In today’s fast-moving world more and more organizations are focusing on creating great experiences for their target users. User experience is crucial for the growth of a business as it aims to meet the needs of the user.
It helps provide a good experience that encourages users to stick with the brand. User experience research can be incredibly beneficial in developing a product strategy and ensuring that the solutions produced to meet the demand of users.
There are a variety of research methodologies accessible in the subject of the user. While using all of the strategies on a single project is unrealistic, nearly all projects would benefit from using numerous research methods and pooling ideas.
Here in this article you will learn to create your research objectives and select a technique for obtaining the data you require.
To understand it better, it is best to visualize them in a 3-dimensional framework with the following axes:
- Behavioral vs. Attitudinal
- Qualitative vs. Quantitative
- Context of Use
Behavioral vs. Attitudinal
Behavioral research refers to any method that involves direct observation. Methods for measuring activities include ethnographic research, usability tests, a/b tests, and eye-tracking. Because we know that people are terrible at anticipating and correctly representing their behavior, behavioral research is often seen as the holy grail of user experience research. Direct observation can provide the most accurate picture of what people do and where they get stuck.
Attitudinal research, on the other hand, uses self-reported data from participants in the form of surveys, interviews, and focus groups. These techniques can aid in the comprehension of stated beliefs, expectations, and perceptions.It’s also typical to watch behavior and solicit self-reported feedback in the same session, allowing you to collect both types of information that will be beneficial regardless of your open question.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Qualitative studies refer to collecting data about actions or attitudes by directly witnessing them, whereas quantitative studies refer to collecting data about the same behaviors or attitudes indirectly, through surveys or an analytics tool.This allows them to ask questions, investigate behavior, and potentially even change the study protocol to better achieve the study’s goals. The analysis of data is rarely mathematical.
Quantitative approaches, on the other hand, often derive insights from the mathematical analysis since the data collecting instrument (e.g., a survey tool or a web-server log) gathers huge amounts of data that are easily coded numerically.
Qualitative approaches are far better suited for answering questions about why or how to repair an issue due to their differences, whereas quantitative methods are much better suited for answering how many and how many types of inquiries.Having such figures on hand can assist prioritize resources, allowing you to focus on the issues that have the most impact.
Context of use
Its experimental method focuses on determining the nature of the disparities in concept formulation concerning daily artifacts between designers and users in relation to their environment of usage.
Context of use is how and whether the study participants use the product or service in question. This can be summarized as follows:
- Natural use of the product
- Scripted use of the product
- Not using the product during the study
- A hybrid of the above
The purpose of investigating the natural use of a product is to minimize study intervention to understand behavior or attitudes as closely as possible to reality. This gives you more validity, but it also gives you less control over the issues you learn about.Although there are always some observation biases in ethnographic field research, many of them seek to do so.
To focus the insights on specific usage elements, such as a newly redesigned flow, a scripted study of product usage is conducted. Scripting levels can vary greatly based on the study’s objectives.Studies that do not involve the use of the product are conducted to investigate issues other than usage and usability, such as a brand study or larger cultural behaviors. Hybrid techniques employ a creative approach to product utilization.
To determine if users would want or need a product or service, concept-testing approaches use a rough approximation of the product or service that gets to the heart of what it would give (rather than the intricacies of the experience).Consider your project stage, objectives, the type of data that will answer your questions, and where you want to conduct your research to get the most out of user experience research.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for every case in user experience, but after reading this article, you’ll be well on your way to performing successful user experience research.
