The present-day world is home to a competitive market where new businesses introduce unique products and services every day. Thus, in order to succeed and expand their outreach in the industry, devoted set-ups need to conduct in-depth research.
In fact, UX research is critical for defining your UX design. In addition, iteratively testing your work should also inform your design decisions to enhance the user experience. Despite this, plenty of businesses treat user experience research as an afterthought [make the case of UX research with these stats].
Luckily, how people analyze UX is evolving meaning more organizations are gravitating towards employing UX research to branch out. Here we discuss the important types of UX research and several common methodologies often utilized:
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Defining UX research
UX research refers to an extensive range of investigative and analytical methods that helps add realistic and real-time insights to your design process. Instead of sprouting out of other fields, UX research merely adopted a variety of different research methodologies, aka academics, market researchers, scientists, and so on.
What makes UX practitioners stand out is the user experience research process reveals invaluable information that directly affects the design process in order to improvise the entire user-interactive experience. In this way, organizations ensure maximum satisfaction and happiness from consumers.
The types of UX research
UX research methods further fall into two subcategories. These are:
1. Quantitative research
Any research that brands can measure numerically is quantitative research. Here you may use structured methods such as analytics, surveys, and so on to gather valuable data relevant to user activity and test assumptions.
Moreover, businesses answer questions like ‘how many prospects clicked this touchpoint?’ or ask users something like ‘how do you like to spend your Sundays?’ In this way, you can understand the habits of at least a substantial amount of your audience. Plus, you can track activity on your website or your app.
2. Qualitative research
Qualitative, or soft research, includes taking interviews on a variety of different platforms or ethnographic field studies to gain insights about user behaviors.
Here you may ask questions like ‘why are users missing the call-to-action?’ or interview consumers to gain personal knowledge. The main objective here is to understand why users do the things they do.
The UX research methods used during projects
Brands may conduct user research through a variety of different techniques with differing costs/value ratios. Here we’ve included the most straightforward and popular ones:
1. Determine the relevancy
Discover whether your products are of use by carrying out contextual inquiries where you interview small groups of users to analyze their performance in comfortable environments.
Or you may request users to record their interactions with a design daily
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2. Analyze how you can meet users needs
Explore through a wide variety of options to pick strategies that help you meet the user’s needs the best.
Start with crafting cards with words and phrases atop them. Next, ask your consumers to organize them to help curate your design accordingly. Another fantastic option is crafting user journeys to pinpoint crucial and pitfall moments.
3. Test out your design
Analyze whether your design is user-friendly by testing its usability and accessibility. If it boasts straightforward and simple features alongside easy access to all users, you’re good to go.
A service like Trymata offers robust features at an affordable price-point to fulfill the need your usability testing and UX research platform. Other services charge astronomical prices for limited capabilities or simply don’t offer the quantitative data you need.
4. Listen to user complaints
The whole purpose of UX research is to enhance your website in accordance with users’ needs, addressing the UX / UI design as well as the customer experience (CX) design. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to listen to your customer’s problems carefully, even if its only A/B testing and not a more comprehensive usability test.
From surveys to in-depth analytics, you can gain insights about your consumers’ preferences in many innovative ways. Moreover, collecting valuable metrics helps build useful reports and increase on-site traffic.
