User Research is a stage-by-stage, ongoing approach to identifying problems and proposing solutions to them, with the ultimate goal of product refinement. You’re constantly testing ideas and receiving feedback from users and customers until you’re able to address any issues and release a highly optimized go-to-market product/service.
It can take time, and you may have to repeat the process several times. However, it’s ultimately worth it as it will help you and your business hit the ground running when it comes to promoting and ultimately selling those products.
User Research helps brands to understand the preferences, behaviors, and needs that influence customers to make product and brand choices. It does this through a range of feedback and response methods such as surveys, observation, and analyzing tasks.
Put simply, User Research methodology is all about improving products and services. After all, our products don’t just need to fulfill a function — they need to be usable. By employing experimental research processes, you can help to guide how your products and services are designed, developed, and ultimately brought to market.
This means that User Researchers work in close collaboration with other business functions like product designers and engineers, as well as programmers and strategy directors, at all stages of product development and ideation.
Qualitative and quantitative User Research methods
There are two main types of User Research methodology: qualitative research and quantitative research. Both of them require different approaches and deliver different results, which means they are more or less advantageous for different types of projects.
Let’s take a closer look at these methods.
Qualitative User Research
Qualitative research is mainly centered around observing and collecting insights from non-numerical data points, like your customers’ opinions or stated preferences.
Qualitative data helps to add a human touch to what we’ve come to know as “big data”. It’s an important part of the User Research process because it helps you to understand the numbers from quantitative User Research through the lens of the end user.
Quantitative User Research
Quantitative research, as you might have already guessed, is the process of gathering data in the form of numbers, stats, and anything else which is definitively measurable.
This ultimately delivers factual information about whether something does or does not happen, or is or is not true, like whether a user has chosen to interact with a certain function of your product.
This is the fact-finding art of User Research, whereas qualitative research, as already mentioned, helps you understand and interpret those facts.
These are two different but equally important pillars in User Research methodology and they go a long way to aligning your business vision with consumer perspectives. Therefore, it isn’t a choice between qualitative OR quantitative methods.
Indeed, it is better to employ both of these research methodologies in your process. They bring distinct insights that together empower brands to act confidently on improving their product design. Think of it like driving — you need one hand to work out the gears, and another to steer the car in the right direction.
There are several different tools, activities, and actions you can undertake to make greater use of insights and enhance the results and efficacy of your User Research program.
Product analysis and user analysis will enable you to look at how products and users interact, whether the product is functioning successfully, and if that function caters appropriately to the way users need or want to use it, including UI and user design elements.
It’s also important to create a stakeholder management plan to ensure the involvement of each stakeholder with the process — from developers and engineers to customers or investors — is clearly defined and their contributions documented.
Competitive analysis UX is another tool you can use. This method gives you a greater understanding of how your competitors are performing. It could be highlighting how their features work, or the feedback they’re getting from their own users. What all this helps you do is adjust and amend your own product strategy to design a superior solution. Understanding the competition is the first step to overcoming it.
This kind of analysis enables you to deepen your discovery research by developing user personas and conducting user scenarios, guerilla usability testing, and contextual study user research. All of those place your potential product or service in the market context and allow you to accurately predict its performance with different market demographics against those of your competitors.
The role of a User Researcher
User Researchers help to plan and execute research projects to support design and development teams to gain a deeper understanding of how potential users use your or your competitors’ services. Their research informs how you design and embed different functionalities and features into your own products and services in the most optimal way for your users.
So what skills does a User Researcher need? Here are a few that can help to optimize the User Research process:
- Analytical mindset
- Inclusive and diverse thinking
- Ability to conduct research (sounds obvious, but worth stating)
- Knowledge and understanding of social, technological, and business trends
- Ability to think strategically about how brands, products, and consumers interact
- Understanding of technical requirements and limitations
- A focus on delivering on user perspectives.
Crucially, the User Researcher will collaborate with your team in an open and iterative way to ensure that the User Research project stays on track and delivers the findings you need to enhance your final product or service.
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