What is UX Research and What Are Its Advantages?
UX Research is a research practice aimed at understanding the needs, behaviors, motivations, and desires of users in relation to a particular product or service. User research is a fundamental part of the process of designing user-centered products and services, and it is used to inform and validate design decisions.
To create a great digital experience, you need to go beyond just developing a website or mobile app that simply works and looks "nice."
You must deeply understand who your users are, what they need, what their expectations and priorities are.
One tool that will truly help you understand your user and develop products that captivate them is UX Research.
What is UX Research?
UX Research involves diving deep into how customers interact with your brand on a practical and functional level, observing how easily they can complete tasks and achieve their goals through your product.
It’s the process of discovering customers' behaviors, motivations, and needs through observation, task analysis, and their feedback.
Essentially, UX Research is the systematic study of users to design digital products that align with their needs.
Why is UX Research Important?
If you know your business better than anyone, how could external people help you learn more about your products or services?
The fresh perspective of end users is precisely why user experience research is so valuable.
Since they aren’t immersed in the UX design of your platform, end users have an objective view of what is working well (or not) at the experience level in your products. Knowing this will allow you to identify points in your UX where consumers get frustrated, make adjustments, and encourage customers to keep using your digital product.
In areas like design and development of new products, UX Research prevents potential issues with products or services even before they are used by the end user.
The goal is to design them correctly the first time, rather than having to fix them later when you see that customers are not satisfied.
So we can say that UX Research is essential. It prevents you from wasting time, money, and effort designing the wrong product.
UX Research brings a series of advantages to all areas of the business.
Advantages of Conducting UX Research
You understand the needs, expectations, and frustrations of your user.
You gain a fresh perspective on your product’s design.
You design digital products that captivate your customer.
You reduce biases from investors or company leaders about how the product design should be.
You don’t waste money, time, and resources on products that don’t work.
You avoid errors before the end user uses the product.
You develop a great digital experience for your user.
You design a digital product that’s better than your competition’s.
Methods of UX Research
The type of UX Research you choose will depend on the type of question you’re addressing, the timeline, the size of your team, and your environment.
We can divide UX Research into two perspectives: qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research aims to understand the human side of data. It seeks to understand what behaviors, feelings, and sensations a user has when using a product or service.
Qualitative methods are best suited to address the "how" or "why" of that behavior.
Through methods like interviews and field ethnographic studies, you work to deeply understand why users do what they do. You can conduct interviews with a small number of users and ask open-ended questions to gather personal information about their habits.
Another aspect of qualitative research is usability testing, a method used to evaluate the user experience of a product or website. Testing it with a representative group helps evaluators determine whether real users will be able to use the product or website easily and intuitively.
Quantitative Research
On the other hand, quantitative research uses measurement tools to collect data on how subjects use a product; it’s usually more mathematical in nature. This type of research aims to answer questions like "what," "where," and "when."
Through structured methods like surveys or analytics, quantifiable data is gathered about what users do, and hypotheses derived from qualitative research are tested.
Now, we can divide UX Research into two approaches: attitudinal and behavioral.
Attitudinal Research
Attitudinal research involves evaluating users’ attitudes or feelings towards an experience. It’s about understanding how a user feels when using a product or service. This research answers the question: How does the user feel when using my digital product?
Behavioral Research
Attitudinal research refers to what people say, while behavioral research refers to what people actually do. These two are often very different. Attitudinal research is used in marketing because it measures people's stated beliefs and needs.
However, in product design and UX Research, what people actually do with your product tends to be more relevant.
For example, A/B testing shows visitors different versions of a site at random to track the effect of the site design on conversion and behavior.
Another behavioral method is eye tracking, which helps researchers understand how users interact and visually engage with the design of an interface by following their gaze.
Another perspective for understanding UX Research is the context of use.
Context of Use
This type of research involves understanding how the user uses an application under certain specific conditions. For example, you might research how a user uses an app from their office to order groceries for their home.
Typically, context of use research data is collected through surveys, focus groups, interviews, visits, and observational studies.
This method identifies the most important elements of an application or product in the context of its use.
It’s the type of UX Research that is usually conducted at the beginning of the product life cycle and continues as data shows which components of the product and user experience are the most important.
Finally, we can view UX Research from two objectives: generative and evaluative.
Generative Research
Generative research helps you understand the problem for which you want to design a solution. It’s the research done before designing a product, allowing designers to create products more aligned with user needs and expectations.
Evaluative Research
Evaluative research helps you assess an existing design. This type of research allows you to diagnose and evaluate the UX design of a digital product. This way, you can identify the strengths of the design that should remain the same and suggest improvements for the areas that harm the user experience.
UX Research Techniques
There are many different UX Research techniques that help teams gather the specific insights needed to understand the user.
Usability Testing
Usability is about ensuring that users navigate your website smoothly. Through usability testing, researchers can discover and understand how real people respond to their products and experiences.
In these cases, a platform is used to record the user's screen while they use your digital product in their natural environment: at home, in their office, or in a specific location. This allows you to discover what they like and dislike, what confuses them, and areas for improvement.
Diary Studies
These are long-term studies where users keep a diary to report their activities and record actions, thoughts, and frustrations. They are useful for capturing organically repetitive, long, or unpredictable activities.
Card Sorting
Card Sorting requires creating a set of cards to represent the information that should be displayed in a digital product. Users group and classify the cards in the way that makes the most sense to them.
This is most commonly used when designing (or redesigning) a website's navigation or the organization of content within it, as it helps evaluate the information architecture.
Surveys
It may seem obvious, but through a series of well-formulated questions, surveys allow you to empathize with users to gather quantitative information that is not as visible to developers, managers, and marketers.
Listening to your customers not only helps you identify new problems to solve but also generates new ideas and gathers customer opinions and feedback through surveys. This is undoubtedly an active, receptive, and honest way to do it.
Interviews
Interviews are a UX research method especially useful for understanding complex feelings and experiences. By having dynamic discussions with interviewees, you can observe verbal and non-verbal cues and ask open-ended questions to uncover details that surveys and usability testing cannot.
These structured individual interviews with your target audience help you better understand their personal experiences with the product. They can be directed to compare and contrast responses among users or non-directed, where users lead the conversation.
Focus Groups
Focus groups fall into the category of qualitative research methods, consisting of gathering a group of people to understand their opinions on a topic. They can be asked questions to find out what they expect from a product or what their experience was like when receiving a service.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are another great way to collect usage data for an application or website. Heatmaps are useful for optimizing applications, improving user experience, and increasing conversions.
It’s a tool that shows which sections users interact with most within a page or mobile application. It displays in red the sections where users spend more time with their mouse and in blue where they spend less time.
When Should You Do UX Research?
The sooner UX Research is conducted, the more effective it will be. Consider that before launching a new product or service, understanding user preferences is key to the success of any brand, product, or final service.
Additionally, digital products are always in a continuous process of evolution, and there’s nothing better than incorporating the knowledge learned about your target audience into that improvement process.
That’s why UX Research should be a constant in the development of any digital application.
Whatever UX Research method or techniques you choose, you should consider the pros and cons. The recommendation in all cases is to involve the stakeholders in your organization from the beginning, as that will make their work much more efficient.
Remember that a good design team values UX Research as a way to validate their assumptions about real-life users. Through UX Research, you can reduce costs, improve results, and keep your products ahead of the competition.
