Doing UX research is really a challenging part as it involves a lot like observation, gathering insights, identifying pain points and need areas, collecting feedbacks, etc. It is indeed a complicated part of UX for beginners, as it usually leaves them confused. Even I felt the same when I started implementing the concepts of UX research that I learned during my UX design training in Delhi with Ravi sir.
I took guidance from my mentor and broke down the process into 8 steps and that worked well for my project.So, I decided to share the same process with you through this blog so that you also can conduct actionable research.
Before I talk about the research steps, let me first tell you that we have different types of research methodologies in UX.
Types of UX Research
There are different types but here I’m covering the two most common one:
- Qualitative data
- Quantitative data
I’ll talk about both briefly below.
Qualitative UX Data research
In qualitative UX research, we focus on understanding the emotions, behaviors and feelings of users who will interact with the apps and websites we design. We don’t concentrate on getting insights in numbers, instead our main goal is to gather opinions from users.
We do this in various ways like:
- We talk to users directly during interviews and survey rounds.
- We conduct usability testing to observe how people interact with our designs.
- We follow their feedback in the form of comments, reviews, and surveys.
This way, we can find answers to many of our questions such as what our users like the most and what they don’t, what confuses them, and what they usually ignore while interacting with an app or website?
As mentioned earlier, interviews, survey, usability testing and focus group are some of the methods that you can use to measure qualitative data. So, now you can start it easily.
Let’s talk about the next one.
Quantitative UX Data research
In quantitative UX research, we rely more on numerical data gathered from users. We focus on patterns like how many how many people clicked a button, how long they stayed on our app or on a particular screen, and which design performs better. There are multiple tools to collect this type of data. Google Analytics comes on top, we also have heatmaps, and surveys with rating scales. So, we count everything our users do and use these insights to make smart design decisions.
Some common methods to measure quantitative data are:
- Survey
- A/B testing
- Tree testing
- Web Analytics
By reading about these types, I’m sure many of you might be wondering that why does it’s really important to conduct such research and why we can’t just do a quick survey or rely on our own likes and dislikes. I had the same thoughts too but gradually I understood the importance as I went deeper into my UX design classes with Ravi sir at ADMEC Multimedia. Let me make it clear for you in the below section.
Why is it important to conduct User Experience Research?
Suppose you are creating a music app but don’t know where to start from. You know before you many people have started their own music app and some got successful while others failed miserably. However, you don’t have any option for failure. Therefore, the first thing you should do is research about the business strategy of such companies that led to success as well as that led to failure. It will improve your understanding of business as well as the market.
Similarly for a successful product it is important to know the insights of what the user needs or expect from the product and this information can only be gained by doing the thorough user experience research.
Here are more reasons to understand the importance of UX research:
- It reduces risk and cost of failure.
- Going through this research helps us to improve user satisfaction.
- This increases the probability of successful business in the coming future.
- User research helps the designer to focus on creating a compelling design rather than guessing and questioning about their motive of that design.
- It helps the product owners to gain competitive advantage among their business rivals.
- User research also creates the feelings of empathy and collaboration across teams such as developers, designers, marketers, etc. keeping everyone focused on providing a valuable user experience.
How to use UX research to get insights?
Here’s the main part of this blog. Now I’m going to present you the 8 steps to conduct actionable UX research:
1. Set clear research objectives
Before you start the research, you should know what you want to learn from it. You should prepare problem statements. Here’re some examples for you:
- Understand why the user deleted the food app.
- Discover what app user have on their phone for navigation.
- Ask if there are any new features they like in any of their apps.
2. Select the research methods you want to use
For this step you must choose such methods that help you gather user data effortlessly. Choose something that fits with the stage of your design process.
- Exploratory UX research – interviews, field studies, etc. to discover user needs.
- Evaluative UX research – usability testing, surveys, etc. to access the existing design.
- Quantitative UX research – website analytics, A/B testing, etc. to understand and measure user behavior at numerical scale.
3. Find relevant users
This step is highly important as users gave us their feedback then it is particularly important that we choose the right user to interview.
For example, if we want to create Boba tea and we ask a person how to make it but that person has drunk it before then how will he/she tell us about it.
Hence to avoid this situation we should find relevant users to participate.
4. Collect reliable data
When interviewing the user, it is important to record the sessions whether on phone recordings or notes. Some interviewer takes an assistant with them for this purpose. It is also necessary to capture user feedback as well as their behavior.
5. Organize the findings
After collecting all the needed data, in this step the designer or research start using the method of cluster by organizing the data on sticky notes and pasting it into any hard and big area like room wall, door, or sometimes in the door of the refrigerator.
6. Try to find patterns
Analyze the organized data carefully and try to look for some hidden patterns in them that can help to connect the data together, such as pain points, similar or unexpected behavior of users.
7. Try translation of the data in insights
You have collected all the data you wanted but now it’s time to translate it into something deeper.
For example, “User is not liking the new feature of navigation in the app” this is written on the findings, now try to find the reason to it.” Users want the navigation icon to be present in upper right corner in the app not hidden inside the map feature.
8. It’s time to create
Now that you have gathered the insights, it is time to create a design based on them.
If you don’t use any design app then I would recommend you to use Figma Design as I used it in my project. It offers community files, lots of assets in the form of plugins and powerful prototyping features. You can also learn it under 3 months Figma course at ADMEC.
Conclusion on Actionable UX Research
To conclude this topic, I want to say that UX research does not only include gathering data, it also means to purify the gathered data into something that could help you create a compelling design for users. It is means to help users get something they want. Like designing a music app that completes their request of satisfying playlist, food delivery app that can deliver food in any place users are at.
In the end, a great UX comes from listening to user needs, understanding their thoughts and designing for the purpose of satisfying the user.
A comprehensive advanced diploma in UX can help you get this level of understanding with a strong design skill. You must start with it if not started yet.
Author Introduction
This blog is written by Aditi Guleria, who is our online 6 months UI/UX design diploma course student. She presented this blog to help the beginners who struggle in UX research.
We hope you find this blog helpful.
