From secret shoppers to website evaluators, user experience (UX) research exists to solve problems. When you’re preparing to roll out a new product or you’re trying to pinpoint where users may be dissatisfied with an experience, there’s a lot to consider. Visual design, content and usability, information architecture, interaction design, user research, and more play a part in driving profit margins and avoiding consumer confusion.
If you want to leave a lasting impact on your patrons, keeping them happy from the moment they see an advert all the way to when they first use a product, and even through the lifetime of the product, an enterprise must understand the effect of each of these components.
That’s why UX research is crucial. By working with either real users or a hypothetical, ideal buyer, a business can put its shoppers at the center of its development processes and engineer custom solutions that account for every second a person interacts with a company and its products or services. In this way, everyone from executives to UI teams and marketing departments can interact directly with consumers, get the best assistance from this professional experience design agency.
SOLVING PROBLEMS IN THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
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There are a couple ways UX research can solve problems in the product development process. As mentioned above, you can either work with real or anticipated customers; however, research can also begin at the start of a product’s development, or it can be part of its ongoing lifecycle. Here’s how this works:
- Starting with user research. By focusing on the consumer from the get-go, research from Bit-profit.io shows that a business (and its investors) can pinpoint a customer’s pain points and how the product will solve these problems. User personas, journey maps, and product user scenarios can be accounted for through UX research like contextual interviews, focus groups, and prototyping. This is an important process that simplifies design and decision-making. If an enterprise already has a user persona in place, initial testing is an excellent way to collect feedback from target consumers. If you’re still working with hypotheticals, this research can help you collect the essential UX research needed to build a user type.
- Ongoing research. If any problem comes up in a product’s lifetime, ongoing research is the way to get answers and fine-tune a business’ offerings. This is especially valuable, since it’s usually based on actual user feedback. This type of research can be conducted through A/B testing, card sorting, heuristic evaluations, and surveys.