Indisputably, any IT product requires precise planning and marketing analysis to clarify the overall product value and problems it has to cover. Nevertheless, UX plays no less important role, since its research can optimize both marketing campaigns and overall product engineering during project discovery and different development stages. This article explores why is UX research important, methods, when and how to conduct one.
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UX research is a critical pillar for product success as it aims to clarify actual user needs and whether the product meets them instead of relying on assumptions.
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Conducting UX research will differ based on the stage of product development and require different research methods.
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UX research can combat different biases based on objective and evidence-based insights.
Why UX Research Matters for Successful Products
The role of the UX design is fundamental for the further success of the product as it aims to analyze target audience’s behavior, motivations, and needs. These insights will directly shape the interaction design by affecting its intuitiveness and usability.
Design Products People Actually Use and Enjoy
The design team shifts from the intuitive assumptions of what the users might like to perform practical research. The investigation will analyze their behavioral patterns, challenges, and needs they cultivate to solve those problems. The plethora of findings enables designers to reduce perceptual bias that would lead to the development of efficient, intuitive, and delightful user experience that would resonate with the real-world clients’ needs. Consequently, the product will not only be functional, memorable, and desired to use.
Avoid Costly Mistakes with Early User Insights
UX research delivers a strategic value to the further product development as it can contribute significantly to the risk mitigation. The design team can collect ideas from users during the ideation and design phase. That’s due to performing usability testing, analyzing interviews with users, and creating the prototype. These actions bring strategic value to the further design development as the specialists can detect misleading elements, and usability issues before actual coding of the application. Identifying those issues is time- and cost-saving as compared to solving those issues during the deployment stage.
Drive Team Alignment with Evidence-Based Decision
Evidence-based research fosters eliminating the perceptual bias and uncertainties about the usability and applicability of the particular features in the product. The inferences are backed with data and observations, which eliminates subjective opinions and facilitates cross-team collaboration. The design team and developers have the shared vision of what elements to include in the product, focusing on prioritizing them on the scale of importance.
Surface User Pain Points and Unmet Needs Early
UX research not only addresses the practical user’s pain points but discovers the latent issues the clients might not even guess about. The design team can explore customers’ behavior in the natural environment to identify the gaps within the potential design solutions by incorporating the methods of:
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Contextual Inquiry.
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Journey Mapping.
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Ethnographic Studies.
Finding hidden problems opens the door for innovative solutions and new market opportunities by touching the inconveniences that the target audience might not even realize exist.
When to Conduct UX Research Across the Product Lifecycle
The UX design team underlines crafting a truly intuitive interface to create a remarkable user experience. Nevertheless, it’s essential to perform research during different stages of the product lifecycle to validate solutions and continuously update features if needed.
Before Development (Generative)
Generative research is undertaken at the very beginning of the product lifecycle even before the overall in-depth design commences. Again, the central point of this research within project discovery is to identify pain points the clients could experience, their needs, behavioral patterns, and motivations. However, please note that the design team does not focus on any specific solutions at this phase, but performs target audience analysis only.
Generative Research Methods:
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User Interviews.
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Diary Studies.
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Competitor Analysis.
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Market Research.
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Ethnographic Studies.
Generative research matters before the actual design starts as it defines what specific problems to solve and for whom. This type of research is central to problem validation, leading the team to build a solution afterward.
During Design (Validating & Iterating)
Once the design team validates the assumptions on the problem, it undertakes steps to embed solutions within the design structure of the future app by building wireframes and prototypes. For this purpose, evaluative research is conducted as designers have to make sure what concepts and solutions are worthy further development in code, and what to discard.
Evaluative Research Methods:
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Usability Testing (performed on wireframes, prototypes).
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A/B Testing.
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Card Sorting and Heuristic Evaluation.
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Tree Testing.
The purpose of evaluative research is to uncover usability issues and collect user feedback on the proposed features before the full-scale development starts. This process helps refine the design structure so that it eliminates all the risks associated with usability, intuitiveness, and feature relevance to clients’ needs.
Post-Launch (Live Testing & Feedback)
UX research continues after the deployment of the fully-fledged product on the market. The design team keeps researching and monitoring the application’s functionality in the real environment by implementing live testing and gathering users’ feedback on its performance.
Post-Launch Research Methods:
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A/B Testing (live features).
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In-App Feedback.
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Surveys.
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Session Recordings.
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Analytics Review.
UX research isn’t over after the overall design creation as the app’s deployment illustrates new market opportunities and helps identifying the emerging pain points for solving. Post-launch research sheds light on actual user behavior, which may differ from the test environment.
Continuously - Why Ongoing Research Is Essential
UX research should be continuous within the overall product development lifecycle covering the app’s ongoing support to make sure it delivers strategic value to the end user.
Continuous UX Research Importance:
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Evolving Clients’ Needs: competitive landscape and market trends are evolving contributing to the evolution of user needs. The research can help keep the team up on the product update.
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Exploring New Opportunities: performing continuous research helps the design team uncover the potentially unaddressed pain points, which might be motivating to explore innovative solutions.
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Improving Product Competitive Edge: the sustained research is likely to strengthen the product’s market positions, as the design team can detect and adapt to the market alterations faster bringing additional value to the app.
Types of UX Research
In order to know how to conduct UX research, it’s critical to understand and differentiate between the types to know for sure when to apply each of the research methods.
Key UX Research Methods
Although the goal of UX/UI design is to create an intuitive and user-friendly application, achieving this requires applying a range of research methods to guide and validate design decisions.
Moderated & Unmoderated Testing
The UX researcher presence is the principal distinction factor between the moderated and unmoderated testing procedures.
Moderated Testing
The key feature of the moderated testing is the UX researcher’s or moderator’s active presence during the investigation session. Both real presence and virtual interaction is acceptable. The moderator asks supporting questions while the participant performs a set of tasks.
One of the central benefits of moderated testing is the intertwined observation and moderator's possibility to adjust testing per user’s real-time response. This is particularly important in gathering ample qualitative data based on both participant’s activity and moderator’s observation of their behavior.
Use Case:
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Apply moderated testing to clarify the reasons users struggle if the project is complex.
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During the early design phase, when the UX researcher explores new concepts.
Unmoderated Testing
The moderator is absent during the unmoderated testing. Instead, the participants complete tasks via the specialized platform equipped for recording users’ screens and clicks, which can integrate a think-aloud protocol to record their voice. Unmoderated testing allows gathering feedback from many users quickly while keeping costs low.
Use Case:
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Testing user flows.
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Gathering data from a medium and large focus group.
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Validate changes in design.
Remote & In-Person Sessions
These types of tests underline the essence of the physical location of the UX researcher and participants during the sessions.
Remote Tests
Moderators and participants interact remotely usually through the virtual communication or applying remote testing platforms. Remote testing is extremely convenient for assessing the response of a global audience while preserving the budget.
Use Cases:
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Global products
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Geographically diverse target audience.
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Budget constraints.
In-Person Sessions
The moderator and participants are in the same physical environment. This testing cooperation brings advantages to explore verbal/non-verbal interaction keys, enabling exploration of users’ physical interaction with the product.
Use Cases:
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Physical interaction is required to evaluate the app's functionality.
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Feature assessment.
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When the project requires contextual understanding of clients’ interaction with the product.
Usability Testing
Usability testing is a qualitative behavioral assessment method, aiming to observe participants’ interaction with the product or interactive prototype and gather valuable insights on their experience. The purpose of usability testing is to detect usability issues, and validate assumptions to help clients achieve their goals.
Interviews
Interviews represent a qualitative attitudinal method applied during the generative research. This includes one-to-one conversation with clients to gather information about their attitudes, motivations, needs, and pain points. The purpose behind is clarifying the reason behind their behavior to make further design and product adaptive and responsive to covering those needs.
A/B Tests (Split Testing)
A/B testing is a behavioral and evaluative quantitative method that aims to collect user feedback on the particular app’s features. The moderators provide different segments of users with two different versions of the feature (e.g., button color, placement) aiming to check what design variation can achieve a specific goal better (e.g., increase in conversion) in the live environment.
Diary Studies
Diary studies refer to the qualitative method that integrates both behavioral and attitudinal perspectives. As this method is widely applied for the generative testing, the users take part in the long-term research by writing a diary (handwritten or digital) on what they did and their overall impressions about the product use. The overall purpose of diary studies is to gain valuable insights on the motivators, habits, and feelings about the product use in the natural environment.
Card Sorting
The method of card sorting is applied when the research team aims to clarify the way users categorize and structure information. This delivers strategic insights during the generative research as the moderators aim to clarify the further app’s information architecture.
In a typical session, participants are given a set of cards, each representing a feature or piece of content, and are asked to group them in a way they resonate with, clarifying the reasoning behind their choices. The purpose of card sorting is to illustrate the potential website or app’s navigation and content categories focusing on the clients’ cognitive models.
Tree Testing
As a behavioral and evaluative quantitative method, tree testing provides users with the task on topic finding within a structural hierarchy of information (a tree). The design team involves a text-only tree to check how users navigate the tree elements to find the answer (e.g., How do you check your transaction history). The purpose of tree testing is to test information architecture without any design element involvement.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps represent a behavioral and quantitative method of researching user activity on the webpage. Heatmaps detect the intensity of clients’ clicks and scrolls by highlighting the most frequently viewed space in warmer colors. The purpose of this research method is to identify popular content and areas of improvement.
