What Is User Experience Research?

 

What is user experience research? UX research is nothing but a scientific representation of the many accumulated insights which have been garnered by actual users and clients/users. These insights are then leveraged by UX researchers to create smart strategic decisions at any phase of the development & design of a website or an app. An effective website or an effective app requires the collaboration of many different users and stakeholders. And to achieve this, many important questions need to be asked, like what do users need and want from the website or the app, what would be their expectations, what are the potential drawbacks of these app/ website features, etc.

There has been a long debate on the validity of user research methodology. While some people argue that the methodology should only include interviews, focus groups, and quantitative data and not necessarily qualitative research (which include elicitation, observation, or questioning posed to specific individuals), there are also others who believe that user research cannot truly provide objective data about anything because humans are very messy creatures. They believe that the only way to conduct quality qualitative research is to do it with actual human subjects. And even if you can successfully gather sufficient information from real people about your app / website, it might not be representative of what real users think about the same. Indeed, to draw accurate conclusions, you need to conduct both qualitative research and user research!

This is where we come in! Through our research, we have found that while both qualitative research and quantitative research can help you understand your app better, qualitative research provides better insight into your audience, app, and business goals. Through our work, we have discovered that there are 3 primary factors which affect how app users view your app:

Firstly, your app's design and user interface design will determine how your audience perceive your app. In terms of design, you need to understand that many users perceive things through aesthetics, which means that an aesthetically-pleasing app may actually turn off more of your audience than a visually-appealing one! User experience design, on the other hand, involves identifying how users perceive functionality and usability, and then tailoring your app to be more user-friendly. This type of qualitative research method, which we've done extensively with over 300 user groups, gives you deeper insights into what your audience wants.

Secondly, user experience research can also help you understand your competitor's strategies. As mentioned above, this type of qualitative study is very useful for both businesses and app developers. We've used this research to gain understanding about competitor strategies, learn their users, and build our own strategies. The results of our studies have been helpful in formulating new methods and techniques for marketing campaigns, and even helping us improve our products. Our quantitative findings have even been used by large organizations to improve their services and programs!

Finally, you'll want to perform this research before your design process. Often, we develop websites and apps that initially seem very user-friendly - but when you start using them, they prove to be much more complex and challenging to use than we originally anticipated. Even if you're developing for the global market, you need to consider each market segment and find out what their typical problems are. From there, you can design your site or app to solve these problems. Of course, in addition to studying your competitors, you'll also want to study your ideal customers - what do they want, what do they need, and what do they expect from your service or product? These are all critical data points that you will need to incorporate into your design process.