What is User Research? How to Build a User Research Culture
- 1. How User Research Helps Users & Business By Vani J.
- 2. Table of Content What is User Research? Types of User Research Data Gathered During User Research Why do we need user research How it Helps Business How to build a User Research Culture
- 3. “To be a great designer, you need to look a little deeper into how people think and act.” —Paul Boag, Cofounder of Headscape Limited
- 4. What is User Research? User experience research is the systematic investigation of your users in order to gather insights that will inform the design process. With the help of various user research techniques, you’ll set out to understand your users’ needs, behaviours, attitudes, and pain-points.
- 5. “User research focuses on understanding user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations through methodical, investigative approaches. Insights are then used to ensure that all product design decisions do benefit the user”
- 6. Types Of User Research Qualitative Research Quantitative Research Descriptive data which looks more at how people think and feel. It helps to find your user’s opinions, problems, reasons, and motivations. Statistical data that can be measured and analysed, looking more at the statistics. Quantitative data is used to quantify the opinions and behaviours of your users. 1 2
- 7. Types of Qualitative Research
- 8. Fast and low cost testing methods such as on the street videos, field observations, reviews of paper sketches or online tools for remote usability testing. Guerrilla Testing
- 10. One on one interviews that follow a preset selection of questions prompting the user to describe their interactions, thoughts and feelings in relation to a product or service, or even the environment of the product/service. Interviews
- 11. Participatory groups that are led through a discussion and activities to gather data on a particular product or service. Focus Groups
- 12. Observations of users completing particular tasks in a controlled environment. Users are often asked to describe out loud their actions, thoughts and feelings and are videoed for later analysis. In-Lab Testing
- 13. Types of Quantitative Research
- 14. Questionnaires with a structured format, targeting your specific user personas. These can be a great way to get a large amount of data. Surveymonkey is a popular online tool. Survey
- 15. Visual mapping of data showing how users click and scroll through your prototype or website. The most well known online tool to integrate would be Crazyegg. Heat Mapping
- 16. Measures the gaze of the eye, allowing the observer to ‘see’ what the user sees. This can be an expensive test and heatmapping is a good cheaper alternative. Eye Tracking
- 17. Comparing two version of a web page to see which one converts users more. This is a great way to test button placements, colours, banners and other elements in your UI. A/B Testing
- 18. User research rarely relies on just one form of data collection, and often uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods together to form a bigger picture. The data can be applied to an existing product to gain insight to help improve the product experiences, or it can be applied to an entirely new product or service, providing a baseline for UX, design and development.
- 19. Who? Users What? Needs What? Want How? Currently Do Things How? They’d like to do them Data Gathered
- 20. Research helps in designing with real insights and facts not guess work!
- 21. Benefits of User Research •To build an empathetic, user-focused company that aligns the product and business strategy with the core needs and goals of users •To understand how people perform tasks and achieve their goals in order to design an effective and pleasurable UX •To create a shorter development time upfront, with a clear vision of what you are trying to build •To solve differences in opinion of “what should we do now?” by replacing it with the phrases: “lets test it” or “lets see what the research showed us” •By constantly employing user research, we can track the ROI of UX to see where our ideas and iterations are working, and where we need to improve
- 23. “When you know your customer inside and out, that’s when you’re able to come up with ideas, messaging and tactics that will change the growth trajectory of your business”
- 24. How It helps Business • Increase user satisfaction: deliver exactly what your target wants • Decrease costs in the long term: save on development and redesign efforts • Get qualitative feedback which helps you to improve user’s interactive experience increasing conversion rate • Understand what best supports user’s goals and motivations: focus on the features that really matter to your target • Gain a competitive advantage: stand out from the crowd, be always 1 step ahead of your competitors, create a “wow” effect • Shorten the learning curve for new users: make your product easy-to-use • Have not only beautiful design, but smart one: putting your user in the center of your design strategy
- 25. Examples
- 26. User research made Samsung change its TV design strategy to focus on making more minimalistic designs that fit into the customer’s home doubling their market share in just two years. Although TVs have not gotten smaller, everything extraneous has been removed. As we see here, the TV functions as a gallery-sized moving picture.
- 27. Amazon encourages developers to do continual A/B testing of different versions of user interfaces so that they are always updated on how different variations of their designs are performing, and they have provided a software tool to help easily set up tests. Amazon is the largest internet retailer in the world. so, you could argue that Jeff Bezos’ strategy has been something of a success.
- 28. WikiWand is a good example of a company that makes a living from providing a great user experience. Their product is a plugin which changes the design of Wikipedia articles to make them more appealing and user friendly.
- 29. How to Build a User Research Culture In many organisations, user research creates friction. It directly challenges the intuition of others, often at the highest levels. It slows product development. It costs money. It has no clear ROI. Build a team of internal allies Change begins by building relationships with other internal advocates.Working with multiple departments quickly shifts the conversation from a design- or UX- centric language to the broader goals of user research—customer satisfaction and brand advocacy. 1
- 30. Create a framework for user research The goal is to define a set of user research principles to guide your organisation. At Yahoo, they identified four principles: timely, believable, actionable, and surprising. (“Believable,” for Yahoo, meant “statistical valid or credible” not “aligned with intuition or experience.”) Share user research with your team Where do you keep customer journey maps? What about user personas? For most organisations, they’re buried in file folders or isolated within small teams. That reinforces the idea that user research is, for example, “marketing’s job,” rather than a company focus. 2 3
- 32. Prototype a change based on user research. A prototype validates an improvement in the user experience. While prototyping is far easier in the digital space—a redesigned app UI is cheaper to mock up than a prototype for the phone it operates on—a bare-bones approach can yield a persuasive impact. Build a proof of concept for your prototype. A great prototype isn’t necessarily a profitable one—it may not address the underlying UX issue or may be implemented incorrectly, two failures that can torpedo anticipated benefits to the user experience and the bottom line. A proof of concept tests the business value of a prototype. 4 5
- 34. Questions?
- 35. Thank You