Think-Aloud Tests
Think-aloud testing is a qualitative, behavioral, and attitudinal research method that focuses on gathering data relevant to user’s vocalization of their thoughts and feelings while performing actions with the equipped testing device. The method is appropriate for both moderated and unmoderated testing. The purpose of the think-alout test is to collect valuable insights on clients’ motivations and reasons behind their actions while using the equipped testing device in real life.
How UX Research Improves Product Marketing
The UX research can significantly improve marketing efforts and streamline client retention by shaping personas, customer journeys, validating messages and product-market fit, and optimizing onboarding and communication.
Inform Personas and Customer Journeys
UX research provides substantial and foundational information for building accurate personas and detailed customer journey maps that contribute to product marketing.
Personas
Speaking about personas, UX research of the generative type including interviews, ethnographic studies, and surveys, enable the marketing team to build realistic and empathetic personas. Understanding target audience goals, pain points, demographics, and daily routine benefit the marketing team in creating tailored messages that unlike one-size-fits-all generic marketing to everyone can deliver person-centered campaigns per different user segments.
Customer Journey
UX research can decode touchpoints and pain points through mapping customer journeys (from awareness to purchase, as well as retention and onboarding) before, during, and after product interaction. Then, product markets apply these customer journey maps to:
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Tailor user-centric messages for each journey stage.
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Streamline marketing channels to relevant touchpoints.
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Identify ways to improve value delivery across the marketing funnel.
Validate Messaging and Product-Market Fit
UX research helps prevent, identify, and resolve issues in messaging that fail to fully represent the product or effectively address the user’s problem. UX research can benefit both:
Message Validation
UX research can test marketing messages, value proposition, and CTA with the target users by implementing A/B testing or concept testing. The marketing team can then evaluate:
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What language is concise and persuasive.
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If the message truly appeals to the client’s needs.
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Whether the word selection, tone and style respond to the clients expectations. Then, the iterative testing helps prevent cost-intensive misfires before the actual marketing campaign launch.
Product-Market Fit Validation
Generative UX research, like problem-space interviews, helps to validate the widespread issue that the product aims to resolve. Additionally, UX research conducts a post-launch behavioral data analysis to detect whether the clients engage with the value proposition through the feature use analysis. Those insights are central to sustain marketing efforts, enrich the product-market fit and maintain the app’s growth.
Improve Onboarding and Communication Materials
UX research can significantly improve user experience with onboarding by contributing to the overall client satisfaction rate and retention. UX research powers the following aspects:
Optimized Onboarding
Usability testing and behavioral analytics of the onboarding flows can detect where the users succeed, fail, or become confused. The marketing team can utilize these data to:
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Refine in-app guidelines and tutorials.
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Tailoring supportive email sequences to address the confusion points.
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Craft product-relevant articles and FAQs to answer clients’ real questions. Smooth onboarding transforms into client activation and retention significantly influencing the marketing efforts.
Improve Communication Materials
UX research can reinforce marketing campaign efforts by analyzing email newsletters, instruction videos, and error messages. The marketers can streamline communication messages by understanding how users interpret the information. This reinforces the product value, keeping users retained and prompting positive client impressions.
Overcoming Bias in UX Design Through Research
The design process gains another complexity that can actually hinder the future product design. It’s all about biases that can affect the overall designing process, which can produce a spectrum of erroneous misinterpretations leading to idea drop-off. Hereof, here are the common biases and solutions the UX researchers can incorporate.
Common Cognitive Biases in Product Design
The product design can derail if the following biases are not being reacted to:
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Confirmation Bias: refers to seeking information that confirms the designers’ existing ideas. The designers have to focus on practical feedback that would validate their initial design ideas, not assumptions as it brings contradiction.
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Anchoring Bias: the designers rely on the very first information, the anchor, to make a decision. If the early anchor idea was flawed it can undermine the whole design project.
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False Consensus Effect: is the false tendency to consider that users will agree on the designers’ assumptions and will think like them.
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Designer Bias: occurs when developers design for people like them, not the target audience. This can lead to the user drop-off, if the interests of the target audience are not represented.
How User Feedback Corrects Internal Assumptions
UX research can counteract the aforementioned biases by involving the objective, external, and diverse perspective into the design process.
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Direct Behavioral Observation: behavioral research methods like usability testing helps researchers to clarify what the users actually do, not what they say. This data matters for breaking the designers’ assumptions because if they think the button is clear but observe users click elsewhere, this will doubt the assumption.
