How UX research improves the customer journey
Editor’s note: This is an article that originally appeared under the title “User Experience (UX) Research Trends and Best Practices."
Imagine your company is launching an amazing digital product. You’ve created all sorts of features and functions designed to make people’s lives easier. All they need to do is unlock them. Yet, users aren’t finding their way to the value and you aren’t sure why. Perhaps the interface or navigation is confusing or people don’t understand how to complete a transaction. Maybe they don’t know what features are available and all the amazing things that are obvious to you aren’t to them.
The cost of that confusion adds up. Frustrated users call your technical support team for answers to simple questions, which increases your costs. Those people post negative reviews that dissuade potential customers. They don’t renew their subscriptions, which impacts revenue.
That’s why UX testing is such a critical part of developing any new digital product or improving a digital platform. If you’re racing toward a launch without taking the time to research, test and optimize your user experience, you’re leaving money on the table.
When UX researchers come to the table with meaningful data that demonstrates their understanding of users, they become proactive business partners that influence strategic decisions. In this blog, you’ll learn how the best performing UX teams are analyzing quantitative and qualitative data to create digital experiences that reduce user effort, increase product adoption and drive revenue. By integrating product telemetry and behavioral data with voice of the customer programs and in-depth interviews with their user community, UX teams can understand what people need today and what they expect for tomorrow.
Most UX testing is expensive, incomplete and inefficient
UX teams rely on a variety of approaches and technologies to test and refine the user experience. Unfortunately, many of these UX processes provide limited information and can easily lead the UX researcher in the wrong direction.
For example, UX programs that rely only on data such as product telemetry and user behavior tracking tell you what people do during their digital experience, but not why. UX teams must sort through mountains of data, often collected by siloed systems, unraveling conflicting stories and searching for patterns.
Ensuring that you’re building the right digital experience requires deep feedback directly from users. But getting this type of qualitative data can be expensive and lengthy. Recruiting participants for research is one of the biggest challenges UX teams face. Third-party sample providers can’t guarantee you’re hearing from the right user personas, especially if you need to have certain types of people in your sample, such as technical users for B2B products.
For UX research to deliver on its promise, time is essential. Small but mighty research and UX teams are often under pressure to do more with less and are often spread thin across a diverse digital portfolio. If UX researchers take too long recruiting those types of respondents or analyzing results, they may miss the opportunity to contribute any insights to a rapid product development process.
Only if UX researchers have the right mix of tools in place can they be proactive business partners to the rest of the business, rather than order takers that respond when called upon. When that happens, everyone benefits.
The stages of UX research within the product development process
UX research isn’t something you should tack on at the end of a project. Rather, it’s an iterative process that should happen continually. UX research can fit into every stage.
Ideation and discovery
Ideally, organizations bring UX researchers into the early stages of product conception, so they can understand the features and functionality goals. At this stage, UX teams can conduct user interviews for formative research so they can understand motivations and perceptions.
Prototyping
At this stage, UX teams build early mock-ups of user interfaces with some or all product functionalities. UX researchers may share different prototypes with users to understand their preferences and then prioritize and adapt designs based on the feedback they receive. Based on the company’s timeline, UX teams may work with product teams to launch minimum viable products and then make ongoing changes post-launch.
User behavior tracking
Once the digital experience is released, more user data starts coming in. With product telemetry, UX researchers can see the user flow and usage of specific features and functions. UX teams can also see where users get stuck in different processes to diagnose and solve problems. For example, customers may abandon carts because they can’t figure out how to pay or they may search for a phone number to call support because they need information on how to make a return.
Testing and redesigns
UX research is never done. However, making changes to a live digital experience can be risky. Many digital platforms approach UX for existing products with an ongoing, iterative process. At this point, UX teams often introduce small changes that can have a big impact, for example changing the placement of buttons or wording of UX copy. Micro changes like these can increase conversion rates, basket size and repeat purchases. With enough user activity, UX researchers may be able to present different experiences for A/B or multivariate testing and select the option that performs best.
Usability trends are driving the need for in-depth UX research
Fast, responsive user experiences designed by the likes of Amazon and Netflix have set a high bar for UX teams. Users have come to expect the same types of experiences from all technology, both at home and in the workplace. UX research must adapt to these expectations with new strategies to test and validate designs.
Here are a few trends UX researchers must keep in mind when developing research studies and gathering and analyzing feedback from users.
Personalized experiences
Digital users today expect that when they log into a product, it will remember who they are. Based on a users’ history, digital products often offer content and recommendations that reflect the context of their relationship. This type of personalization creates emotional connections with users and increases loyalty, likelihood to recommend and many other metrics important to business growth.
For a UX researcher, that means any user testing must be able to segment customers into different groups, based not just on their search history or purchase patterns, but also on psychographic attributes such as motivations. Data-backed segmentation is also an important part of the UX testing process. Instead of asking everyone everything, UX teams are designing experiences for different groups of users and researchers are getting feedback just from those groups.
Self-service features: Putting the user in the driver’s seat
Increasingly, users are seeking to set their own course. A self-service functionality allows for a seamless, user-driven product discovery and customization.
For a UX researcher, that means spending extra time understanding whether users feel confident and capable. It means providing people the tools to do what they need and presenting relevant information, without overwhelming them with options.
Increasing accessibility
Inclusive design is an emerging trend in product development that considers the needs of minority or disadvantaged groups of users. It enables the creation of an experience that provides users with a sense of belonging rather than making them feel excluded.
For a UX researcher, that means doing all you can to remove bias from the research process. Panels, focus groups and any other research sample must include people from different races, income levels, geographies and abilities.
Choosing user-friendly UX research methods
To conduct UX research that aligns with these trends, user experience teams are adding new tools to their arsenal. The most cost-effective, additive tools are those that meet the requirements for rapid, iterative testing and analysis and integrate with existing technologies and data repositories.
Most importantly, any tools UX researchers select must be easy and enjoyable for users. At the end of the day, if users aren’t willing to participate in UX research, are abandoning a study part way through or aren’t providing accurate, meaningful information, the effort is wasted.
What methodologies and solutions should UX researchers explore?
Private insight communities
Teams that need rapid access to a variety of users are increasingly integrating insight communities into their UX programs. An insight community creates a dedicated online space for research, including surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews and more, with a group of participants that have been pre-vetted and have agreed to provide their feedback. You can launch and manage an insight community for less than half the cost of a traditional UX research tool.
Insight communities provide always-on access to users, saving UX researchers crucial time recruiting the right participants and getting them to opt-in to studies. Because an insight community is private and secure, users feel safe providing their feedback and tend to be more honest. Insight communities can be as small as a few hundred users and as larger as several thousand. While insight communities are great for deep, ongoing conversations, other UX research strategies are best for in-the-moment feedback.
Embedded micro surveys don’t interrupt the user experience
If there’s one thing digital users hate, it’s being taken out of an experience – a purchase, a game or any transaction – to be sent to a different site to answer survey questions. They often get frustrated and confused and exit the experience, possibly never to return.
To avoid that problem, short surveys can be embedded directly in a digital platform or app with the same branding and navigation built into the user flow. These types of embedded micro surveys have higher engagement rates than traditional surveys and have the benefit of capturing user feedback in the moment, right at the point of experience.