Why UX Research Matters in Product Development
Introduction:
Have you ever used a product that felt frustrating or confusing? Maybe you struggled to find the information you needed, or the interface didn’t make sense. These are common problems that can be avoided with good UX research. In this blog post, we’ll explore why UX research is important in product development and how it can help you create better products.
While creating a product, the process involves various channels of input at different stages. As UX design entangles an entire team of people who bear influence over the final product, keeping everyone in the communication loop becomes integral to the part and process of the project.
From product managers, sales, marketing, and copy teams, to client support, everyone has a defined role to play in revolutionizing the UX of the product. This is where UX research comes in to set the record straight with plain facts, data integration, and a clear understanding of UX problems.
Defining UX Research:
UX research is the process of studying users’ behaviors, attitudes, preferences, and patterns to create user-centered products. It involves both qualitative and quantitative methods of gathering data, such as user testing, surveys, and A/B testing. By understanding users’ needs and pain points, UX research helps to create products that are intuitive, easy to use, and effective.
Where everything we do, design, and offer revolves around the user’s requirements, getting an insight into the user’s mind and behavior through deep user research becomes paramount. UX research refers to a methodical study of the end-user and the target group based on various factors like user behavior, attitudes, preferences, and patterns.
“Users are not always logical, at least not on the surface." To be a great designer, you need to look a little deeper into how people think and act.”
-Paul Boag (UX Consultant and Expert in Digital Transformation)
The deep study of the user’s interactions with the product involves qualitative and quantitative research methods that effectively help frame clear problem statements. User research furthers the goal of building user empathy and impacts product quality and user engagement in a realistic context. These insights into user experience-good or bad, become the guiding principles for building good products the right way.
UX research can be done using two methods:
Qualitative research refers to first-hand inquiry strategies that focus on getting an in-depth understanding of why, how, and what users need in their natural settings through open-ended questions. These techniques include such things as interviews, field studies, questionnaires, and focus group discussions to observe and monitor user behavior.
Quantitative Research: Quantitative research utilizes structured methods to collect statistical data and analytics about user preferences, and patterns to test assumptions in large sample groups. This method includes research through surveys, data analysis, and online polls.
Good UX research explores:
-Clearly understanding and identifying the pain points
-Reveals user needs and business requirements
-Ask the right questions and frame problem statements.
-Share discoveries with various teams involved.
-Add features and create UX solutions to implement
-Test responses and evolve the design process.
A cross-disciplinary perspective on UX
As UX serves the greater purpose of aligning business goals with user-impacted product development, a great many people are connected through different tangents of information and input in the design process. The communication between the teams and their shared collaboration on the project are crucial to generating actionable insights. A cross-functional team collaborating with product leadership, marketing, sales, support, product development, and UX researchers can deliver a multitude of perspectives based on distinct user personas, preferences, and more. In UX design, the right solution lies in how simple, versatile, and functional the product is in serving its purpose. For this to actually work, the partnership of product leaders with UX researchers and other teams must be communicative and collaborative, with an open channel of contact to share, challenge, and leverage the differences of a cross-disciplinary perspective.
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Why does UX Research Matter ?
Are you pursuing a career as a UX/UI, User Research, or Product Design professional and struggling to explain the importance of UX research to your stakeholders and bosses? Do you have a hard time explaining the importance of UX research in job interviews? Then this is for you.
In any UX/UI or Research role at a company, you will always be working with business leaders, product managers, sales and marketing executives, engineering professionals, data scientists, and many more other departments that help create, build, sell, and make your product or service profitable and generate high ROIs.
The first step to take is to explain to each key stakeholder that their feedback & ideas have a direct role in defining the experience of the product or business that you all work for.
Now, explain to them that if all ideas and feedback are executed and implemented all at once and at the same time, then the feature will take a lot of effort to build and thus will take a lot longer to develop.
This is where UX research comes in, as while doing the user research, the company and stakeholders are collecting valuable and non-biased data from real user testers and their interactions with the product or service. All kinds of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies like SUS, SUPR-Q, Coding Pattern Analysis, and much more help and enable the team to prioritize features, frame clear problem statements, and achieve the highest ROI by picking features and requirements with the maximum user impact and also balance it with continuous iterative product development.
These insights into user experience-good or bad, become the guiding principles for building good products in an iterative and agile way. For example, the priorities can be based on any scale, like high, medium, low, could have, must have, should have, low effort with high impact, or any scale in the agile, scrum, kanban, or extreme programming frameworks.
So why is UX research important, you say? Because user research furthers the goal of prioritizing and building user-centered features that impact the product ROI while generating high user engagement and conversions.
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Why does UX research matter?
Good UX research explores:
-Clearly understanding and identifying the pain points
-Reveals user needs and business requirements
-Ask the right questions and frame problem statements.
-Share discoveries with the various teams involved.
-Add features and create UX solutions to implement
-Test responses and evolve the design process.
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Read about Embracing a UX Culture: The Key to Business Success in our next blog.
