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“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology” ~Steve Jobs
UX research has a very significant impact on any business, and that’s why employers all around the world are pouring more time and money into hiring UX research and design professionals. In fact, according to a recent report, 81% of executives said user research makes their company more efficient, and 86% believe that user research improves the quality of their products and services.
There has always been skepticism towards UX research. Many a times it is seen as a step that prevents the project to meet its deadline, but if we look around, in most of the scenarios, designing according to the assumptions and not investing on UX research has been one of the biggest reasons of a UX project failure.
Let’s start from the beginning!
What is User Experience Research and why is it done?
User Experience (UX) research is the process of discovering the behaviors, motivations and needs of your customers through observation, task analysis, and other types of user feedback.
Created by Erin Sanders, the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for conducting UX research.
1. Objectives: What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
2. Hypotheses: What do we think we understand about our users?
3. Methods: Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
4. Conduct: Gather data through the selected methods.
5. Synthesize: Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.
Now let’s shed some light on the common reasons of doing UX research. The real value of UX research lies in its ability to reduce uncertainty in terms of what users want and need, which yields benefits for the product, the business, and, of course, the users themselves.
1. Product Benefits: UX research provides data about the end user of the product, how and when the user will use the product, and the main problems the product will solve.
2. Business Benefits: UX research brings a lot of a value to businesses. By knowing the end users and incorporating design requirements upfront, businesses can speed up the product development process, eliminate redesign costs, and increase user satisfaction.
3. User Benefits: One of the greatest values of user experience research is that it’s unbiased user feedback. Simply put, UX research speaks the user’s thoughts — without any influence from outside authority. It also serves as a bridge between users and the company.
What are the top UX research methods?
Discover
• Field study
• Diary study
• User interview
• Stakeholder interview
• Requirements & constraints gathering
Explore
• Competitive analysis
• Design review
• Persona building
• Task analysis
• Journey mapping
• Prototype feedback & testing (clickable or paper prototypes)
• Write user stories
• Card sorting
Test
- Qualitative usability testing (in-person or remote)
• Benchmark testing
• Accessibility evaluation
(The most-frequent methods used by UX professionals, by www.nngroup.com)
To bring to life the value that user research provides, let’s look into some real-life research moments with the detailed research process followed.
Bank of America
The giant bank identified and funded a UX redesign project to improve its online enrollment application for online banking. In developing the business case, the design team identified yield (or the percentage of customers completing the process) as the primary metric.
The UX design team began with a literature review of 24 academic articles, an exploration of four analogous domains, and a competitive analysis to identify gaps in the market as in analogous spaces. Following this secondary research the team began other primary research by recruiting and interviewing 17 target users (upper middle class US residents). They also did Card Sorting, Matrix Diagramming, and What’s on Your Radar exercises with users. The team continued with guerrilla research, follows up surveys and created an affinity diagram and story-based personas.
Prototyping and testing various design solutions with yield as the primary success metric proved a successful design strategy. The week the new registration form went live, the yield metric nearly doubled, and exceeded the desired ROI benchmark. This was a win for the design team, as well as the business unit that sponsored the project.
Baileigh Industrial
A UX design firm Marketade began its work with Baileigh by conducting qualitative interviews with sales representatives. A major pain point among the sales representatives was that customers were frequently calling because they could not find the information they needed on the website. The researchers realized that improved self-service on Baileigh’s website would free up sales representatives to focus on people who needed their expertise and would enable them to spend most of their time on high-value sales.
Marketade then moved on to qualitative usability testing to understand why so many customers were reaching out to the sales representatives.
To take a baseline measurement of the navigation’s performance and to determine which areas of the navigation structure needed improvement, Marketade conducted a tree test using Optimal Workshop’s Treejack.
For the results of each task, Marketade researchers looked at the most common incorrect paths. Across all tasks, they found some themes:
- Too many top-level product-category choices
- Navigation hierarchies that overlapped
- Similar or misleading subcategory names
The Marketade team then conducted a card-sort study to understand how Baileigh’s customers think about and categorize their products. The result was new information architecture that:
- Broadened categories
- Reevaluated and reworded problematic subcategory names to
- Included context for tools’ functionalities where possible
Quantifying the Results The team conducted a second tree test using the new information architecture (IA). In the first tree test with the original IA, the overall score was 4.0 out of 10 across eight tasks. In the second tree test with the revised IA, the overall score was 7.4 out of 10 across those same eight tasks — an 85% increase in product findability. In the following months, Baileigh’s revenue and leads increased substantially.
Now if we conclude, what’s the actual ROI of UX research, then?
According to a study done by Forrester, every $1 spent on UX will bring from $2 up to $100 in return. That’s a return of 100% up to over 9000%. What that translates to is:
· less time spent developing, since changing mockups is cheaper than changing a line of code
· or less time wasted on developing features that your clients don’t need,
· less time and money spent on customer care
Remember that satisfied customers are your best marketing and PR team — according to Harvard Business Review more than 20% of happy customers shared their experience with 10 or more people. Doing proper UX research and testing is crucial on every stage of product design, as it allows you to discover avoidable problems and find opportunities to engage your customers in a meaningful way.
