UX professionals (UX designers, usability engineers, usability architects, usability researchers, UX managers)Secondary: Graduate level students in a human-computer interaction, usability, or related program.
Our tool, Smartlook, was designed to help UX researchers, product managers, and marketers gather accurate user behavior data quickly and cost-effectively by automatically capturing every interaction of every real user on your site, product, or mobile app.
During tree testing, our researchers work with different users by asking them to find specific content. At the end of the testing session, they suggest improvements to the information architecture based on the problems that have emerged.
In card sorting sessions, our researchers ask users to group content organised on cards by affinity and, therefore, to explain the reason for their choice in order to identify criticalities and potentialities of how the information is sorted.
UX researchers use various research methods to uncover problems and reveal insight that feeds the design process. The two main parts of UX research are gathering data and synthesizing data to improve usability.
Dovetail is a research repository software that stores qualitative research in one place. Use Dovetail to upload videos, photos, notes, or other data from your research. Dovetail also allows product managers, UX designers, and researchers to analyze qualitative data, find insights and share research findings with stakeholders.
Airtable is a cloud collaboration service that works as a smart spreadsheet where your team can collaborate on projects. It has the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. User researchers can create databases, add records, set up column types, sort records and publish views to external websites.
Confluence keeps your team organized with everything from strategy docs to meeting notes and IT documentation to help you make more informed design decisions. It also allows researchers to create discoverable documents that collaborators can access.
Userzoom is a UX research platform with managed research options. It is ideal for enterprise clients and experienced UX researchers who can take advantage of its advanced offerings. Features include moderated and unmoderated usability testing, analytics, surveys, benchmarking, reporting, user recruitment, and more.
Optimizely is a user testing tool that helps researchers to create advanced A/B tests with multiple variables. It offers deeper insights on user behavior that allows product and design teams to experiment with algorithms, design choices, and other elements that lead to great UX journeys.
Survey Monkey is an online survey tool. It allows researchers and product teams to create and send out surveys. On the paid plans, you can create advanced surveys targeted at specific users. Then, turn analytic data into insight that improves your product UX.
Google Forms is a free survey software that allows researchers to create and administer online surveys. You can automatically integrate Google Forms with Google Spreadsheets to easily view results and sort through data. Google Forms also allows you to collaborate with your teammates on your Google Suite workspace.
Generative research: This research method helps researchers develop a deeper understanding of users to find opportunities for solutions and innovation. It's sometimes referred to as discovery or exploratory research.
UX research encompasses a variety of investigative methods used to add context and insight to the design process. Unlike other sub-fields of UX, research did not develop out of some other field or fields. It merely translated from other forms of research. In other words, UX practitioners have borrowed many techniques from academics, scientists, market researchers, and others. However, there are still types of research that are fairly unique to the UX world.
Though researchers may specialize in specific types of interviews or tests, most are capable of conducting a wide variety of techniques. All user researchers collect valuable information that helps us design in an informed, contextual, user-centered manner.
The first step to conducting research is learning to observe the world around us. Much like beginning photographers, beginning researchers need to learn how to see. They need to notice nervous tics that may signal that their interviewees are stressed or uncertain, and pick up on seemingly minor references that may reflect long-held beliefs or thoughts that should be further probed.
Much like observation, understanding is something we do all the time in our daily lives. We strive to understand our coworkers, our families, and our friends, often trying to grasp a point of contention or an unfamiliar concept. But for UX researchers, understanding has less to do with disagreements and more to do with mental models.
In a way, all usability conferences are design research conferences. While the other areas of UX tend to have conferences that cater to their factions, trends, or best practices, researchers are by nature generalists, who seek out ways to learn more about humans and usability. To that end, we recommend a little bit of everything, to keep researchers up to speed.
Participants are brought into a lab (could be as simple as an office or conference room) to meet one-on-one with a UX researcher and are given a set of scenarios that lead to tasks and usage of specific interest within a product or service. This can be extremely useful in watching and understanding how and why users flow through a website, navigate an app, or otherwise use the internet. In addition to the objectives outlined, this can give UX researchers an opportunity to ask followup questions about how and why a user does what they do, and gain other customer-specific insights. Often the "ah-ha's" are found off-script.
While UX researchers have borrowed techniques from academic research, scientific research (particularly psychology), many forms of UX research are unique to the field. The main goal of UX research is to articulate the needs of the user during the design process, forming the basis of user-centric design (human-centered design).
UX analytics refers to the quantitative and qualitative data you can use to analyze how people experience and interact with your website, app, or product. A UX analytics tool can help UX designers and researchers identify areas that need some changes.
Development teams are under pressure to consistently ship software, fix bugs, and prioritize new and exciting features. But, as Senior UX Specialist Page Laubheimer writes, the typical two-week sprint cycle of Agile and Scrum can put a significant burden on UX researchers and designers:
Because of the importance of this work, user experience researchers play an increasingly important role in organizations, helping stakeholders understand user behavior, addressing usability problems, and assisting in the design process of new products or services.
Trained UX researchers have a variety of tools at their disposal to help take the guesswork out of UX design. Their methods generally fall into one of two categories:
User experience researchers will often employ both qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to provide the most accurate assessment possible of how users are experiencing a product or service. Below are some of the common research methods used.
UX researchers use various methods and best practices to identify problematic areas and design opportunities. They choose the best ones according to the phase in the product life cycle.
Phase
User experience researchers (UX researchers) are focusing on understanding user needs and frustrations to improve the usability of digital products. They perform in-depth investigations using qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Ultimately, the researchers pass their insights to UX designers who then can create the right product that meets user needs.
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