UX research plays a pivotal role in product design and development, by ensuring that your future product will meet user needs and market demands. To ensure a smooth and productive UX design process you must understand your future user and their demands and wishes, which can be achieved through conducting deep UX research and user experience analytics. In this article, we will go through the most crucial methodologies and tools that will help you to better understand the UX research process.
Card Sorting – attitudinal UX research methodology for planning and product design phase.
Card Sorting research is a technique used to understand how users categorize and organize information. This method is particularly useful in designing the information architecture, menus, and navigation of a product. Card sorting helps UX researchers visualize and better understand categories of users and their opinions about a product or its specific characteristics.
This type of user analytics consists of the following stages:
🟢 Preparation – time to determine the purpose of the research and develop a list of categories or topics.
🟢 Prepare cards – write each topic on a separate card, but make sure the number of cards is manageable. Don’t use too many cards so that participants can sort them easily.
🟢 Conducting a test- explain to participants that they should sort the cards into groups as they see fit. Observe participants sorting the cards and commenting on their actions.
🟢 Data collection – record how participants sorted the cards and the comments they left during the process.
🟢 Data Analysis – analyze how users organized the cards and identify patterns in their approaches. Note problems or inconsistencies in categorization.
🟢 Interpretation and conclusions – use the results and analysis to form an optimal blog structure.
🟢 Suggest improvements – if there are problems, offer recommendations to optimize UX architecture.
There are various UX research tools that can ease the process of card sorting. The most common ones are:
Optimal Workshop which allows to easily create and manage various cards and conduct UX surveys.
Lyssna is another all-in-one platform for user analytics that allows to test and manage results in one place.
Prototype Testing – behavioral method for the prototype development stage.
Prototype testing is a user experience research method in which preliminary versions of a product or interface, called prototypes, are tested with real users to understand how they interact with the product and identify areas for improvement.
Key features of UX research prototype testing:
🟢 Objective: The purpose of this study is to get feedback from users on the functionality, design, usability, and overall impression of the product or interface in the early stages of development.
🟢 Prototypes: Prototypes are interactive versions of a product that mimic its functionality and user interaction.
🟢 Participants: Real users who represent the target audience of the product participate in the study. Participants are invited to perform various tasks and scenarios so that researchers can observe their interactions with the prototypes.
🟢 Observation and Analysis: During testing, researchers observe the behavior of the participants and take notes on how they interact with the prototypes. This helps in identifying problems, behavior patterns, and user desires.
Given these points, we can tell that prototype testing is crucial in the design and development process due to its ability to early detection and correction of problems.
UX research tools that are commonly used for prototyping and testing:
Figma is probably the most common instrument in the UX researcher arsenal, which allows the easy creation and sharing of prototypes, and collaboration with team members and users on ongoing projects.
Invision is another handy tool for UX design and development, that allows creating and collaboration on a prototype in real-time.
Qualitative A/B Testing – behavioral UX research for the product development stage
Unlike conventional quantitative A/B testing, which focuses on comparing the results of metrics and statistics between two or more versions of an interface, qualitative A/B testing focuses on a deeper understanding of user behavior and the motivations behind that behavior.
Key stages of qualitative A/B testing:
🟢 Goal definition is an exact determination of what you want to test.
🟢 Variant development sets up different variants of the product or interface (versions A and B) that will be tested on user experience.
🟢 Recruit participants for testing that represent your target audience.
🟢 Conduct testing sessions with participants, providing them with tasks and scenarios to perform. Note their reactions, comments, emotions, and interactions with the product.
🟢 Qualitative analysis – it identifies behavior patterns, common problems, and motivations of users.
🟢 Based on qualitative analysis, make recommendations and changes to prototypes or products. Qualitative data will help justify and inform design decisions about preferred options.
UX research questions that you can use to conduct qualitative research:
🟢 Which of the product (or interface) options do you find more appealing and why?
🟢 Which version of the product better meets your needs or objectives?
🟢 What elements or features in each version did you like best and why?
🟢 Is there anything in each version that confuses you or makes it difficult to use?
🟢 How would you rate the usability of each version of the product on a scale of 1 to 10?
UX research tools to use for qualitative testing:
Lookback allows you to set up remote A/B testing and collect qualitative data from your users.
Crazyegg is a multipurpose platform where you can conduct A/B testing, and UX surveys and get access to heatmaps of your website.
And one last paragraph
As can be seen, UX research methodologies serve to a better understanding of customer behavior and are directly related to future UI designs. Without a doubt that will impact overall product usability and success. If you lack knowledge or human resources for user research, you can always address this issue with professionals. As a result, you will save your time and energy for more valuable business processes. However, you should never neglect this activity in your product design and development. Our expert team provides design and development services, including UX research and future UI implementation. Contact us for more details and make your users’ journey an exceptional experience.
