- What is user research? User research is a field of empirical research which stands on the shoulders of decades of scientific knowledge into human behavior and focuses on a specific context. User research works to understand how people interact with a design, often a specific product or service.
Why do we conduct user research? Typically, the goal of user research is to identify ways to improve a product's design. User research can help us find critical information for the design process, including whether or not a design works, where users are frustrated, if information is conveyed correctly, or what types of people use a product.
Now, what is the value of conducting user research? Conducting user research allows for individuals, stakeholders, teams, departments, and companies to make decisions based on evidence rather than opinions. User research provides user experience professionals with true insights about user behavior, feelings, and perspectives.
User experience professionals are responsible for communicating and advocating for users' interests inside organizations. This task is difficult during the best of times. User research gives us more than a hunch, more than anecdotes with which we may convince others of user priorities.
Here are some research methods, which are used by user researchers. User research involves many different approaches to measure and understand user behavior, all to identify how users interact with products. Common user research methods include field studies, card sorting, benchmarking studies, surveys, usability tests, and A/B testing, among others.
User research is important throughout a product's lifecycle and can roughly be categorized along two key axes: attitudinal to behavioral and qualitative to quantitative. Attitudinal approaches gather users' feelings, thoughts, and opinions, whereas behavioral approaches analyze users' actions, what they actually do. Qualitative research is often more exploratory with room for more flexibility and open-ended discovery of problems, friction, or user perspectives.
Qualitative research typically involves a small number of users. Quantitative methods are more structured and involve more users to appropriately conduct statistical analyses of user behavior. Qualitative methods often answer why or what questions.
Quantitative methods answer how many or how much questions. User research is valuable to any organization and essential to any team that wishes to place users at the center of their priorities. - Thanks for watching.
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