UX Research Tips: 5 Pro Tips for Fruitful User Experience Research
Kick off your UX research plan with these helpful tips and UX research tools from Prototype1.
Starting your user experience research can seem daunting, but if your strategy is smart and approachable, you can get immeasurable feedback to improve your product. User testing for app and website usability helps you determine people’s goals, needs and behaviors before you sink a bunch of funds into a set-in-stone design. You get to spend time with your current and prospective users and drill down on the elements that make them stay or go.
Many people assume that user experience design research simply isn’t necessary, but we disagree: investing in early-stage website testing can save you time and money. In fact, the ROI of user testing is incredibly high. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), fixing a post-development error can cost you 100 times more than it would had it been fixed before! Watch Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s talk regarding the ROI of UX for more.
Some Great Tips for User Research
1. Rethink Your Numbers — Thorough UX research doesn’t require big numbers of participants. As we’ve covered in the past, it’s still smart to test with only five users in order to get big returns for less money. Although a sample size of five works in many situations, you’ll want to determine the goals of your testing before picking a number. If you need to test in several rounds to target different users (i.e., parents and kids), want to gather statistics or need to perform eye-tracking studies, you’ll need more than five users.
2. Pick the Right Participants — This is especially important if you’re going with the five-user method. You want to first screen potential users with an initial questionnaire that helps you understand whether or not the user is indeed a person who would qualify as your target user. Remember, if you’re planning to do iterative usability testing, you will almost always need to screen and recruit a new batch of users for each testing round. When screening, be sure to define “usability study” and outline the purpose and scope of your study to potential participants.
3. Ask the Proper Questions — Your UX research questionnaire should be something like a courtroom cross-examination: you never want to ask leading questions that could skew the user’s response. For example, consider framing questions like “How visually appealing is the design to you, on a scale of 1 to 10?” instead of “How attractive is the design to you?” You also want to make sure you’re structuring your questions in a way that all users understand by eliminating jargon and using plain language that won’t alienate users. Remember to define key words or concepts before you integrate them into a question.
4. Mitigate Personal Bias — Okay, we know this is a tough one. As the purveyor of the product’s feedback, it is absolutely essential that you do your best to avoid your own bias towards the project. You can try to steer your perspective in this direction by remaining focused on the value of criticism and focusing on the immeasurable worth of an outsider’s point of view. When you’re immersed in a project, it can be really easy to overlook its quirks. If you have the right subset of participants, it will be easier to see the value in their opinions.
5. Pre-Test — Once you’ve built out your screening questionnaire or come up with a list of questions you want to pose during the testing stage, you can quickly perform a round of testing on team members to make sure that your questions are clear, straightforward and hyper-focused on what you need answered. Naturally, this step is incredibly valuable when performing qualitative testing over quantitative testing. Ensuring that your study is free of errors, confusing statements or off-track questions is important to a snafu-free testing strategy.
Originally published at prototype1.io.
