A website is the vehicle through which your client establishes brand visibility, boosts credibility, educates the public on their offering, and generates income. That said, are your clients the ones you’re actually designing websites for?
Not really. A website represents and serves the brand, but it’s ultimately the end user who engages with the website that you’re designing for. The tricky thing about website design is how do you create a website for someone you’ve never met. This is why UX research plays such a big part in the UX design process—it gives you a direct line to the user, even if you haven’t started work on the website.
In this guide to UX research, we’ll explain what it is, why it matters, as well as the various types, methods, steps and tools involved in it.
What is UX research?
Being able to create an aesthetically pleasing website is important, we generally call this UI design (User Interface). However, there’s more to the UX design than what users see. It needs to feel natural and be intuitive enough that they can easily achieve their goals.
User experience research is the practice of collecting data on users, studying their interactions with products and designing experiences based on that user input. Essentially, the goal of UX research is to help web designers create better products, like websites and mobile apps.
Why is UX research important for my small business or start-up website?
UX research is an integral part of human-centred design. It enables web designers to base their decisions on facts and observations instead of on assumptions or personal preferences. Here are some of the positive outcomes you can expect when you make UX research part of your design process:
1. Improve the website user experience
UX research allows you to go directly to the source and learn about your website user behaviours, thoughts, and goals, providing insights about your hypotheses you won’t be able to get anywhere else. This, in turn, will enable you to improve the user experience for the target user.
2. Take a data-backed approach to fixing issues
Thorough UX research is part of the lengthy and iterative UX design process taking place across many phases throughout a single project. Since one of the goals of UX research is to create more satisfying experiences (that lead to positive outcomes, like conversions) you can continue using UX research methods to discover new problems after the start of a project. Once you have prototypes or a live website to share its a new opportunity to learn about users’ pains, motivations and behaviours.
3. Create better websites by today’s standards
The web has undergone massive changes over the years. Some of these changes have been in response to evolving technologies, other times, web design trends change because tastes require a different approach. Inclusive design, for instance, is in response to a growing social awareness and need for accessibility. Humane design, on the other hand, has arisen to mitigate the negative side effects of users spending so much time using their devices.
What connects today’s UX design trends and techniques is the empathetic component. Design is responding to the human condition, and UX research is the process that allows this to be possible.
Types of UX research
There are different ways to classify the various methods of UX research, and the best UX research approach often employs a mix of methods. Certain kinds of research are beneficial to different phases of UX design, so having a solid understanding of what they are will help you devise your strategy.
Qualitative vs. quantitative
Quantitative research helps you gather data on what is happening. You can measure these insights with numbers and percentages. Qualitative research, on the other hand, helps you gather data that explains why it’s happening—insights that can be measured with observations and personal responses.
Ideally, you’ll use a combination of both methods. This will allow you to see the bigger picture of how your target users respond to your website design and why.
Behavioural vs. attitudinal
Behavioural research allows you to observe how users interact with the experience you’ve designed for them. This kind of research should be used to see what happens when you put users in various scenarios.
Attitudinal research allows you to determine what the users’ feelings or thoughts are about an experience. With input regarding their opinions, beliefs, and feelings, you’ll understand their general impression of your website.
These methods should be used in conjunction with one another. Behavioural research will shed light on what users do and then attitudinal research will help you understand why.
Generative vs. evaluative
Generative research helps you gain a deeper understanding of users by identifying their pains and defining their most common problems. This kind of research is useful before you design a website, since you can anticipate these issues off the bat.
Evaluative research is used in later design phases, as well as in post-launch and when redesigning websites. These kinds of research methods help you evaluate an existing website or feature and form a working hypothesis regarding how to improve it.
What UX research methods should I use for my small business website?
There are many different UX research methods, so don’t think of the following as a checklist of what you must do. UX research will differ depending on the specific project and objectives you’re working on.
Surveys
Surveys give UX researchers the chance to learn more about their users as a whole. The questions posed to respondents can be qualitative in nature (e.g. “What does this logo make you think of?”) or quantitative (e.g. “How would you rate the ease of use of this contact form on a scale of 1 to 10?”). The nice thing about surveys is that you can gather information about a group of users while expending minimal effort and time. As a small business you could simply ask for opinions of people that have used your website via email or even a pop-up.
User interviews and Focus Groups
The one-on-one user interview (or larger focus group) is another method focused around a question-and-answer format. However, this method establishes a direct interaction between the UX researcher and the user or focus group.
Usability testing
Usability tests are similar to tree tests, except they go beyond the sitemap and take a look at how users think about and engage with a website and its features. Researchers can use usability tests during the initial research phase to learn how users prefer having key components designed. They can also perform usability testing after a prototype has been developed or launched to diagnose issues with the UI or UX.
Here are a couple types of usability testing you can do:
Moderated usability tests: Can be done in person or via screen share. The UX researcher asks the user to complete a task. The user then explains how they’d do that or demonstrate using a prototype. They’re also encouraged to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Unmoderated usability tests: Use session recording software. The user is provided with instructions on what to do and which tasks to carry out. Again, they’ll go through the motions while explaining their thought process. The researcher reviews the results later.
A/B testing
A/B testing is a type of quantitative UX research method that takes place after a website has gone live. A/B testing software is installed on the website, which enables the web designer to create an alternative design (or designs). The different versions are shown to an equal number of website visitors.
A/B testing can be used to:
Help the researcher decide between competing designs or functionality
To remove friction from the website and replace it with a more user-friendly design
To learn how to optimize the website for greater conversions
As a general rule of thumb, A/B tests are done on one specific segment of the website, like a contact form’s fields, a button design, or a hero image. While UX researchers and designers tend to do lots of A/B testing to improve a website, only one test can be run at a time.
Would you like us to run A/B testing on your site? Get in touch.
Heatmaps
When used in conjunction with A/B testing, heatmapping can be a useful tool in website optimization. Heatmapping is both a qualitative and quantitative UX research method that takes place on a live website.
In heatmapping, software monitors how users engage with a web page by visualizing the following data:
How “hot” (heavily viewed) specific areas of a web page are
How far down a web page the majority of visitors scroll to
Which areas of the page people click on most and least
We can install simple to use heatmap software into your small business website, enabling you to use this visualised data along with engagement percentages to make inferences about the success of their content and the user journey.
Ethnographic studies
Ethnographic studies are ones where the researcher observes—and sometimes engages with—the user in their natural environment. These kinds of studies don’t need to be done in-person. Researchers may remotely observe the user (for example, over Zoom) as they interact with a product.
The purpose of these studies is to gather behavioral data and figure out how users will naturally engage with a website. This kind of observational data can’t be used on its own though. It needs to be gathered in conjunction with attitudinal data to ensure that how users feel or think about a website translates to how they engage with it, and vice versa.
For small businesses, we could install software onto your website that allows you to see video recordings of users on your website and see how they interact with it in real time. This allows us to monitor if there are key areas where we lose any engagement and address issues.
Would you like us to support you with your Website usability testing?
Get in touch today to discuss how we can make your website easy to navigate and improve conversions.
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