What is User Experience Research?
Understand the problem to find truly valuable solutions
User experience (UX) research is the study of user behavior. This helps you uncover problems they encounter and find design opportunities. It gives you insight into why people use your products, how they use it and why they pay for it, enabling you to improve your products and deliver more value.
Why is UX research needed?
UX research allows you to empathize with your users. This helps your to understand:
- why people do what they do
- what problem your product/service exactly solves
- how important that problem is to people
- why people would buy your solution
This has some great business benefits:
- By finding the real problems and solving those, you create real value for people
- By understanding your user’s problems, you prevent wasting resources on problems that are not important to them
- Talking with users can spark new ideas and business opportunities
- Understanding your users helps you understand the market and can help you shape business strategy
Example
Imagine your train company wants to get more people to take the train instead of the car. You do some brainstorming and come up with some great ideas, like free wifi and USB chargers so people can work during their trip. You have endless meetings about how to install the internet routers and wiring into existing trains. When after some months the project is done and all the trains are outfitted with wifi and chargers, there’s still no increase in train travelers.
This time you’ll go out and do some proper research:
- You talk with users, conduct interviews.
- You do some “people-watching”, conduct an observation.
- You combine these methods. This is called a contextual inquiry.
Users are quick to tell you that they don’t take the train because it’s hard to find the timetables on the website. They take the car so at least they’re sure to arrive on time to their appointments. You didn’t understand the problem, so your solution was irrelevant.
Understand the problem
People like to “think in solutions” and get to the results as quickly as possible. But when you don’t understand the problem, you’re just blindly shooting and hoping to hit the target.
When you truly understand a problem, the solutions will present themselves
UX research can deliver a lot of value to an organization by helping you understand the problems you need to solve. But your research needs to be organized well to maximize its impact. That’s where having a good research repository come in.
The single best book on the topic of UX research is Think Like a UX Researcher. I highly recommend anyone in UX to read it as it outlines all the ins and outs of UX research and strategy in a very simple and clear way/
