User research is an ongoing process which can continually deliver valuable information into any business process to improve its conversions and user satisfaction. User research helps to understand what’s relevant to users and how they behave.
Why do you need UX research?
- Recognize different audiences
- Validate hypotheses
- To understand the audience
- Learn the experience
- Discover a context of use
The insights detected from user research can be implemented into the business to help inform decisions around pricing, product, services, and marketing.
When need to do user research
- You are starting a new project and do not know anything about the needs of the audience.
- The release/mistake cost is very high
- Hard to explain analytics data
- Stuck at local maximum
- Unknown target audience
Research methods
User research methods possible to divide into two types: quantitative and qualitative. Both of these types of user research are complementary and play important roles in an iterative design cycle.
Which method to choose?
It depends on tasks and goals, product stage, available resources (time + people + expertise), size and structure of the company.
Qualitative research
The qualitative methodology provides data on the needs, habits, fears, and problems of users. This knowledge is necessary for product development when the target audience is well known. This knowledge is equally essential if you need to make changes to an existing product to improve the user experience.
Qualitative research discloses the “Why and how?”. “Why do users have a particular attitude towards a product?”.
- In-depth interview
- Observations
- Usability testing
- Focus groups
Quantitative research
That method may be measured with numbers. It answers questions such as “How many monthly visitors?” or “What the bounce rate on this page?” It’s valuable in understanding statistical probability and what is happening on the product.
- Surveys
- Analytics
- A/B testing
What to do with research results
With qualitative research results, you need forming hypotheses and validating it with quantitative research. In quantitative research results, you need to focus efforts on what the problem and found answer why with qualitative research.
The obtained research results must be correctly interpreted and used with helpful frameworks and tools:
- Value Proposition Canvas
- Customer Journey Map
- Personas
- Jobs to be done
- How Might We
- Double Diamond
- Model Kano
What to do if there is no opportunity to conduct qualitative and quantitative research? When users in another country, spoke in other languages, no analytical data, etc.The only way it’s competitive and comparative research. But there is a high probability that this researches will not yield results that will give you qualitative and quantitative research.
If you do not do research, there is a significant risk that you will make a useless product and waste your time and money.
UX without users isn’t UX.