Why user research

Contextual Interviews - Enable you to observe users in their natural environment, giving you a better understanding of the way users work. First Click Testing - A testing method focused on navigation, which can be performed on a functioning website, a prototype, or a wireframe.

Focus Groups - Moderated discussion with a group of users, allow you to learn about user attitudes, ideas, and desires. Individual Interviews - One-on-one discussions with users show you how a particular user works.

Parallel Design - A design methodology that involves several designers pursuing the same effort simultaneously, but independently, with the intention to combine the best aspects of each for the ultimate solution. Personas - The creation of a representative user based on available data and user interviews. Prototyping - Allows the design team to explore ideas before implementing them by creating a mock-up of the site.

Surveys - A series of questions asked to multiple users of your website, help you learn about the people who visit your site. When we are trying to learn about their needs, wants, and motivations, we can use defaulting to our advantage by removing any barriers to completing tasks or answering questions. Conversely, we can add barriers to hinder less than desirable behavior. Ostrich Effect. This happens to us all. An example is business debt.

When a business owner realizes they have gone further and further into debt, they will often continue down this path, denying the situation and not wanting to face how far they have gone.

For this, we can build guardrails to help them stay on track, knowing they will be in avoidance. Social Proof. Following the pack, i. Pertaining to user research, this can be a useful principle to be aware of. We do a huge disservice to customers and clients by acting on what they say. Instead, we should seek to better understand what they are actually trying to convey. This is one of the reasons why user research matters and why we, as designers, should go beyond the surface and try to uncover the true needs, wants, and motivations that will drive superior results.

User research refers to the methods and frameworks used to help design professionals focus on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through various observation techniques, feedback methodologies, and task analysis. We seek to understand these needs in order to better align with products and services being designed.

The purpose and importance of user research is to better align user needs with products and services being designed. There are several user research methods and frameworks that help UX designers learn the needs, wants, and motivations of users. Designers should do both qualitative and quantitative user research in order to solve design problems and create a more human-centered product or service.

There is also a time-saving and money-saving value in performing research. We should listen to customers in order to better understand what we will need to research further with specific user research methods that help us see what they do, instead of what they say, leading to a set of highly valuable outcomes. Subscription implies consent to our privacy policy. Thank you!

Check out your inbox to confirm your invite. Design All Blogs Icon Chevron. Filter by. View all results. The learnings from this research are useful during the UX-design process, but you do not need to spend much time on research. Heuristics are sets of best practices and guidelines that help you to identify problem areas and potential opportunities—for example, the heuristics that usability guru Jakob Nielsen defined.

A heuristic evaluation is an assessment of a digital experience that identifies usability issues. This method often comes into play when adding new features to an existing feature set. In this method, a few UX experts examine a user interface to gauge its compliance with a checklist of heuristics. The timely usage of this evaluation method can help avert post-production disasters.

Nielsen created his ten heuristic guidelines way back in the early s. Since then, they have been in wide use by UX experts. By using this method, you can uncover usability problems early and fix them during the design phase. This method can also help suggest the best corrective measures to UX designers. An expert review is a UX-research method in which a usability expert evaluates the quality and usability of an application or service based on his experience.

The usability expert identifies and analyzes problems and recommends solutions for them. This method saves a lot of time and money.

While written documents take more time to create and read, they provide detailed information and recommendations. Product teams can use this deliverable as a checklist for necessary design modifications. This method also lets you rank your findings by severity and frequency.

Typically, personas are profiles of imaginary users that are based on user-research data and act as surrogates for real users during design.

Each persona represents an example of a type of user or a role of someone who might use your product or service. Hypothetical personas should represent typical users and be believable, but not stereotypical. Later on, whenever the opportunity arises, do some user research and thoroughly review and refine your assumptions.

If a project does not include a formal user-research phase, you can review relevant published research and other prior studies and draw inferences and deductions that may apply to your users. But make it crystal clear to your stakeholders that greater back-end effort is necessary. Unfortunately, user research does not always get its due attention. It is a tragedy that the software industry is not cognizant of the value of UX research in devising brilliant, unique solutions to the problems we confront in product design.

In my opinion, UX research is no longer optional. We must conduct UX research to ensure seamless, valuable user experiences or submit to inevitable product failure. You mentioned that as soon as the failure of the product was apparent the client realized they missed out on user research as a critical element. Unfortunately, in many cases, this is not the conclusion that clients end up with. From my experience many of these clients are used to outdated ways of working where a Business Analyst does all the scoping without research and the Designer creates the wireframes.

All they will do is try to fix it again and again until the project is either shelved or improved to a level where it has value and people get used to it. But, Ziv all the time and money that is being spent on fixing the stuff could have been saved if UX Research was carried out. The actual development phase can begin on time if we apply the UX Research findings in the design phase.

As a UX Specialist at HCL Technologies, Apurvo works within a multidisciplinary team to deliver compelling UX designs and services that support business objectives and enhance the way people live, work, and communicate. Apurvo takes a keen interest in helping the team to cope with UX design technology transitions and adds value across teams.

He creates solutions that address new challenges in UX design and the visualization of complex data. Apurvo is a Certified Usability Analyst. Not to mention that your users will love you for creating a great user experience.

Even if you are designing products for—e. WikiWand is a good example of a company that makes a living from providing a great user experience.

Their product is a plugin which changes the design of Wikipedia articles to make them more appealing and user friendly. WikiWand does not provide different content from the classic Wikipedia webpage, but the company has thousands of users who praise it for the awesome user experience it delivers.

Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use. To the left is the classic Wikipedia interface; to the right is the WikiWand version of the same article. The content is the same, but the experience is different. When you are designing or developing a product, you become the primary expert on how to use it and what functionalities it has. Because you know your own product so well, however, you can become blind to functionality in your product that is difficult to use.

As designers, we need that level of understanding of our products, but it also means that we can all too easily shift far away from the same perspective as our users. The author has personally participated in many projects where the designers know the ideas behind the interface and functionality of a product so well that separating the understandable from the not-so understandable is really difficult for them.

You might also be designing for a target group such as kids where the regular guidelines do not apply. That means testing the user experience of your product is always a good idea. User tests work best when they are an integrated part of your work process so that you test your product iteratively and from an early stage of development onward.

Early tests are what we can do on primitive prototypes—e. If you only start testing when you have an almost-finished product, you run a very serious risk in that your findings might come too late for you to make larger changes to the product.

Although the importance of good design has become widely recognized, UX designers and researchers still experience having to fight for resources to enable them to do their work. Executives and shareholders sometimes fail to see the value in investing in user research and UX design. UX design and user research is not as tangible as—e. If resources become scarce, UX is also often one of the first areas to experience cuts; the reason is that consequences are not as immediately felt as when you save on development or similar areas.

If you make cuts in—e. Although we can easily argue for the value of great UX, it is much more effective if we can show it. This is where studies to show the return on investment ROI on UX efforts are worth their weight in gold or the weight, at least, of the printouts. If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you have a much stronger case for investing in UX.

User studies to measure the effect of your design are mostly quantitative and can take different forms. With apps and webpages, you often build in different types of analytics to inform you of different user patterns.