A UX Researcher’s Guide to Understanding What Customers Want

We all know it’s important to understand what your customers want. When we have this information, we can deliver impactful, high value customer experiences. But how do we figure out what we need to know so we deliver what’s best? How do we create meaningful experiences for our customers? At Snapcommerce, these are the types of questions UX research strives to answer. Today we’ll take a look at the work UX research does to collect the insights we need to create a great customer experience.

At its core, UX (user experience) research is the practice of studying user interactions to understand user goals, needs, and motivations. Studying this information allows us to identify and improve possible friction points in user experience, and also to dig into the rationale motivating consumer behavior. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to deliver high quality customer insights at scale. The agility of UX research is one of the things that makes it such an exceptional tool and a key part of product success. It allows us to leverage data and insights throughout the entire product and development roadmap to ensure we always make data driven decisions. This results in empathetic design for our customers.

Every stage of the project cycle, from the design process to the product development stage, can benefit from different UX research methodologies. Regardless of the methodology we use, it’s critical that we understand why we are conducting research. Every step of the way, we ask questions like ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’ ‘Why are we trying to solve it?’ ‘Does this add value for the end-user?’ This ensures we are strategic with our research efforts.

The Benefits

UX research allows us to benefit our customers in many ways. Just a few ways we can benefit them include:

• Making sure our hypotheses are valid, based on real data from our customers.
• Prioritizing features to ensure that we design and deliver high value offerings.
• Saving time, money, and effort in the development process by doing iterative testing.
• Reducing risk by catching issues earlier with actual customers.

Human centered design and the Future of UX research at Snapcommerce

Customers want experiences that are personalized, accessible and inclusive. It’s important that customer needs are incorporated into the product development process to ensure the experiences we offer are inclusive to all of our customers. For example, is the research team gathering enough in-depth feedback to understand our customers with various types of disabilities, such as vision, mobility, and cognitive? Take the curb-cut effect phenomenon. Essentially, designs that were designed to assist people with disabilities become so widely used, that they are no longer viewed as assisting only that user group. It creates an environment that benefits a much larger population, enabling everyone to participate in those experiences.

At Snapcommerce, we understand the importance of being data driven and using mixed methods research for more insightful results. We gather important details from quantitative data that answers questions like ‘how much,’ how often,’ and ‘how many,’ and combine it with qualitative research. Adding the qualitative research allows us to dig deeper into the ‘why’ behind our quantitative metrics.

As we grow our UX research practice at Snapcommerce, we’re continually adding innovative research tools and approaches. The goal is to empower our team members outside of the research team to feel confident when they conduct customer research. Collaboration between designers, product managers, developers, and marketers is what makes UX research successful.

The Future of UX Research

The field of UX research continues to grow exponentially and is constantly evolving, which makes it so exciting. There are many innovative trends like AI and biometric devices (e.g., electrocardiogram) on the horizon. These tools allow researchers to gather data through physiological measurements and emotional analytics (e.g., eye tracking, heart rate monitoring, brain and facial responses, speech analysis etc). While there are still advancements being made in these areas, it demonstrates the exciting opportunities around the corner, and how we can continue to push the envelope when it comes to the methods in which we try to understand our customers. Layering complementary research approaches and tools gives us that holistic 360 perspective of our customers, so that we can ultimately deliver to them a more memorable and delightful overall experience.

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