and a specific scenario for your project is critical. First, you need to build a user persona by integrating the motives, needs, and goals of your target audience.

Then, you can create a scenario that leverages all of this valuable information to deliver a top-notch user experience.

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Average
Phase: Predesign

Field Studies

Although a field study is a very effective UX research method, it is also expensive and difficult to conduct. However, there is nothing like field research when it comes to obtaining real-life data.

Difficulty: High
Cost: High
Phase: Predesign, During Design Phase

Tree Tests

Tree testing is a UX research method that you can apply to your designs during or after the construction phase. The process is fairly simple: you provide users with a text-only version of your product and ask them to complete certain tasks. This tactic is a great way to validate your product’s architecture.

Difficulty: High
Cost: High
Phase: During and Post Design Phase

How to Choose the Right UX Research Method?

Good planning is the most important thing for us UX designers. If you know exactly what the UX problem is, you can solve it quickly.

The methods analyzed above are just some of the research tactics used by UX designers. Choosing the right user research method for a project is not easy. To do so, you should first define your goals.

Source

The post How to Get Started With UX Research first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

Picture a dark office, blinds drawn. Picture a UX designer smoking a cigar. See the light filtered through the smoke whipped to fog by a spinning ceiling fan. Watch as the UX designer sits at a desk and considers the website.

The UX designer has devised a series of tests to determine if a green button is better than a red button. One of them involves tipping a tortoise onto its back. He looks the website over carefully and says, “Describe in single words, only the good things that come to mind about your mother.”

The website pauses, sweating under pressure, then replies, “Let me tell you about my mother…”

BLAM! The website pulls the trigger of an unseen gun, and the UX designer collapses, leaving the project to be rebuilt from scratch in Material by Harrison Ford, with overuse of Post-its delegated to Edward James Olmos.

Who Does UX Testing Actually Serve?

In the past’s bleak dystopian future (1982’s Blade Runner was set in 2019) no one benefitted from asking the wrong questions. And little has changed.

Designing any test to verify UX is fraught with as many complications as administering the test. Questions are skewed by bias, conscious or otherwise, and competing agendas. Even with something as apparently simple as a split test, the potential for distortion is immense.

When planned by a designer, a UX test offers little benefit to a client; the benefit is to the designer, who can then say their ideas are validated (or not).

Imagine hiring a developer to code a website, only to discover that the developer didn’t know CSS and expected to be paid to learn it before completing the work. You would hire someone else because that developer isn’t qualified.

From a client’s perspective, a UX designer should know, through experience, whether a green button is better than a red button. Designing an elaborate test to split-test the button color serves little purpose other than indemnifying the designer against mistakes.

The ROI of UX Testing

It’s widely accepted that there is substantial ROI (Return On Investment) from UX testing. We’ve all heard apocryphal stories about sites that split-tested their checkout and improved retention by 5%.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that without user testing, that site could have improved its checkout retention by 4.9% simply by hiring a competent, experienced designer. But what about the remaining 0.1%? Well, for most sites, 0.1% represents very little profit. And the cost of recovering it via testing far exceeds the benefits.

When a company the size of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google split tests a website, it can afford to allocate $25k for user testing because it stands to gain 0.1%, and that represents far more than $25k. To meet the same 0.1% improvement, a small business has to design and run the same tests, incurring the same costs. But in the case of a small business, $25k could eat up all of its profits.

UX testing almost always works. But it is only profitable at scale.

If a good UI designer with a grounding in UX can improve checkout retention by 4.9%, tripling the project budget for just 0.1% more is a tough sell. Bluntly, that $25k is better spent on advertising.

What UX Designers Can Learn From Psychiatry

We all have the tendency to think we’re unique. It’s a survival trait attributed to our prehistoric brain. That belief in uniqueness is particularly strong in highly competitive people. We all think our site, our side-project, our approach are original. And we’re all wrong.

When a psychiatrist sits down with a patient, they have two immediate goals: categorize that patient into an established diagnosis, and assess the severity of the condition. It may be that the patient is depressed or anxious or even suffering from a potentially more debilitating condition like schizophrenia. What the psychiatrist is not trying to do, is define a new illness.

Occasionally — perhaps once per decade — a genuinely unusual patient will present themselves, and a new form of illness is considered. New treatments are found and tested. These treatments are rarely developed on behalf of individual patients; doctors work with grants from governments, medical schools, or the pharmaceutical industry and publish their results.

The vast majority of websites face similar problems. They deal with similar demographics, work within a similar culture, and deal with similar technology. As such, they can be categorized in the same manner a psychiatrist categorizes patients.

The key to delivering successful UX solutions is not UX testing in individual cases, but rather UX research, examining similar projects, and cribbing their solutions. If you categorize a project accurately, you’ll find a solution readily available.

Replacing User Testing With UX Best Practices

Your client doesn’t need to pay for UX testing to benefit from it. Enterprise sites, government sites, and even personal projects will test UX patterns. Sites like Shopify or Stripe will user-test their checkout processes at scale and enable companies to benefit from the results by adopting their platforms.

If you’re currently testing designs for small business, one of two things is true: either you’re wasting your client’s money investigating a problem someone else has already solved, or you’re designing something so original that it has no precedent (and you probably shouldn’t be).

Designers should be opinionated. Designers should know UX best practices and how they apply to a range of scenarios. Designers should be capable of making an educated guess. Designers should be self-validating.

Once or twice in your career, you may find a legitimate need to test something. However, the vast majority of the time, the correct answer is to tip the tortoise back onto its feet and choose whichever color button has the higher contrast.

Featured image: Still of Brion James in Blade Runner. Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment