UX Research and it’s Importance
After doing several years of UI design, I finally came to a conclusion. I haven’t really been doing User Research, well I did some but it was not the correct way. Half the time a stakeholder was just telling me to design a solution and other times I would talk to internal users about what they wanted. So you could say I did “some” user research.
After taking this course at the Interaction design foundation I can tell that I haven't been doing enough user research. This is common in the industry actually. User research is really putting the users first, and becoming more of a user centered designer. We should stop guessing what the users might want and build what they would use. So taking not only quantitative information but also extracting qualitative research analysis to help us make informed decisions.
In quantitative methods such as surveys, analytics, and formal experiments, the researcher seeks to measure aspects of users and user behavior in a way that can be quantified and used for statistical analysis.
In qualitative methods, the researcher accepts that he/she is to some degree a co-creator of research results, so the results are not completely objective and reproducible. The results of qualitative research are usually not expressed numerically, but rather as themes or categories that have occurred during the research.
So at my current job we pushed really hard to do user research, starting with user interviews. Management has been slow on figuring out what the next project in IT should be. So we said, give us a few months to figure out our users and their needs are and we will bring you a report so you have some data to make informed decisions. We can only throw so many darts at a wall. So lets really put the users needs in the hot seat. Lets transform our operations to be more user driven.
We just conducted 7 interviews, these interviews focused on our current system and also wanted to know what tools outside our systems they use. This would help us choose not only what kind of technology to build next but really shed light on the day to day tasks the user does and what struggles they have.
Our results were surprising, we already knew our technology may be confusing in our archaic system. We had no idea how many work arounds and 3rd party apps our users have to use to get a job done. So now we have data to back the problems we have.
After the interviews we started building a report and abstracting those important things that we heard multiple times. This has helped us really put together some options for our stakeholders. In fact, the business listened in on some of our calls and have already started making critical changes. That was a huge win for us user advocates.
At the end of the day our users make the company grow, without understanding everything about them we can only guess. Guessing is a loss of revenue. We are slowly turning the company in being a user first, let’s make better decisions based on facts and data. No more dart throwing. Changes are not easy, but having a CTO that cares about UX has really been a game changer.
If you want to learn more about UX Research and how it can be a game changer for your company check out the Course on Interaction Design Foundation.
As always here some great tools.
Awesome software = Bio Link Micro Sites + Ai Tools
UX Education = Interaction Design Foundation
