What is UX Research?
How could customers value your product if you don’t know what they need?
User experience research (UX Research) is inseparable from creating a desirable user experience (UX). UX research helps you to understand how to make people value and enjoy using your products or services. Thus, UX research can help you to achieve your business goals.
Imagine that you are a great coffee lover. You know everything about coffee and have an idea to open a cafe. What you don’t know about are your potential customers. Who would come to your cafe? How to make them never wanting to leave and craving for return? How to make them choose your cafe instead of your competitor’s coffee shop around the corner? Let us welcome UX research. UX research will identify your customers’ needs, wants, expectations, habits, values, and even the most subconscious, concealed hopes, and desires. The earlier you figure these things out, the more desirable experience you’re able to offer to the customers. The better you know your customers, the more conscious business decisions you’re able to make.
UX research studies can be conducted at the beginning of the early development process as well as whenever a product or service is being changed or redesigned and requires feedback from the users and customers. For example, in Kiwi.com, we conduct regular interviews with our users and customers to explore how they travel and understand how they perceive Kiwi.com’s product and service. We do guerrilla usability testing to collect feedback on the initial prototypes of a new product. We apply usability testing on almost finalized designs. And after the release of the product, we analyze the customers’ feedback and reviews.
UX research brings together researchers of various backgrounds. For example, in our UX Research team in Kiwi.com, we have researchers with a background in human-computer interaction, design, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and computer science. This makes the team highly diverse, enabling them to apply different research approaches. However, the rule of thumb that no UX researcher can overlook is the choice of research methods. When conducting UX research, it is crucial to choose the right research methods to avoid biases in the results. As UX research professionals we analyze each study case separately to understand what are the questions that need answers, and based on this, decide on the most appropriate methods.
In Kiwi.com, the role of the UX researcher is twofold. On the one hand, UX researchers aim to meet the needs of a project as well as Kiwi.com as a company. UX researchers work closely with designers and product managers to be able to provide the most relevant research that the product or service needs in a certain phase of development. UX researchers can also give valuable input for marketing, brand, and sales teams, helping them to establish meaningful relationships with users and customers. On the other hand, the UX researcher’s role is to be an ambassador for users and customers, communicating their needs, wants, struggles, behaviors, mindsets, etc. to the stakeholders.
What about you? Have you ever tested your idea or designs with users or customers? Let us know!
In the next post, we will write about UX Research methods and when to apply them. Stay tuned 🙌
This post is co-authored by the wonderful colleague Zaneta Kucarova, Kiwi.com UX Researcher.
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