User experience or UX research is one of the essential parts of the human-centered design process. Without UX research, you can neither create solutions to meet the customer needs nor deliver value to them. To prove that point, in 2019, Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, found that 95% of launches over 30,000 products fail every year.
Skipping user research may sound cost-efficient in the early stages, but, in the long run, it might minimize your chances to succeed. Instead of developing products based on your assumptions of target buyer choices and problems, UX Research helps in creating products that are loved by your customers.
So, what are these research methods and testing techniques that you should be using for product development? Let’s find out with the help of this guide.
What is UX Research?
UX Research refers to the process of generating valuable insights and understanding of behavior, pain points, and needs of the users using feedback methodologies and observation techniques. UX Research provides perspectives and context to the product teams to help them build user-centric products while making informed decisions.
UX Research consists of continuously gathering evidence and questioning from users and customers that are leveraged to help make product decisions at any given stage of the product development process. Simply put, modern teams use data and insights to create products that address the real needs and pain points of the users to offer consistent value.
But, how do one conduct UX Research?
UX Research Methods
There are various UX research methods that you can use to identify challenges and opportunities using surveys, click tracking, heatmaps, recordings, customer feedback, performance monitoring and so much more. Hotjar and Crazy Egg are two of the most popular tools that can help you with conducting UX research.
Heatmap Tracking
A heatmap is a visual representation of the clicks, moves, and scroll done by users. With heatmap, you can identify what attracts your user’s attention, learn what is being ignored, analyze pre-launch and post-launch behavior, and compare behavior changes on different devices.
Surveys
Surveys are great to hear the thoughts of your users. Using Hotjar, you can confirm your plans from customers via user feedback, discover the cause of user churn and receive an ever-expanding lake of new ideas. Hotjar provides you with on-site and external survey templates that you can customize according to your needs and capture feedback to optimize your decision-making.
Customer Feedback
Understand what users feel about your site with incoming feedback. Using Hotjar, you can collect feedback from users in the wild. Not only that Hotjar enables users to highlight parts of the page that they liked or disliked to help you detect the area of improvement. You can also compare the feedback score of each page of your site side by side.
Recordings
Recordings are the playback of users moving, scrolling, rage clicking, and u-turning on your site. Both Hotjar and Crazy Egg allow you to map the user journey, watch recordings to check if everything is working perfectly and easily identify pain points, bugs, and problems on your site.
Performance Monitoring
As the name suggests, performance monitoring is an evaluation of your site’s performance to understand if it’s working as expected and is satisfying for the users. With performance monitoring, you can analyze the median page load time, slowest page load timing, rage clicks, dead clicks, page bounces, and total errors that are on your site.
What is UX Testing
UX Testing is a method of testing different aspects of user experience to conclude the best way for a website and its elements to interact with the audience. The goal of UX testing is to identify if there are any usability issues, gather quantitative and qualitative data to determine whether users find the elements of your website satisfying or not. To run effective UX testing, it is important to create a powerful test plan and analyze the findings for reporting.
Now think about your website for a sec. What are you aiming to achieve? Increased sales, obviously! But how would you make it possible without figuring out what influences your customer? There’s no way you can do that.
So to increase your sales, you will have to fulfill the needs of each user. And let me tell you no two users want the same thing. That’s why you can’t just follow every piece of advice provided in UX best practices blindly. Although best practices give a starting point, you need to test things for yourself first.
Sounds intricating? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Let’s check out the prominent UX Testing methods in the next section.
UX Testing Methods
User testing follows the scientific method – you recognize a requirement, create a hypothesis, set up experiments, run tests, and interpret results.
To make your task easier, there are tons of testing methods and tools that will help you understand UX testing. However, instead of getting lost in the flood of tools, we have a tool that can perform the following testing, i.e., Google Optimize.
A/B Testing
An A/B test is a random experiment that uses two or more variants of the same page of your website. Each variant is served at the same time to observe its performance and measure independently of other external factors. Then the gathered data is used to identify the leader among the variants that will be used in your website.
Multivariate Testing
In multivariate testing (MVT), variants of two or more components are tested at the same time to see which combination gives the best result for the users. Instead of showing the effective page variant, MVT identifies the most effective variant of each element and analyzes interactions between them. MVT is best used for optimizing landing pages.
Redirect Testing
A redirect test allows you to separate web pages from each other. In redirect testing, variants are detected through URLs. The best use cases of redirect testing are to test different landing pages or redesign a web page completely.
Conclusion
So, these were the popular UX research methods and testing methods that you as a developer or business owner can use to identify what suits your target audience the most. The above mentioned are three powerful tools that will help you gather in-depth research and testing data of your website that your team can use to fix the problems and bring out prominent results.
