Research and design
Research and design are two strong entities merged together to build a product or service, in today’s world if you build your product without user research it’s like killing your product even before it’s birth. R and D can be applied to anything and everything in today’s world.
In this blog I will be talking more about UX design research, in the recent times many of us have heard about UX Research and UX design, what is UX research and design?
UX Research is more about understanding the users and design is more about changing the way how users are using a system or app and making it more efficient, meaningful and effective. I feel there is a huge gap between humans and technology in the way human interacts with technology, through UX research and design one can hope to bridge that gap to an extent.
Research is something that is done in a very systematic way, we conduct research to test our theories and assumptions about users, to get in depth knowledge about what the user needs, how users behave with the product and try to learn as much as possible about the users requirements. Research gives us insights and methodical approach towards understanding the users. By conducting research, we can validate our theories and assumptions, arrive on a solution to the problem, and reduce tons of cost on a long run.
So how do we go about the UX research design, there is a systematic approach towards conducting the user research and design an experience for the users. What are we after when it comes to gathering user data? Those may be discovering new insights and getting to known about unknown patterns, create hypothesis and arrive at the conclusion, discover feasible solutions.
A research method consists of 3 categories:
- Qualitative & Quantitative
- Generative & Evaluative
- Behavioral & Attitudinal
Qualitative Research:
- Deals with descriptions.
- Data can be observed but not measured.
- Colors, textures, smells, tastes, appearance, beauty, etc.
Quantitative Research:
- Deals with numbers.
- Data which can be measured.
- Length, height, area, volume, weight, speed, time, temperature, humidity, sound levels, cost, members, ages, etc.
Generative research:
· This type of research deals with finding opportunities for solutions and making way for innovation
· In order to conduct Generative research, one must define the problem areas that they want to solve
· The best approach to conduct this research is to be open about the grey area, as we are not quite sure about the problem what we are trying to solve
Evaluative research:
· This type of research deals with testing the current solution to check if its meeting the user needs, efficient, ease of access and meaningful.
· This type of research needs to be conducted throughout the product development life-cycle.
· As it involves lot of iterative designs and the users are exposed often to the design, the best part about this research is that, we get opportunity to design an experience truly to the needs of users.
Behavioral Research:
· Behavioral research is all about the how people behave, react, and respond to.
· It gives us data on what’s happening
· Examples of this type of research are, Usability testing, A/B testing, Eye tracking
Attitudinal Research:
· Attitudinal Research is to understand, measure people stated believes.
· Examples of this type of research are, Surveys, focus groups, card sorting.
The main goal of design research is to design the process from the end user perspective. It’s the design research that helps us prevent making a mistake of designing to one particular user that’s none other than ourselves(designers).
It’s a well-known fact that the purpose of UX is to design keeping the end user in mind and it’s the research that tells us about the persona, in what context they will use the product/service and what are they expecting from the product.
Research has two parts, gathering data and synthesizing the data in order to improve the overall experience of the product.To sum it up briefly, the project starts with the design research which is focused on gathering data on project requirements from product owners and getting an idea on the needs and goals of the end user. Later researchers will start interviewing users, observes current users and reviews existing data. Then the research shifts its focus on the usability part of it. Researcher conducts A/B tests, usability to test and the data we gather from the research will eventually improve the overall experience of the product. This is how UX design and research will help in its unique way in building a user-centered product.
