User Research = Customer-Centric Organization
Summary: Nowadays each and every organization want to be a customer-centric organization because the user is the key part of any company or organization and User Research Plays a vital role in this. The earth’s most customer-centric company Amazon invests lots of money in UX Research even Google, Airbnb, Intuit and so many companies are also belonging to this list. As per the Forrester Research “Research shows that, on average, every $1 invested in UX brings $100 in return.”
Some misconceptions about UX Research:
- UX research and Usability testing are too expensive and time-consuming.
- We already know our users.
- We generally ask the user’s needs before design.
- We only do competitors’ research.
- We just do a survey.
What UX Research is not:
- UX research is not only Quantitative Research: Quantitative research is often the preferred method of engineers. It includes things like analytics, AB testing, funnel metrics. It’s always statistically significant, and it never really involves talking to humans and it’s related all about the data.
On the other hand, Qualitative research is about observing and listening to people. It’s related to human natural behavior and cognitive science. We can’t understand the user’s subconscious mind without qualitative research and its help to understand what they want? Which we will never found though A/B testing(Quantitative research) and as per the Nng group organizations, UX maturity defines by how much they do qualitative research.
What is UX Research? Why should we do it?
User research is a discipline that is providing insights, keyword insights, into product users, their perspectives, and abilities to the right people at the right time.
So that’s the official definition. To make it more understandable, user-research is there to help answer three big questions. The first one is what do people need? The second is what do people want? Which is different from what they need and the third one is can they use the thing that we’re working on?
There have lots of good points why we should do user research in any organization but I am highlighting some important points below:
The later changes are implemented in the development process, the more costly they are. In fact, one study has found that “once a system is in development, correcting a problem costs 10 times more than fixing the same problem in design. If the system has been released, it costs 100 times more relative to fixing in design.
The absence of UX experts in projects causes more changes during development, which significantly increases the investment. It has been shown that “UX designers reduce the time developers need to re-work or ‘fix’ a product by up to 50%”. As you can see, implementing a change later in the life cycle of the software costs exponentially more. Adding the research phase at the beginning, as well as testing will help reduce the development time and maximize the product’s probability of success.
Where we can include UX Research:
- It’s a good idea to include UX Research where we need to discover something new in the early stages of the design phase.
- Usability testing is a part of user research so we can include in the end part of the design phase just to validate that our design is really useful for our end-user.
Conclusion:
The UX Research is the key parameter of User-Centric design companies and a little investment in UX can increase productivity, user engagement, ROI, and will save money, time.
