UX Research — Desk Research (Secondary Research)
So till now, we have discussed there are few techniques which are used for UX research
In the previous blog, we have cover what is card sorting and how it works
Next is Desk research
IntroductionTypes of desk research
-Internal Research
-External Research Sources
- Online Research
- Government Published Data
- Customer (User) research
1. Introduction
Desk research is like you find the details of place on the map while traveling.
Sounds funny but this is a simple way to describe.
That’s why it is also known as secondary research because most of the places are explored data.
What we are doing here is just get data from already researched data (Primary researched).
But before proceeding with this research first we need to prepare the questionnaire, And interview stakeholders or few users. It will help us to find specific answers to data. Sometimes we find more questions from the answers so it’s win-win…
The questionnaire can be:
1)Why are we doing this?
2)Who are our main stakeholders and what is their concern?
3)What is the current state of the product experience?
4)What we can learn from our competitors?
5)What do we know about current usage?
6)Who are our users and what they want?
7)Are they technical constraints?
You will find pain points of users or stakeholders like:
-The users want more features on the online shopping app.
-Stakeholder wants to improve the success rate of the product.
-Stakeholder wants more users on a home page, etc..
2 Types Of Research
There are two types of desk research methods:
2.1)Internal Research — Internal research can be treated as the most reasonable starting point of research for any organization.
Let’s take an example of the product of the HR system. you do not need to go outside of the office and interview people. You can find data easily about what are the features used most by employees. what are the problems that need to be solved? Do they find features useful? What type of data should be on the dashboard and what should be not?
A tool like Hotjar available for product analysis online.
2.2) External Research — External Research involves research done outside the organization for collecting relevant information.
These resources can be below:
- Online Research — There is so numerous amount of data available online. It’s important for a team to be specific while fetching out this information as there are billions of pages available on the internet. And that’s when our questionnaire helps.
Look, if you are a designer and designing home page for e-commerce website and you start merging Amazon’s and Flipkart’s homepage sections for your design Well that’s neither online research nor UX.
Research is all about thought bigger picture of your project. A simple technique is to search on google with your keyword with the addition of more keywords like “trends”, “Online”, “Specific Year”, “Research Paper” “pdf” “doc”.
Remember, Always save the documents you read and cite it. Give credits to the writers of papers.
Example, after I search for these “trends online shopping” on google and I got the link:
https://acadpubl.eu/jsi/2018-119-7/articles/7b/34.pdf for Recent Trends in Consumers‘ Online Buying Behavior in Chennai India.
which is researched by AP ijpam.eu. And we got so many stats for users’ behavior on buying things online.
2. The Government published data — The government usually publishes data online that can be used in the research This data can be related to social, financial and economic aspects.
And you know what the government websites are mostly free to access and contain the most Notable information.
3. Customer (User) research: When you are new in the market then this is the method. For this, the Researcher needs to directly communicate with the existing customer or Need to be a detective:), means the need to communicate with the competitor’s customers and collect relevant data from them at an early stage.
Mostly finds the problems and maybe solutions sometimes for the projects. We also find then trends in the market and the actual needs of people.
There are so many tools available for online survey and hiring users for testing online Lookback.io
You will find So many numbers and real-time data. Save all the documents to create a presentation and then you can tell the stakeholders(clients) in which way we should proceed. Sometimes you got an idea for the features to add and to start a new business.
After the desk research, we got stats(numbers, graphs, charts) on what kind of data is important for the project. We can take care of those things while analysis & wireframing.
Next, we will see the most accurate method which is User Testing and some list of the Tools.
So till then Keep researching…
