How to choose an appropriate UX Research method
I am a graduate student who is studying in Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience in Drexel University currently. As an newbie who first come into this field, I have been overwhelmed by so many information. The reasons I wrote these articles are to help me organize all the information I got and to deep my understanding in UX. I hope these can be helpful for UX beginners who just like me.
This article is structured from the most common questions that UX beginners may want to ask about UX research.
- Why UX research is important? The role UX research plays in the development process.
- When should we do UX research?
- What kind of UX research method should we use?
- How can we conduct an UX research?
I. Why UX research is so important?
As you can see, the reason that many businesses or products failed is not due to they didn’t work hard. Instead, they failed because they had worked too hard in a wrong direction, so a large budget and resources are wasted.
An analogy for the entire product produced process, UX research is the fore-work for searching the location of treasure, and the service or product design is the process for digging the treasure. If the explore of the location of treasure is wrong in the beginning, even we dig for hundreds years we still will not find the thing we want.
UX can be one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk of businesses model or product design before it actually launches. A good UX research can lead designers and stakeholders to find the right question to work on, and it can also support them to find the real needs of users and markets. This is why UX research so valuable in all the stages of the products development.
II. When should we do UX research? And, what kind of UX research method should we use?
Usually, UX research will impact the most in the early of the project. But according to Susan Farrell, she mentions that UX research can actually be applied in any stage that you are in. The values of UX research created for the project will always increase.
In Service and Product Design, the process can be divided into four main phrases —— Discover, Explore, Test and Listen.
Here is a very useful graphic created by Sarah Gibbon. UX practitioners can use it to determine which UX research method to use in different stages:
Don’t choose method blindly. In the same stage of different services development, the problems you will counter probably are very similar. This table lists some great suggestions of methods which fits most of the scenarios you are in. However, we must remember whatever UX research method we will use, the eventual goal for us is to solve the problem we have. In the other words, we should always identify problem first, chose method second.
For more details, please check this link https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/, the author explains all the details of the various stages and the activities you can take.
Generally, we may can choose the UX research method depending on which stage we are in. If the chart above is too much for you, Susan Farrell summarized another table which included the most popular methods are used in each stage:
In addition, depending on the features of the problem, you are also supposed to choose the appropriate UX research method through three dimensional framework analysis. These dimensions are:
- Behavioral and Attitudinal
- Qualitative and Quantitative
- The Context of Product use
Another chart created by Christian Rohrer is pretty useful for us to understand this concept. He evaluated some common UX research methods through the three dimensional frame.
So, how can we apply this chart into our real work?
For example, for an online store, we have found there are many users didn’t complete their payment on the last step. Through the analysis process, we found the reason is that the location of the payment button is badly designed and it can be really hard for users to notice, so they quit. Then, we come up with two potential solutions for setting the new button.
In this case, the best way to determine which solution is better is to observe the click rate for both of the new settings of button. By observing how people do this in each solution, it will give us the most objective and accurate feedback. In the other words, we are more focusing on the behavioral, which is “what people do” rather than attitudinal, which is “what people say” , and Quantitive — — “how many” instead of Qualitative — — “why they do this” in this case.
The steps to choose an appropriate method just like what I mentioned earlier: Identifying the goal first, choosing the method second. Here is another table listed different main approaches that aim for various goals:
IV. How can we conduct an UX research?
Erin Sanders introduced a five-steps approach for conducting an UX research:
01 / Objectives : What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill? What kind of problem we have found?
02 / Hypotheses : What we have already known? Any potential solutions?
03/ Methods: Based on the knowledge to the problem and potential solutions. To select an appropriate research method and to make a plan.
04/ Conduct: Conduct the plan and gather data through the methods we’ve selected.
05/ Synthesize: Analysis the data and answer the research questions, and determine if it has proved or disproved the hypotheses.
There still are many questions such as “ how many users are needed in each method” haven’t been answered in this article yet. I will cover more details in my next article.
Reference
Christian Rohrer. (2014, October 12). When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods [Com]. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/
Susan Farrell. (2017, February 12). UX Research Cheat Sheet. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/
David Sherwin. (2013, September 23). A 5-Step Process For Conducting User Research. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/09/5-step-process-conducting-user-research/
