How to Research Like a User Experience Designer
Designing and creating a new product is no easy task, and the process of getting to a final product involves many steps. One of the most crucial of these steps is user research because it can provide supporting evidence and opportunities that allow you to define your problem and ultimately begin building a solution. While every company may handle the product discovery process a little differently, I thought I would walk through some of the different research methods UX designers commonly use to begin their product development cycle.
To begin, research is often broken down into qualitative/quantitative research and attitudinal/behavioral research. Qualitative research is based on data that can not be measured in numbers, and quantitative research is research that can be measured in numbers. Quantitative research can provide statistical significance to qualitative research findings. Attitudinal research is in essence what the user says and behavioral is what they do. Research can reveal that these two do not always align, but can also reveal users desires, their emotional resonance and their actions.
One of the most common and useful methods of research for UX designers are user interviews, or conversing directly with potential and current users of a certain product. User interviews can give you clearer insight as to the motivations and psychographics of your end user, and can point our further areas of research you may need to look into. It is important to go into these user interviews with a clear goal and well formed questions, but to let the user do the talking.
Depending on the size of the company, stakeholder interviews may be another research tool used in the discovery process. These are formal interviews with stakeholders in the project and are used to identify business goals and opportunities. This is a good opportunity to find out what the business wants to accomplish from the project and can reveal potential risks you may encounter throughout the process.
One of the first things many UX designers will do is perform an analytic review on the company’s site or app to understand engagement and paint a picture of the current state of the product. Using these analytics (often through Google Analytics) can reveal what people did on your site and can help you understand why. Looking at the search analytics can reveal what people come to your site looking for, and even understand the words they use to search.
There are different ways to gather insights directly from your users, and one of the most common methods is conducting surveys, which help a company gain insight about a product or the company from its audience. Surveys are a good way to identifying patterns and testing assumptions and are most effective when used to ask questions that can be analyzed quantitatively, like “On a scale of 1 to 5…”. Open-ended questions can give further insight, but should not make up the majority of the survey as they are very time consuming and difficult to analyze. You can gain a higher level of statistical confidence when using surveys but this involves a larger sampling of people usually.
If you are redesigning an existing site or product, a heuristic evaluation is a good approach because it uses usability criteria to provide a qualitative review of a product or experience. Users will evaluate the interface and judge it typically to a predetermined scoring system that will allow you to understand your user’s impression of the interface and locate areas that need improvement. There are various ways to approach a heuristic evaluation — a popular one is Jacob Nielsen’s approach which focuses on the following 10 areas:
Another popular approach is Abby the IA’s method, which looks at these criteria in comparison:
Conducting a competitive analysis is very common in most industries and for many different roles, but this is an especially valuable tool for UX designers to understand the current product landscape. Analyzing what competitors are doing right or wrong can help your company avoid these same mistakes and reveal opportunities the competitor may have missed or not addressed. Keeping track of what and how competitors are doing consistently can help you stay relevant and ahead of industry trends. When looking at competitors, it can be valuable to look broadly at first and consider even those who are not direct competitors but that could provide inspiration or insight.
Card sorting may be one the of cheapest, fastest and most effective ways to understand macro taxonomies and help refine your information architecture. This is generally giving your user cards (digital or physical) and asking them to sort them in logical groupings and order. In doing this you can explore how people group items into categories and the ways in which they relate concepts to one another. This is a critical test to perform if you want to break out of the internal data structures you develop and identify different, more effective ways to organize your navigation, menus, and taxonomies.
On a broader scale, usability testing can collect data about how users directly interact with the technology and reveal how to improve the usability of your interface. As the designer, your job is to design these tests around tasks and scenarios that are reflective of the end goals of your users. These tests can also reveal how your user sees product vs. how the design and development teams see the product. Something you think is obvious and easy to find may not prove so for your user.
Sometimes the best way to understand your user is to just go watch them. Through user observation we can identify patterns of behavior, pain points and the places where a user might struggle to do something. Many times user observation can help us find areas of opportunity. It is helpful to be able to put yourself in their situation so you can experience and feel what the user is experiencing. Similarly, ethnographic research is about how people interact with one another. You can conduct ethnography studies by being a passive observer or by being an active participant and learning how to do their job for a week — both of these involve keeping a journal and documenting everything you observe.
Another common test to run when analyzing your product is A/B testing. This is comparing two versions of the same design to see which performs better statistically against a set goal. Usually this will randomly be sent out to users until a large enough sample size has been tested to determine the results. It is good to supplement a/b testing with qualitative research because it will not provide the why one performs better than the other. Using this same concept, you can also perform multivariate testing, which is similar to a/b testing but with 2+ versions of the design and layout.
From these methods, you can see that UX designers have a lot of research tools to help them create better experiences for their users. It is important to remember that while using this research methods, a designer should always provide context to help others understand user testing and its relevance. Bias is inevitable when conducting user research, but if you can understand the bias and manage around it that you can get very valuable data. Selecting the most effective methods from these and other research methods available to UX designers in relation to your project can ultimately help lead you to finding an impactful solution that keeps the user at the center of your product.
