How UX Research Can Improve Your Product's Chances of Success
Today, we cannot base our product development solely on our intuition or vision. Our thoughts are laden with biases, so we might build a product nobody wants. User experience research is a critical component of human-centered design and essential in producing solutions that deliver real value to users and organizations. This post is the first in a series that discusses the importance of user experience research, its methods, and its best practices.
What is UX research?
User experience research is the process by which we can understand user behavior and obtain insights related to their needs and pain points using different techniques and methodologies.
The idea is to provide the team with the information and context needed to build a user-centered product.
UX research improves the success chances of the business and becomes the most significant competitive advantage.
In Bardo, we have two types of research methods, generative and evaluative.
Generative research allows us to obtain an understanding of the target audiences. This includes behavior, emotions, motivations, and challenges. The generative research focuses on identifying the problem to solve and obtaining all data needed for framing it.
Evaluative research focuses on evaluating a product, concept, or prototype to obtain the needed data that help us to improve it. This type of research is used in all product life cycles.
But how can research help us to create better products?
Here we’ll mention some benefits of running UX research as part of the design process.
UX Research helps you to remove biases.
UX research allows us to eliminate bias through a deeper understanding of the user. We can get this by conducting interviews and asking questions that help us understand your pain points.
This way, we can be more empathic with the user and their context. Understanding human behavior is an essential principle in the process.
Research is essential for validating concepts.
UX research allows us to validate with real users a concept using a prototype, asking questions, and obtaining feedback.
For us, it is one of the essential points; in each iteration of our design process, we find ourselves with the need to validate concepts and ideas through prototypes. This gives us a lot of insights that help us create better products.
It allows you to make decisions based on data.
When we start to incorporate UX research in the design process, we start to obtain data that allows us to make better decisions. We use different platforms that allow us to measure user interactions with a product; this gives us the necessary information to make decisions and improve the product.
Bring real value.
Understanding users' needs through research allow us to make better decisions about what we will build. This way, we use resources better; we follow the paths that generate the most value for users.
UX research is difficult to organize. It takes time, money, and effort to interview and test with your audience. However, the insights you gain may be the driving force for innovation, improved user experiences, and product success. Whether you want people to use your products for longer, differentiate yourself from the competition, or feel confident about your choices, UX research can be used at every stage of product development and launch.