Unsatisfying UX [survey results]

I have been working with UX research for two years now, and honestly, I found some things I to be frustrating. I wanted to understand if the same struggle was felt by other fellow UX’ers so I went out for a mission.

I thought I would reach out to the community and ask them to fill out a form. Woohoo, how exciting. Who wouldn’t want to spend 10 min of their time filling out a survey?

Things were not going that well, so I decided to do something to make the whole thing more appealing and somehow to crack a smile from fellow designers. With the hope that there would be few who would care to share.

I came up with the idea to put together a short video which I would call “Unsatisfying UX” where I would showcase some of the frustrating user experience examples with software.

Dedicated half of my Christmas holidays and used nearly all my motion graphics skill, I’ve managed to put together a 2 min video.

At the end, spamming all my friends and UX channels I was part of, I have managed to gather 31 responses.

Survey stats

This completion rate seems to correspond quite well with the average qualitative user research rates, that is around 20%.

I have focused my survey on 5 questions:

1. Which tools do you use to run your UX research?
2. How satisfied are you with the tools that you use for your research?
3. What is your UX research process?
4. How do you keep track of your research data?
5. The most difficult / the most annoying part of UX research process?

Let’s look what data tells us.

UX research tools

• 15 out of 31 users selected using Email for their UX research
• 14 out of 31 are using Invision App
• 12 out of 31 are using Google/Microsofts docs
• 11 out of 31 selected Google drive/Dropbox

And there was a bunch of other tools mentioned:

• MarvelApp
• RealTimeBoard
• Figma
• Sketch
• JIRA
• Pen and paper
• Lookback
• Usertesting.com
• skype
• google hangouts
• ethn.io
• Survey Monkey
• Typeform
• In-house remote user recording tool
• UserZoom
• WebEx
• SurveyGizmo for surveys
• Slack
• Hotjar
• Limesurvey

Tools satisfaction

We have so many tools available to us that the spectrum of them is quite wide. As of a result, users seems to be quite satisfied with the tools they get to use. The average satisfaction rate was around 7.

What’s your UX research process?

There are many different kinds of UX research methods and different types of practices around UX research. The biggest challenge is to know when to use which method.

UX research in most cases focuses on reading the documentation and technical specifications, running workshops or interviews with stakeholders to understand the problem or to test the solution.

Few of the survey users shared that tend to rely on the best practices online which they seek out when working on a specific project or specific type of issue.

As someone pointed to its essence what UX research is all about:

“Define the user(s), define the problem, build prototype, test, share insights, repeat”

But going a bit more in details around UX research process, it is important to start your project with the problem.

1 You need to talk to stakeholders/clients/target group to understand the problem to its essence. The biggest mistake UX’ers do sometimes is to assume that your client/project manager or other influential stakeholder knows all the problems and behaviors of the product/service user. Never take for granted and always seek out to talk to the end-user.

At this stage there are may ways to go. You could fire up a questionnaire using one of the survey platforms. Or you could reach out to existing customers, your customer’s customers, and to do face to face interviews.

It is somehow easier to execute this initial research phase when you work with a product company, while a bit more challenging when you live in an agency world and work with clients.

I can point out there are tools that could help you to understand user behavior such as inspectlet.com, that allows you to track the user clicks and users interactions. But this does not give you the full story why they are doing as they are.

2 Then once you’re clear on the problem you’re solving and you have gathered insights, it’s the right time to start working on personas/user stories and building up wireframes or low fidelity UI.

If you’re researching user behavior it might be worth building a more interactive prototype using some of the tools mentioned above (MarvelApp, Framer App, Invision App).

3 After following up with target group and stakeholders to test the prototype and solution, gather feedback and repeat. :)

User recruiting and feedback gathering is still a challenge

One of the most interesting research results was around the challenges UX’ers experience in their daily work. Users still think it’s a challenge finding and reaching out to users to execute the research. While there are tools to do that (userinterviews.com, usertesting.com or usabilityhub.com ) when it comes to specific target groups it might become a challenge.

Another challenge is making sense of the raw data and converting it to insights. At the end of the day when you have executed the research and have gathered a lot of feedback, it might be quite a task to go through it and drawing conclusions. Survey users tend to use different places and different methods to gather and categorize feedback but in most cases, they will end up using a big and complex spreadsheet document to categorize the data.

While there might be few challenges on the way and sometimes it might seem that there is no clear path towards the solution, you need to remember what an important job you’re doing. UX research is the most valuable way to hear the user’s voice, to understand the problems they are experiencing and to make that experience better. UX research is helping to make products and services frictionless and more intuitive.