How to Conduct Successful UX Research and Measure the Results in a Right Way
The question, however, is–what is the right design? Well, the answer is quite simple. A great product visually appeals to the users, and, most importantly, solves their problems. A product that has excellent aesthetics but doesn’t serve the user’s purpose is nothing more than eye candy to the user. So, the right design is the one that soothes the eye and is extremely easy to use.
To serve your user, you need to know your user first. Users differ from industry to industry, and so do their requirements. Here, UX research comes into the picture. Your role as a business is to thoroughly know them and design the product easily and efficiently for them to use. UX research helps you to get there if done the right way.
While knowing the user is the most important step when conducting UX research, there are many other crucial steps. If you want to conduct the research the right way, there are two primary approaches you can tackle:
Undoubtedly, the first method will save you a lot of effort and time as the tools help you do most parts, including doing usability testing, taking feedback, surveys, etc. The second method will require you to hire a person. The research experts will have to examine the users and extract meaningful data from them to best tackle their product design.
UX research primarily aims to understand the user requirements to create a design that meets those needs. However, there is more to this. Let’s look at a few other reasons why UX research is important.
Why is UX research important?
44% of shoppers tend to share a bad experience with their friends. A bad experience for them may qualify for a poor choice of colors, being hard to use, or can only serve one user at a time. If you do not want your user to leave with a bad experience, UX research is necessary. Here’s how it helps you:
- It helps small businesses stand out from other competitors
- Eliminates assumptions regarding user requirements
- If a feature is not needed, it helps you know before designing the process
Well, UX research isn’t simply about knowing the users. It is also about collecting data to back the design process. Let’s break down the process into steps to understand it better:
5 Steps to conduct a successful UX research
If you hire a researcher or take help from a UX research tool, the steps to essentially reach the end goal remain the same. If you follow these, there are slim chances you won’t have an optimal product design ready.
Conduct user research at the beginning of the design phase
The chain shows the roadmap from knowing the product to the result. Before you directly begin to know the user requirements, you must know the purpose of the product. Once you are aware of the purpose, user insights will let you know if the product will serve the user or not. Hence, you need to conduct extensive user research.
Let’s say you do not conduct UX research and design the product. There is a high possibility you might develop the wrong product altogether. You will certainly need to keep making amends in the product design. However, in the beginning, conducting it establishes the base of the design.
Have specific design goals
What is your product trying to solve for your user?
Your design goals should answer this question. Goals can include both–questions and action points. The questions you ask also depend on the phase of the product. If you are developing a new product, you will have different questions. While if you are aiming to make the existing product more feature-rich, your questions will differ.
So, you need to know your product’s phase and scope to have the right design goals.
Now you know the importance of user research, but how you conduct it effectively might still be a question. Well, thankfully, there are methods to conduct it at your disposal.
Select methods to conduct research
Conduct surveys
A survey is one of the best ways to gather qualitative data from your users. You can ask open-ended questions wherein users can answer their expectations and problems they face in the product they use. You can easily create a survey form online and ask users to fill it out.
User groups
A user group, also known as a focus discussion group, involves multiple users with different job roles who share their expectations regarding the features and issues they face.
Conduct interviews
The simplest way of doing user research, interviews, are always very revealing. You can set up group interviews or individual, remotely, or face-to-face
Communicate findings with users and colleagues
Once you are done with your findings, it is important to share them with your design team and users. Doing so will help you know if your product is useful to the users.
You’re done with the research. Now what? Now comes the analytics part. You should know how to measure the results to design an optimal product. Let’s understand ways to do so:
Four ways to measure UX research results in a right way
You need to keep track of if your design is catering to the user or not. For that, you need to measure the following metrics:
Task success
Task success measures a user’s ability to finish a task successfully. You can calculate this chance through this formula:
For example–you’ve designed a registration page, and you ask the user to log in. You can know where the user faces an issue while s/he begins the flow from start to end. Here’s when having specific goals becomes a necessity. Only if you know all the user flow steps can you know the user’s pain point on a specific step.
How much time does it take for a task to complete?
As the name suggests, this metric measures the time to finish a task. As per Google, a user is likely to leave a webpage if it fails to load in 3 seconds. It shows that users want fast results.
Similarly, your product should not take much time to complete a task. While many factors can make a user take longer to complete a task, your design should not become one of them.
You can determine task completion time based on evaluation method and type of project:
- Average Completion Time: It verifies users who complete the task
- Average Time on Task: It gives the total average time users spend on a specific task
The less time a user takes to complete a task, the better user experience.
Error rate
Number of errors
________________ = Error rate
Total attempts
This metric lets you know the percentage of bad entries users make. Fewer error rates lead to a better user experience. There could be n number of reasons for a high error rate. The results, however, could help you know the following things:
- Is the design too complex for the user?
- Is the user flow not correct?
- Will it require education or training sessions for users to understand your product?
- Can you simplify it?
These questions will help you make the design more optimal for the user.
User satisfaction
User satisfaction is the most important metric for knowing how users feel about your product. You can conduct user research and keep track of this metric by following methods:
- Surveys: You can add a customer satisfaction score to get quantitative data on the satisfaction level of your customer and also include open-ended questions.
- Social Media: You can also run through polls and Q&As on social media channels to know how your users feel about the product.
Wrapping up conducting successful UX research and measuring it in a right way
Often, users do not know what they want until you show them. Therefore, it becomes important to have a clear roadmap before beginning a product’s design. After all, you want to design a super easy-to-navigate product that guarantees a better user experience.
Remember–UX research needs to be done at various phases of designing your product. User preferences and challenges keep changing, and your design should keep catering to their dynamic requirements.
