User Experience (UX) Research

How To Think Like a UX Researcher?

• Think like 'Sherlock'- We likened UX researchers to detectives. Now we’re likening UX research to explorers. Think of three explorers—they can be historical or contemporary—read up on them to get a sense of what motivated them and what their objectives, challenges, and discoveries were. What can you learn from them that can be applied to user experience discovery research?
• Think of a recent project you worked on where UX research failed to deliver the expected business benefits. If you could return to the beginning of that project, what would you do differently?
• Summarize UX research findings. Thinking of the last UX research you carried out, how might you present the findings on a single sheet of paper?
• We talk about the difficulty of delivering bad news to senior managers. What prevents your organization from hearing bad news? How can you help your organization learn from its mistakes?
• Every UX researcher has their favorite UX research method, be it a field visit, a usability test, or a survey. This becomes a problem when you use the same tool to answer every research question. Identify your favorite and least favorite UX research methods and question if this “ favoritism” affects your practice. Identify two research methods you would like to learn more about.
• We define a successful UX research study as one that gives us actionable and testable insights into users’ needs. What makes an insight “testable”?

Research methods we follow in the four phases of the product development lifecycle

Product user research makes it possible to design for real people; otherwise, we will trade into our own myst. And businesses should always avoid that trap — especially if you are aware of your niche market. And let's face it as a marketing ninja!

1. User research during the product discovery phase

In this phase, we find the solutions - How to Design for Everyone? And search for a target audience’s problem and its solution. This will form the foundation of the product.

UX research methods for this phase:

• Interview StakeHolders - Clients and development teams often approach the UX researcher with a “method led” request (such as “Please run a focus group”). Imagine you have been asked to deliver a UX research method that you feel is inappropriate, but you are told, “That’s all we can do with the time and budget available.” Which is the more ethical approach: to carry out the research method that’s asked of you or to decline to run the research at all? Why?
• Market survey - to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
• Field research - Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
• Competitor analysis and industry research -Find the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

2. User research Exploration techniques during product validation

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately. UX research methods in this phase:

• Website analytics - Research on its own can be valuable, but in order to use the insights to inform design, it needs to be analyzed and ultimately presented to a larger team. The analysis is the process by which the researcher identifies patterns in the research, proposes possible rationale or solutions, and makes recommendations.
• Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
• Landing page A/B tests - A/B testing is another way of learning what actions users take. An A/B test is typically chosen as the appropriate research form when designers are struggling to choose between two competing elements.

3. Testing and validating User experience research during product prototyping

Ideas now take shape for life. In this phase, make prototypes and test their usability. Run several iterations at this phase.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

UX research methods in this phase:

• User journey mapping - Until all the serious usability problems have solutions. We test one version of the prototype with at least three or four people every month last week. By then, it may not retain any serious usability issues in smaller products. But for a huge enterprise application may need many more iterations.
• User tests - On average, to identify the usability issues, running six tests in one cycle filters out 87% of the problems. After a round, prioritize the problems and work on them, iterate, and test again.
• Heatmap analytics
• Click analytics

4. Listen User’s Voice and Test UI prototype

After the launch, many options to get feedback from users remain. Indeed, now real users can provide data.

UX research methods in this phase include:

• UX metrics - Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to treat your progress.
• UX surveys - Qualitative surveys ask open-ended questions to find out more, sometimes in preparation for doing quantitative surveys. Test surveys to eliminate problems.
• Heatmaps - We use the HotJar tool teaser the heat map on the landing page.
• Recording - Again, HotJars gives a one-stop solution for user recordings monitory with the help of it, we analyze the user behavior and usability issues.
• Data analysis - Google Analytics is part of a suite of interconnected tools that help interpret data on your site’s visitors, including Data Studio, a powerful data- visualization tool, and Google Optimize, for running and analyzing dynamic A/B testing.