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Data-Driven Decision-Making: quantitative data from surveys, A/B tests provide practical and statistical evidence on user preferences. This resolves anchoring bias by motivating researchers to make design decisions based on facts, not the first assumptions.
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Interaction with Diverse Opinions: incorporating a diverse range of participants helps the researchers to combat the designer and consensus effect biases, as it refrains from addressing the narrow segment of users.
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Detecting Unbiased Needs: generative research methods like ethnographic studies can grab the valuable insights on the pain points and expectations, the design team can work on and eliminate the confirmation bias.
Embracing Humility and Iteration
Combating bias is a continuous process based on learning and design improvement through the following two principles:
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Humility: refers to understanding and accepting the fact that one’s own perspective is limited and the feedback of the others have to be considered. Humility is about shifting from the personal ideas for the sake of the practical data to represent the valid idea within the design.
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Iteration: is a cyclic process of building, testing, learning, and refining the design to keep the track on the correct course.
Creating a UX Research Strategy
Tailoring a robust UX research strategy requires an in-depth cooperation with all the stakeholders to define core product ideas, underline questions and hypotheses, and select the appropriate research methods.
Align Goals with Stakeholders
Before conducting real-life UX research within the project discovery, it’s critical to define the core stakeholders and understand the overall product’s scope, what it’s going to achieve, and what are its current challenges. From these, the UX researcher has to identify what goals, solutions have to be achieved, and which KPIs will matter. Aligning goals with stakeholders is critical as the further research will shift from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to a strategic process.
Explore the role of UX design and designer in project discovery.
Define Research Questions and Hypotheses
Once the research team defines the goals, it shifts to breaking them down into the research questions and hypotheses to clarify what exact information the moderators have to collect.
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Research Questions: these are the fundamental information the design research team has to answer throughout the research. They can relate to users’ behavior, motivation, needs, and problems.
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Hypotheses: these are assumptions with solid explanation the research design team is going to test through its research. Well-defined hypotheses and questions help to prevent scope creep and will directly affect the research method selection.
Select Methods Based on Lifecycle Stage and Resources
With the clearly defined research questions and hypotheses at hand, the design research team selects the methods focusing on the lifecycle stage (before the development, during design, and post-launch) and resources (time, budget).
Lifecycle Stage
Here’s a short breakdown of the methods used at the development stages.
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Before Product Development (Generative/Discovery Method): is applied as it has to explore the problem and understand user needs and context. User interviews and demographic studies will mostly suit those needs.
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During Design (Evaluative/Validation Method): the usability testing can be applied to clarify issues with usability and clients’ overall impressions about the product prototype. Card sorting and tree testing can be applied for information architecture.
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Real Product (Post Launch): aims to check the product’s functionality within the live environment. Analytics review, heatmaps, A/B testing can be helpful for data collection and further product design optimization.
Resources
The overall time and budget will influence the research method selection as when the business can afford a longitudinal cost-intensive research, the research team can select the qualitative methods. If business tightens the budget, the research can cover scalable quantitative methods. Choosing the right research method can gather hypothesis-relevant information and prevent inconclusive results.
Analyze and Socialize Insights
All the obtained results represent the raw data, which are the unstructured pile of information, required to be synthesized and represented as actionable insights.
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Analysis: is about processing qualitative and quantitative data to identify themes, key findings, and recommendations. This can include creating statistical reports and user journey maps.
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Socialization: when the results are analyzed and understood, the product team and valuable stakeholders can make informative decisions through reports and workshops to answer the questions of ‘So What?’ and ‘Now What?’ Consequently, informative decisions promote a more healthy and cooperative environment by powering user-centric culture.
Tools for UX Research
Although the landscape of UX research is continuously evolving, there are tools that help moderators collect and structure raw qualitative and quantitative data.
Platforms like Maze, Hotjar, Optimal Workshop
These platforms help UX research by automating data collection and initial analysis, increasing research accessibility and scalability.
Templates and Frameworks for Repeatable Research
Standardized templates and frameworks are critical to build a scalable and consistent UX research practice.
Capturing Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data
Powerful UX research keeps in mind integrating both qualitative and quantitative methods of research to gain an in-depth understanding of the users’ motivations, expectations, and needs. The tools and approaches can involve the following:
Summary
User experience research is one of the central foundations of further product success. It not only touches building intuitive design but checks what exactly the target audience needs and what actual problems the design can resolve. Selecting the appropriate research method and tools will contribute to the correctness of idea and solution validation leading to the proactive collaboration between the design team, developers, and marketing specialists.
