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User experience has become a growing focus for companies of all sizes, including all of the small interactions the customer has with the brand, especially digital ones. Organisations are taking a more mature approach to collecting and utilising customer feedback to satisfy user needs, making them come back and increasing conversion rate. Most of the companies have realised it’s no longer enough to run surveys or user tests a couple of times a year. Instead, they’re working constantly on building a consistent experience across channels and on all devices, and the user’s feedback is the driving force behind that work. Due to its great growth, I decided to create a UX research infographic.
Today, we can see that companies dedicate more budget to the UX design field and UX research in particular. In the coming years it is predicted that budget for it will be only increasing, companies will invest more heavily in creating products and experiences based on continuous feedback from their customers, and customer experience will become a shared responsibility among all teams in an organisation.
What is UX research?
UX research, also called design research, is very important during the whole design process. It is mainly used to identify and confirm (or not) assumptions and recognise users needs and obviously for many other purposes. It’s a sort of base that is used when it comes to making a decision.
UX research englobes many methods that are used to get some insights that will help during the design process. Although those methods have been were already used by academics, scientists, and market researchers, today, you can find some types of research that are mainly only used in UX.
The idea is to get the perspective of the end user, because a common error in the design world is to design for ourselves instead of considering that we are not the user. If you know about user experience design, you should know that its a customer centric approach and the research is what enables us to make it really done for the user, not for us.
What does the UX research process consists of? The first step is to gather data and the second step is to analyse it. To collect data, we do interviews, surveys, observe users, review some existing research, etc. Usually in the beginning of a project, we research more about the project itself, the basic requirements, etc. Later on in the process we concentrate on the usability, feeling and experience. We often use usability testing and A/B testing to confirm assumptions we have. Let’s learn a bit more about that.
A bit more about UX research methodology
Usability testing: enables us to see if a product is easy to use. We basically test the product on users by asking them to complete tasks using the product meanwhile we observe them and try to find what doesn’t work as intended.
Interviews: The most basic method is conducting an interview where we have a conversation with the user or potential user with the objective of collecting relevant information for the purpose of our research.
Focus group: When we have a group of people that are asked about what they think about something in particular. This could be about a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or even the packaging of a product.
Field studies: A method that involves observation and interviewing. The user is observed while he is performing a task.
Survey: Here we take a certain amount of respondents and provide them with the same questionnaire which can be presented under the form of an online questionnaire, a face-to-face interview, or a telephone interview.
Online trends affecting UX research in the next 5 years
- Multi-device interaction: Nowadays, is big proportion of the people own multiple devices, going from smartphones to laptops to tablets. This will continue on growing and having a big influence, companies will work harder to provide a seamless user experience on all devices.
- Wearable technology:
- Omni-chanel experience: Companies do their best to provide great experiences to their customers, and that will include more and more the customer’s interaction with the product, let it be online and offline.
- Touch interfaces
- Voice interaction
The idea of this post was to present the following infographic, which is based on the user testing survey. Here, you will see UX research methodology, how to recruit participants for the survey, how frequent you need to do the research, what is the average budget for it, what are the sources for the usability knowledge improvement and what are the online trends, that will affect UX research in 5 years.
UX research infographic
After conducting this research, Chris Hicken – UserTesting President claimed : “For years we’ve been hearing that customer experience is a priority for executives, but for the first time this survey reveals that companies of all sizes are finally making significant investments in CX”.
