How do you go about performing UX research? ~ UXness: UX Design, Usability Articles, Course, Books, Events

User-experience research methods are excellent for generating data insights, and continuing efforts aid in getting the job done. The UX research serves as a foundation for the UX design process. Various UX strategies can maintain product development efforts on pace, in accordance with genuine user requirements rather than fictitious ones, at any and every level of the design process. We can't picture design without conducting research, and we can't fathom it at all. UX research has always been essential for double-checking pre-made assumptions, validating facts, and proposing modifications.

Why do you exactly need UX research?

Increases the product's worth
During brainstorming and post-design, it saves a lot of time and money.
Helps you to develop design ideas that are quite useful to users and simple to use.
Ensures that users are able to execute their activities without committing blunders.
Reduces your product's training curves by making it easier and faster to understand and use.
It will assist you in estimating the return on investment (ROI)
Allows you to discover early adopters.
Ensures that your hypotheses are accurate.
Helps to understand about your competitor’s products
Also, UX research can be conducted at any phase of the process, so that's a bonus!

Let us look at the elements of UX research

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is the procedure of collecting as well as analysing non-numerical data in order to gain a better grasp of user perspectives and motives, as well as to generate a thorough comprehension of an issue. Rather than guessing over causation, qualitative information allows you to make correct, educated decisions for your users. Acquiring this psychological or empathic data could make it much simpler for consumers to invest in product modifications.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is the procedure of gathering and analysing numeric data in order to uncover patterns or statistics, as well as evaluating data points for providing quantitative outcomes. Qualitative research has identified the most critical design concerns, detects usability flaws, and aids in the discovery of potential solutions during the design process.

“When should I start conducting user research for my new project?” is among the most often asked concerns. There are three possible responses:

Conduct user research at whichever stage you're at.
Conduct user research at any and every stage of the process.
Conduct the majority of user research earlier on in the project (when it would have the greatest impact).

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How do you conduct UX research?

Discover

The discovery phase would be where you try to figure out what you do not even know and learn more about what folks want. It is quite vital to do discovery activities when developing a new product and feature, then you can determine if the project is even feasible.

Validating and discarding assumptions is indeed a key objective at this phase, followed by presenting the data plus insights to the team. Field studies, journal studies, and client interviews all seem to be excellent UX research approaches.

Exploring

Exploration approaches are used to comprehend the challenge area and product scope, as well as to adequately answer user's requirements. The purpose at around this point is to identify the issue and determine how and when to better serve the user.

Alongside UX research methodologies, it's critical for the UX design agencies to recognise discrepancies and take into account the new design's many options and outlining indicators(s). Competitor analysis, task analysis, persona construction, journey mapping, design reviews, and card sort are all UX research approaches that might aid at this step.

Testing

At this point, testing is performed to make certain that the designed systems offer the user. It's really critical to begin testing with quite a wide group of people earlier in a development cycle. Moreover, at YUJ designs we believe in adopting continuous strategic initiatives like tracking usability with time. We tend to do this while maintaining transparency among stakeholders all through the design stage helps enable a quick resolution for potential issues.

Validation approaches, such as qualitative usability testing, benchmark checking, and accessibility evaluations, are applied in this step of UX research.

Listen

Listen throughout the research as well as design process to better grasp current concerns and identify new ones. Analyse obtained data to keep an eye out for trends and patterns in revamped data.

Listening to users during the whole study process will help you direct future attempts and comprehend new challenges which have surfaced.

Surveys, analytical evaluations, usability bug inspections, FAQ reviews, and search log analytics are all examples of UX research methodologies for testing.

To sum up

Though most people may not be able to comprehend UX research right now, its importance is growing by the day. It isn't required to perform it all on each project, although it is frequently beneficial to employ a combination of methodologies and attend to some continuing needs throughout each iteration. A good user experience, after all, leads to an excellent product design.

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