What is UX (User Experience)?
UX (User Experience) is the most significant part of a new or existing product whose main income stream is based on the user’s generated revenue. When a user finds it difficult to interact with a product, it has the User Experience Research (UX research) team to blame. User experience is, therefore, a graphical representation of a product or service using images, text, or graphics.
What is UX research (User Experience research)?
UX research can be described as a systematic investigation of users and their requirements, in order to add context and insight to the process of designing the User Experience.
Most times, UX researcher employs verity of techniques, tools, and methodologies to draw conclusions, uncover facts, and determine problems, thereby revealing valuable information which can be fed into the design process.
The process of gathering information from users through a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability testing could be a set goal and aim of UX research. The focus is on the systematic way of gathering and interpreting data.
When to conduct UX research?
Conducting such research is suitable during the generative (Ideation) and evaluative (Validation) stages of a development process. UX research can be very helpful to the User Experience design team by way of informing, validating assumptions, and further reduce the cost of delivering a successful product. It is aimed at analyzing real-life phenomena in order to furnish detailed facts, thus cannot be used to generate or improve a theory.
Five guiding principles for UX research: The best researchers don’t rely on a single tool, they deploy a host of different methods, tools, etc., and put it all together at the end. This gives you a chance to discover a real-life problem and fix them.
Below are the five most important principles to follow for effective user experience research.
1. It’s easier to find “You got it wrong”.
Research can be faster when we get something wrong. Imagine if you create a new product thesis and three of your research participants already hates it.
2. Testing with one user.
You rather test with one user and avoid thousands of other users facing the same problem in the future. Some problems are universal and it takes only a user to point them out.
3. Usability It is impossible to measure usability.
What can be measured is when something is not usable, because of the change from user to user and product to product. Finding a problem is more difficult than assuming there’s no problem.
4. Grow your tool kit You will never identify which tool is better if you don’t put them to use. Methodologies and tools will definitely emerge as time flies, don’t dismiss them without trying them even if they suck, you’ll have learned they suck rather than assuming.
5. Keep short reports
The method you used was innovative and incredible enough for the job, but you don’t have to write a book to send the message across. If you research to have wide value in the organization, keep your report to the minimum. However, don’t be limited in the process.
The need for better UX
All products, whether digital or otherwise, must deliver a high-quality User Experience or stand a risk of losing their users to competitors. Moreover, a product is useless without a good UX, products with better UX sell better, in fact, design-centric businesses often outperform the average market by almost double. It’s therefore of utmost importance for existing and emerging companies to deliver high-quality UX for their products.