A Quick Guide to User Experience Research

User Experience has been a buzz word in recent years but what exactly does that mean when it comes to Business? As the term ‘User Experience’ suggests, it is a tool to understand how the end users actually experience the product or service you sell.

“Leaders start with Customers and work backward” is the first and the foremost principle of Amazon. This simply tells us that the businesses that know their customers well, will profit well.

User Experience Research is not just about getting reviews from the customers, rather it’s much deeper than that. As individuals we are continuously experiencing various products and services on a daily basis, however, we hardly get time to think specifically about each one of those products and services. The goal of user experience research is to understand how a user thinks and feels while what the user says and does and use these insights to build useful, usable and accessible products/services. User experience research bridges the gap between what the business thinks the users need and what the users actually need. How will you know what to offer if you don’t know your users’ needs, pain points, and motivations.

A user experience research study answers the questions of what is needed and why and also what is not needed and why. It gives you all the information you need to build a great product or service. UXR is a continuous process of checking with users and improvising.

There are two types of data that you will collect when interacting with users, Qualitative or Quantitative. Quantitative data is nothing but anything that can be measured like “How would you rate your experience on a scale of 1–10?”. However, Qualitative data is more in detailed nonnumeric information, like “what do you think of this product?”. Qualitative data answers ‘what and why’ while quantitative data answers ‘how much and how many’. The data collected is then used to derive useful insights for building customer centric products/services.

User experience research is the foundation to build right products, benefit the business and serve user’s needs which in turn creates an eco-system of happy and satisfied customers while adding value to the business.