A User Research strategy includes detailed and specific data about users' needs. Through this research, designers gain perspective on how to make design bold and practical, as well as understand design motives and goals. With a good user research strategy, we can focus on finding methods to solve problems. We'll teach you how to create a perfect UX User Research strategy and how you can face challenges that may come up. Are you ready?
What is a User Research Strategy?
The User Research Strategy in User Experience Design is a process that includes a user's systematic study. It focuses primarily on goals, perspectives, and needs and aims to add ideas and practical information to the design project to discover problems and design opportunities. Before launching a product on the market, a company must segment its potential users to know each user's age and personal tastes, specifically ongoing users. They must go as deep as possible when surveying users and discussing their preferences; remember that collecting and managing this data is critical for designers and campaign managers.
User Research Strategy vs User Experience Research
User Research Strategy and UX Research are different terms! User Research Strategy is a more complex term for understanding users' demographics, behaviors, and sentiments. Instead, UX Research is User Experience-specific research that considers interaction, responses, and how users react when interacting with your product. Both cases seek to understand users and their needs for their product. The goal is to get a general context to make the right decision and create user-centric experiences. You can check our User Research and User Research Tools articles for more information on this topic!
What is a User Experience Research Strategy?
When you create a UX prototype, it’s important to focus on the testing and iteration of that prototype, with budget and time being an essential part of running a product's user testing. You can stratify the obtained data by category through the User Research Strategy and understand how users interact with a product. Establishing a user research strategy is one of the first steps when we are developing a successful product, and it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
● Who is your user?
● What are the types of problems they face and their solutions?
● What is the expectation of your service or product?
● What do they like or dislike about their competitors?
● Where do users currently go to solve their problems?
● What to do to make users switch to our company?
Asking these questions is always viable, even when the product is on the market! You can use various research methods, including focus groups and surveys, to help confirm your ideas and investigate possible alternatives before wasting resources on unfeasible designs and products. You can guarantee user-centered design decisions based on proven data through a good user research strategy. Our recommendation is to research as you develop your product and know if the product is in the right direction. Collect qualitative data through surveys and focus groups, and use wireframes and sketches to get quantitative responses via clicks, heat maps, and SUS. You can even use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to check the viability of a product, including tree testing to measure navigability effectiveness! With AI-based processes, you can also determine your audience and their needs. However, it's important to integrate statistics outcomes and research tests, such as studying the user and his interaction with the product in a real environment. Knowing any quantitative data is important in the Product Development process's early stages. Consider other aspects, such as load times and error messages.
Types of User Experience Research Strategy
User Research Strategy methods are ways of obtaining essential data. You can use many research methods to identify challenges and opportunities, such as user interviews, surveys, focus groups, card sorting, and Usability Testing. There are two fundamental methods; quantitative and qualitative. In the quantitative method, UX researchers test user behavior and attitude theories through numerical and statistical evidence. Its purpose is to quantify UX through metrics and answer questions like What percentage of people can find the call to action?
On the other hand, the qualitative method focuses on understanding why real users behave and why they need or want a product to work in a particular way. This approach aims to understand the users' human side by understanding actions and reasoning. The UX user research strategy includes two key approaches; the attitudinal approach, which focuses on listening to what users say, for example, in an interview, and the behavioral practice focuses on what users do through observational studies. Now, let's have a sneak peek at the best 8techniques to achieve a good user research strategy in UX.
1. Card Sorting. Study, test, and design the app and website's navigation and structure. In card sorting, users receive an item list that includes all the products. Right away, users have to group products in the most logical sequence from their perspective.
2. Interviews. In this technique, UX researchers analyze the users in their natural environments. Besides, UX researchers can comprehend the way users work.
3. Focus Groups. Focus groups mean discussions between a user group and a moderator. This type of group allows getting data about attitudes, ideas, and user wishes.
4. Expert Reviews. Usability experts review websites and examine if they have all the checks.
5. Survey. It's a series of questions asked to a group of users and helps researchers know how they use the product.
6. Usability Testing. Usability Testing lets us discover problems and user frustrations when using a website.
7. A/B testing. Tests randomly show users different website versions. The idea is to track the effectiveness of the design in terms of behavior and conversion.
8. Eye Tracking. This approach allows one to follow the movement of a user's gaze. The purpose is to get relevant information from what users look at and determine what they pay more attention to.
The User Research Strategy in UX design covers different steps to achieve it. First, we can consider the objective: What do you need to know about your users and their needs? Second, focus on the assumptions and consider what you already know about your users. In the third step, we can highlight the methods and their application, considering that the correct way of application depends on the deadline, research team size, and the project type. In the fourth step, we can mention the overall process. The idea is to recap user data, including their preferences and needs. Finally, you need to address your hypothesis and create a plan to improve your design process, remembering that improvement lies in user feedback.
Conclusion
Understanding the needs and behavior of users is the key to everything! It's essential to use quantitative and qualitative approaches and pay attention to user behavior, including applying user research at each stage and running usability tests. Apply the communicative sense with the developers and show results, considering that the UX researchers must translate the users' needs into the technical language to ensure a successful digital product's UX design.
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