7 ways to make your UX research more effective

“I don’t like blue”.

“This navigation doesn’t make sense to me”

“That picture looks weird”

These were the conversations we would earlier have with product managers. Decisions were taken based on personal likes and dislikes. Companies were always in a hurry to launch a product, and just couldn’t find time to invest in a detailed UX Research study.

Over the years, the UX Research scene has rapidly evolved — from being a ‘good to have’ to a ‘must have’. What’s more, research is no longer a ‘practice’ that works in one corner of a business. It is being utilized by everyone — from marketing & sales, to product and service support teams. Every customer facing department has a research team now.

Here are some tips from my work across multiple businesses, that could make your UX Research a lot more effective and revealing.

1. Make Use of Your Data

Very often, I see UX Researchers jump into talk about research groups & interview scripts, without making the effort to study insights that are already available via the web.

There is probably a ton of data already available on the product you are researching. Make full use of it! Some of them include:

· Service Support Tickets: You’ll get a wealth of information by just studying the kind of tickets customers raise, the time taken for resolution, the number of escalations, and the type and percentage of recurring issues.

· Product usage data: If the product you are researching has a software tool, studying the usage analytics (bounce rates, pages most visited, search behavior, average time spent on the application) gives you a lot of insight into what’s working and failing. I personally find heatmap tools such as Hotjar extremely useful in understanding the visual experience of users (what do they notice, what do they click, what gets ignored, how far do they scroll)

· Customer Survey Forms: If there have been surveys run in the past, dive into the survey forms and connect the dots — what do users like about the product, what do they not like, and what are the recurring themes you can find across all the responses.

· Forums & Community Blogs: Forums, interest/fan communities, and focused groups can be a great source to understand pain-points and new feature requests. It is amazing how creative and innovative your customer community can be.

· Talk to Customer Facing Staff: Since these employees spend the maximum time with customers, include hearing feedback from them as part of your research data collection exercise. You’ll be surprised to hear insights that might never have been captured anywhere else.

2. Go Guerilla

For all the businesses that don’t have either the time or budgets to do a thorough primary research study, go guerilla! This is the cheapest and fastest alternative to a detailed generative research.

Simply put, guerilla testing is a means of gathering quick feedback by taking an idea, design or prototype into the public domain and asking random people for their thoughts. By public domain, you could either go to a physical location such as a shopping mall or a park or even conduct a virtual study by finding your research participants on social media.

A few things to keep in mind:

· Choose a location where you can easily find relevant target participants. In general, guerilla research works best in situations where your participants don’t need specialized knowledge. Don’t go around looking for specialized financial knowledge in a park.

· Another very important aspect is CONTEXT. Always choose an environment that somewhat resembles the conditions present when using your actual product. For example, researching on a car parking finder application in a public place that has ample public parking, will give you misleading results.

· Avoid relying on just one location (physical or virtual) for your guerilla research. You face the risk of running into bias by talking to people from just one location. Switch around a little bit and travel to a few locations to eliminate such bias.

· Remember that not every passerby will be comfortable talking to you or opening-up about their experiences. Pay attention to any discomfort and give your participants the option to leave at any time.

· It’s best if you avoid sensitive topics such as sex, money, and relationships in your guerilla research initiatives.

3. Shop Research

For the lack of a better term, shop research is the concept of observing your participants purchase the very same kind of product you are researching on, from any business, store or website in the market.

In a ‘shopping research’ study, you don’t mandate any specific website or company that your users need to purchase from. They are free to browse the web or visit their favorite store/website, and make the purchase.

The advantage here is that rather than limiting the activity of your users to a specific website or store, you are gaining insights into their overall behavior when performing a specific task. By observing their behavior and asking probing questions, you’ll understand how your users think — their preferences, expectations, needs & frustrations.

4. Get your Participants to Narrate Incidents

I have often read research scripts with questions such as “Tell us the problems you face when using this product” or “What are the biggest challenges you face in your job?”.

Let’s turn the tables for a bit. If you were asked this very same question, how holistic would your response be? Would you be able to narrate all the challenges or issues you currently face? You would probably not remember more than half of them in the moment.

But if I would rather ask “Take me through what happened when you went camping last time and it began to rain” or “Narrate the sequence of events that transpired when you couldn’t find a parking spot at that particular location”, your response would bring forth a flurry of emotions & animated gestures. You’ll share insights & happenings that I could never learn by asking the first set of questions.

We as humans explain best when narrating a real-life incident. It is through the sharing of these experiences that we best understand how a person thinks, feels, and acts. Move away from standard research questions and do what it takes to get your research participants to engage with you — physically, emotionally & mentally.

5. Let sharing be a two-way street

A great way to build trust with your research participants is to narrate relevant incidents from your personal life. In several of my conversations, when I could sense a degree of discomfort or hesitancy from my research participants, I would turn the conversation by talking about a time when I was in that very same messy situation, and the things I did to come out of it.

When you open-up and talk about your personal experiences, it builds a rapport with your participants who, in turn, feel more comfortable to share their own stories.

6. Study the entire ecosystem around your product

A mistake I very often see researchers do is that they are so fixated on their specific product application, forgetting that an entire ecosystem exists around that product.

No user uses your product in isolation. There are a multitude of ecosystem factors — physical, emotional, and mental — that influence the experience they have with your product. Some of these factors could be under your control and the other may not. This is where it gets tricky.

What do you do if your product is being used by customers in areas with weak phone signal strength or poor lighting conditions? What if many of your customers have disabilities or seem to be in a stressed/distracted condition when using the product? If your users love to multi-task and have 5 applications running at the same time, how will your design and user experience change?

While no UX research study can list down every single environmental constraint, it is good to capture as many of these use-cases as possible. That way, your product teams can make informed decisions on what they will and will not prioritize on, during the design phase.

7. Leave Rating Scales for Surveys

How many of your interview scripts have questions such as:

• “Rate your experience of using this app from a scale of 1 to 5”
• “How likely are you to recommend this game to friend, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

While rating scales work great for surveys, I have personally not found them very useful in ground-research. Research participants often try to be diplomatic when answering such questions. Their responses are not necessary an accurate reflection of what they think. Plus, I have found it very difficult to baseline and normalize such ratings across all the different interviews.

Rather than focusing on ratings, tweak your questions to derive maximum insight from your participants. A few examples could be:

• What is your favorite app for ordering food? Could you open it for us, show us how you order food on it, and what you love about it?”
• How often do you recommend games to your friends? What encourages you to make these recommendations?”

And finally, if you want to be a great UX researcher, try and be on the other side every now and then. Enroll as a research participant at various usability studies.

You’ll be able to better empathize with participants once you have experienced how it feels like to be one. Furthermore, you’ll learn some great tricks from fellow researchers by observing them in action.