Start UX Research gracefully: Qualitative VS Quantitative
“The outcome of any design effort ultimately must be judged by how successfully it meets the needs of both the product’s users and the organization that commissioned it. ” — Alan Cooper
To design effective solutions for users,
the Designer should understand:
- The problem.
- The problem’s constraints.
- The business or organizational goals.
By doing
- Qualitative research (behavioural & organisational knowledge)
- Quantitative research (objective data)
However, Alan Cooper noted in About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition:
“ Qualitative research helps us understand a product’s domain, context, and constraints in different, more useful ways than quantitative research does. ”
Did he mean that Qualitative Research is more important? Let’s take a short look and compare the two ambitious Research Methods to see which one is better!
📑 Qualitative Research
☞ Outcomes:
- The behaviours, attitudes, and aptitudes of existing & potential users;
- The domain/environmental contexts of the product to be designed, include political, industrial, cultural, business, and technical contexts.
For example, it answers some important design questions:
- How will the product fit into the broader context of human lives?
- What problems are people suffering?
- Why will people use the product to be designed?
- What values can it bring to people? What are the value propositions?
- How will people use the product with their different knowledge and operating behaviours?
☞ Its Benefits:
- Common understanding: design team members will all understand the domain issues and user concerns by involving in the research process.
- Credibility & Authority: the qualitative data allows the design team and other teams to look back and trace to validate design solutions.
- Management decisions: research results empower the management team to make informed decisions about the product design issues, otherwise, they may guess.
- Business insights: deeply understanding of user populations brings valuable insights and surprises.
- Very important: it is less expensive & helps companies avoid costs (imagine the design solution fails to help users solve their problems, the design would be cleaned without getting any profits but cost a lot of money 😟 ).
📊 Quantitative Research
☞ Outcomes:
- Market sizing, Markey Segments.
- Psychographics and behavioural variables, such as attitudes, lifestyle, values, ideology, risk aversion and decision-making patterns (general perspective).
- User Segments and their consuming characteristics, such as purchasing power, motivation to buy, self-orientation and resources.
… Sorry no example :>
☞ Its Benefits:
- Accurate & Direct assessments: it offers convincing data to validate the viability of the product.
- Forecast business opportunities.
- Generic behaviours: quantitative data traces many people’s behaviour and display the patterns of the behaviours, which provide a generic perspective.
- Help the Market Research: quantitative data provide critical information such as market sizing of the behavioural models(personas), and it helps determine which user types should be prioritised when designing the product experience.
“However, understanding if somebody wants to buy something is not the same thing as understanding what he or she might want to do with it after buying it.”
User segmentation is a great tool for identifying and quantifying a market opportunity, but it’s an ineffective tool for defining a product that will capitalize on that opportunity.
☞ The limitations of Quantitative Research:
- Unable to dig out what are users’ pain points and how users use the product.
- It answers “what” and “how much” questions, but it is unable to answer “why”, which can be answered by qualitative research.
But, usually, the two research methods work together harmoniously and enrich each other:
So, we cannot define which method is better as each of them serves different purposes. If you can exploit their strengths to maximally meet your needs and achieve your goals, it will be the best method.
The most important thing is understanding your goals for your design research.
You may want to know how to do design research step by step with quantitative and maybe qualitative research, click the article below to get more Information
