“Empathy is the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel and experience, design is a pointless task.” -Tim Brown , CEO of the Innovation and design firm IDEO
What is User Experience (UX)
When you develop a new product, UX is taken high priority to ensure that the developed product is useful, simple to use, and enjoyable to interact for the end-users. It’s all about improving people’s overall experiences with products and ensuring they receive value, satisfaction, and delight.
However, most of the founders and product managers miss one most misunderstood yet crucial phase in UX design that is user experience analysis. UX analysis and user testing should be a part of any design decision, not an afterthought or an unaffordable luxury. UX research is important for grounding ideas in practice and increasing the likelihood of success, but the word research can be intimidating. It can seem that we don’t have enough money or time.
Why do UX research
Maction Consulting has seen three great reasons why clients want to do UX research
- Ensure the product is relevant for the user: Unless you know about the end-users and how do they behave it is very difficult to create a successful product. Hence, make sure the developed product is relevant for the customers otherwise it will never succeed.
- Make sure it is intuitive and easy to use: A favorite quote from Steve Jobs: “If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem.” If the product is not intuitive and easy to use most of the users will get the wrong impression because they would not have understood it properly.
- Validate ROI of the development cost basis expected response: Businesses look at the overall benefit they would derive from a successful product through
- Improvement of credibility and customer loyalty
- Growth in customer base and engagement
- More efficient work-process
How UX research is done?
UX research can be done in two ways – Quantitative and Qualitative research
A. Quantitative Research:
Quantitative is primarily done to explore the problems. It can be done by collecting user flow data through online surveys, paper surveys, website analytics, heatmap analysis, and systematic observations.
It can also be done through website tracking tools such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is part of a larger set of integrated resources for interpreting visitor results, including Data Studio, a popular data visualization platform, and Google Optimize, which allows you to perform and analyze complex A/B research.
As already mentioned, quantitative research is exploratory and insights gain from Quant study must be aligned with other UX research approaches, such as focus groups or usability testing, which should be combined with quantitative input from analytics platforms. The analytic data will reveal patterns that will help you decide which hypotheses to test further.
B. Qualitative Research:
Qualitative research is done to uncover unspoked insights. It is done by getting more closer to the customer and understanding their behavior and motivations. Some of the widely used methods in qualitative studies are field study, in-person customer demo and Q&A, and ethnographic studies.
We at Maction believe that the quant has some advantage in terms of gathering consumer insights on UX, but the relevance of the Qual study cannot be negated. Qualitative study can help uncover hidden problems/ insights which might not have been discovered through quant analysis.
When it is ideal to do UX research?
It should ideally be done at the time of product development to ensure it is solving the intended problem rather than giving and bad and confusing experience to the customers. It is also cheaper and easy to fix when UX is done in the initial phases rather than waiting for a few months/ years when a lot of legacy is already built and even a positive radical change can have negative repercussions.
Different UX research methods
- Card Sorting: Helpful to redefine website/ app navigation structure. Users group and organize features in a logical framework. This ensures that the site’s layout corresponds to how people think.
- Contextual Interviews: Allows businesses to get unbiased user insights in their normal setting. It facilitates a deeper understanding of how users behave in different settings.
- First Click Testing – This is navigation-focused testing that is used on a live website, a sample, or a wireframe to see where users are reacting in the first instance. It helps generate a contextual heatmap of the website.
- Focus Groups: A moderated conversation with a group of 6-7 users that provides a deeper level of insight into the emotional and behavioral aspects of the users. It is useful to see how users response changes when they listen to other responses.
- Interviews: One-on-one conversations with customers reveal how they function. It is helpful to learn more about a user’s behaviors, interests, and perceptions and generate directional insights for deep diving.
- Parallel Design: A design approach in which many designers work on the same project at the same time but separately, to use the best elements of each for the final result.
- Personas: This is helpful when there are respondent constraints or insights of a larger user group is required. In this method, personas of different user groups are studied and same is used to generate the feedback on how different segment behaves on different UX versions.
- Prototyping: Designing a mock-up of the web allows the design team to test designs before introducing them. A prototype can be as simple as a paper mock-up or as complex as interactive HTML pages.
- Surveys: These are a collection of questions that are asked of different visitors of your website to help you learn more about the people who use it.
- Usability Testing: Identifies user frustrations and difficulties with the website/ app under a one-on-one session with the moderators. Here respondents perform the app usage cycle like a “real-life” scenario and under investigation. This helps improve funnel conversion.
- Use Case Analysis: This gives insights into how users interact with the different features on the website and app. Most of the time users find their own innovative ways to use certain things. Hence, use case analysis helps generate new insights from the product.
How Maction can help with UX research
Most of the businesses around the world are built on user research. In India, brands like OLA, Flipkart, and Fogg are one of the biggest examples where consumer insights played a major role in developing a consumer-centric product that not only created a brand but also created a long-term moat.
We have seen businesses experiencing better conversions, customer engagement, and over review post-implementation of UI/UX research.
Bottomline
Any business success depends on how satisfied their customers are and UI-UX research amplifies customer satisfaction through user testing. UX study highlights the subjective perception different customer segments have when using the product. As a result, it’s critical to comprehend future consumers’ needs and goals, as well as the meaning and activities that each product requires. Basis the UX study, product managers can mold the product and come up with products that represent both consumers and companies in a more comprehensive manner.
