What kind of UX research to do
Good UX research is all about gaining a better understanding of what your end users want. Best practices suggest a few proven methods to employ:
Good UX research is all about gaining a better understanding of what your end users want. Best practices suggest a few proven methods to employ:
1) User interviews and surveys: the main objective here is to gain an understanding of your users’ goals, what motivates them, their pain points and the different tasks, dependencies and opportunities in the task flow.
2) User persona development: remember to base your personas on “real users” that will actually be using the product. Your personas should capture the users’:
- motivations for using your product
- technical abilities
- environmental profile
- actions that they want to achieve
Lastly, persona development should clarify assumptions about users and their tasks in order to help create a realistic user journey.
3) Customer journey maps: with this step the goal is to understand the users’ stories. Customer journey maps illustrate the interactions that users go through when engaging with an interface/product. In other words, they give you the ability to visualize the outcome of the design solution allowing you to explore and design for the users' task needs and wants.
Other methods include: card sorting, site analytics, heuristic evaluation, and focus groups.
The UX bottom line
There’s nothing romantic about it. If you want to increase the rate of acceptance and adoption of your project and reduce re-development time by as much as 50%, you need to invest in your UX research.
There’s nothing romantic about it. If you want to increase the rate of acceptance and adoption of your project and reduce re-development time by as much as 50%, you need to invest in your UX research.
Check out this great article: “UX, Without User Research, Is Not UX” -http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/
Whitepaper: “UX Research and Market Research” - A Conversation with Apala Lahiri Chavan, Human Factors International -http://info.humanfactors.com/acton/attachment/4167/4167:f-0045/1/
About UXD Group: Our goal is to collect and analyze data, to understand the user’s expectations of the breadth and depth of their end tasks. uxdgroup.com