What do UX researchers really want
By: Tanvi Punjabi
Tags: User Research, Careers, UX, User Experience, UX Research

What do UX researchers really want

Many thanks to @designmortals for been the guiding force behind this article.

If you are a member of the UX / Product Design or Product Management / Development Team, it’s likely, that by this time, you have instinctive awareness of the value research brings to your company.

If not, fret not. I’m right here with you!

But before jumping into nitty-gritty of UX research, it’s good to understand when and why do organizations get serious about Research.

Whether its discovering vaccines for COVID- 19 or making sure that we use existing information of the medical treatments to treat patients with mild symptoms in the best possible ways, Research plays a significant role to find answers to things that were not known before.

But Why is research crucial? Can’t we just leverage already existing data and program it back into the system to achieve definite outcomes? Well, quite frankly speaking, No.

The purpose of research is to establish facts and fill the gaps in existing knowledge so as to determine alternative ways to arrive at a conclusion.

Search intent for “user research” has risen 4.25x in the last 10 years.

For instance, it would be prudent on your part to research about the style, form, charges, timings of a Dance Academy before buying membership because it will help to match your relevant interest with their services offered.

According to The State of User Research Report 2020, 80% of people who do research feel like they could be doing more research.

But do companies get serious about research. And if yes, then when?

Honestly, it depends. If the information they’re looking for is already out there with full reports of data or when marketing budget allotted to research is more expensive than beneficial, some companies ought to skip research phase.

On the other hand, if a small proportion of investment on research helps the organization make better informed decisions about consumer needs, explore potential threats & opportunities on product improvisation, discover emerging trends, then research makes sound business sense.

So, What’s UX Research?

UX Research is conducted to put forward a blueprint covering basic focus areas of the business in front of the users to analyze their pain problems, generate insights on how they interact with it and add real-time context to reveal information that can be fed into the design process.

Did I just put too many things on your plate?

Well, worry not. We’ll get off on the right foot as and when we explore the intricacies of UX Research.

The UX research process by Erin Sanders at Frog.

Think of UX Research as a study where the user’s behavior is observed while they interact with your product. What would it take for you to make their interaction more exciting?

Conversing with the users via Polls, conducting surveys, taking in person interviews; this although may seem too time-consuming but its not a lot of work if you would like to give your users a smooth and frictionless experience on your platform.

“You are not your user and you cannot think like a user unless you’re meeting users regularly.” — Leisa Reichelt, Head of Research and Insights at Atlassian.

Who Is A UX Researcher?

UX Researcher is like a Risk Mitigator with the cognitive ability to understand human perception and is an expert at human judgment decision making.

Simply stated, a researcher reveals unique user needs, explores their behaviors & motivations and tries to solve most challenging questions in design.

The FAST User Experience Research framework

They try to observe how people use icons, the kind of patterns they have in their mind during playing a game and try to understand why they do the way they do an activity.

“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” -Steve Jobs

Are There Research Types?

Of course! Every day has a night, every User Research Method has a type!

There are two main types:

Qualitative Research-

· Focuses on assessing behavior based on observation by collecting non-numerical data from interviews, surveys containing open-ended questions among 10–30 people from the target group.

· The data helps to find patterns, trends and commonality across key categories under which most of the target group audience falls.

· Another facet of Qualitative Research is Usability Testing where, how usable or easy the design is for the users, is monitored to observe their stress response. It is important to not let your personal views affect key findings.

Qualitative vs Quantitative UX Research

Quantitative Research-

· Focuses on collecting data that can be measured, computed and transformed into usable statistics to understand what users do and test assumptions drawn from qualitative research.

· It is performed during a mission critical task where you need large sample size to be 98% confident about usability findings to understand where your TG agrees on different ideas, behaviors or motivation.

· This helps us to understand which Target Group to go for and how to prioritize the product features for them before hitting the first addressable audience.

· Platform agnostic tools like System Usability Scale can be used to evaluate the usability of a website

Who Should You Talk To?

“Testing with just 5 users can uncover 85% of usability problems.” -Nielsen Norman Group.

Building a product necessitates the adjustment of site based on user expectations and needs and you simply need to know what those expectations and needs are.

But to begin with, you need to find users who will use your product and services.

Social Media can be a great start for finding your target audience.

Let’s say, you’re selling a design course. In this case, you can find people actively looking to enroll in a Design Course from different Facebook UI/UX groups or create post with relevant hashtags to reach target audience who also follow other design accounts.

You could also create Ads for potential learners to fill up an enquiry form or perform a quick search on LinkedIn for people seeking Design Course and look for followers of your competition-other Design Course Providers.

Once you get their co-ordinates, you can create a survey for interview using Google Forms or alternatively, connect visitors from your functional website to your questionnaire using SurveyMonkey , Hotjar polls or Qualaroo .

Should You Script Questionnaire?

Should we predetermine how the conversation goes?

The mainstream response: Depends.

Although it might reduce the chances of spontaneity or new discovery and possibly make the conversation mechanical, a user interview script helps to establish basis to keep the users informed and talk to them comfortably about your product.

WHEN to have it scripted:

· Depending on the user type and what you’re trying to learn from them, it should be scripted when you have to ask formal questions and collect data in the same way, for instance, while doing a scientific research.

· If the way of asking is different, it will elicit a different response so that way you can control the variance by asking the same questions in the script.

· It’s advisable to have the Introduction scripted since the foundation remains the same. Sometimes it’s difficult for a researcher to have all questions answered and so it becomes difficult to act natural during the interview.

WHEN NOT to have scripted:

· When you don’t know the finite focus areas that users want to be questioned for since its keeps varying depending on user journey, it is better to have a flexible flow, keeping the pain points in mind.

· This is used for field study where we need to understand what user does in a particular scenario and hence, we frame higher level questions based on certain theme.

· Regardless of scripting the interview, one important aspect is not to ask interviewees if they want to have a module or a feature on the site.

· Key point is to understand what the user would like to achieve from your site and get insights on problems they might encounter along the way.

You can’t treat Target Users as Inputs on an Excel Sheet…

After gathering the data from user interview, looking straight into metrics could be misleading.

As a part of Findings, key categories should be determined based on the Affinity or likelihood of users falling in a particular category. Essentially, key categories help to solve underlying pain points of the business.

Based on the pattern or most frequent characteristic observed in the user behavior, users can be further grouped into Personas.

Personas help to define generic or fictional profile which is independent of actual user demography or age but based on features, interests and needs.

“Personas are like actors in UX movie and help to decide personality traits those actors possess.” -Design Mortal Academy.

What is the role of UX Research in design?

UX Research, which is mostly done during the early Discover Stage, aims to make the product more usable by understanding more about user, their pain points and by observing how they perform a task.

By basing design decisions around assumptions may cause risking the ability of the designer to fulfill users’ needs in a structured manner.

After product ideation, business decides functionality based on assumption of customers but UX Research can help to test those assumptions and make the concept of target audience less abstract so it’s easier to address the actual user needs.

Having relevant User Personas and modifying them timely based on changing user behavior is crucial to the commercial success of business; since this is what makes the target group resonate with the product idea.

Researchers want the designers to understand the importance of user behavior in making product useful than just aesthetically pleasant.

So now you know what UX Researchers really want :)