User research is an extremely vital aspect of Product design. This discipline mainly involves thoroughly studying a target audience’s behaviour; determining the different wants and needs of the very same target audience; understanding their motivations, and so on. 70% of enterprise CEO’s see UX as a competitive differentiator. After all, UX is all about creating customized product experiences. The speciality of user research is that it mostly ends up in discovering the unknown needs of the users and thereby lays a foundation for stronger Product Design.
Research can be as creative as the real design process. You can always ‘design a research’ like you design products. Keep things flexible to make it more fun. Before starting the research make a brain dump. This one is for designers who believe that the divine act of creation is what makes us unique and is way more interesting.
Realistically, it’s impossible to stay unbiased during a research.88% report that customer mapping had a positive impact on their ability to deliver personalized UX. It’s better to know your biases beforehand and form proper hypothesis from them. This will ensure you research outcomes are of better quality. It’s also important to manage expectations of stakeholders. Don’t promise hefty outcomes from your research. Collect as much data as possible from both internal and external sources to kick off a topic. A few stages to user research are User Survey, One-on-One User Interview, User Testing, and Final UI/UX.
UX Research is what makes our approach to understanding users, methodical and well-structured. The type of user research you should do depends on your work process as well as your reason for doing user research in the first place. Every $1 invested in UX results in a return between $2 and $100. Hence, Research is crucial. Whether you use classical methods, or you opt for non-conventional ones, there’s no debate that it will help you design better solutions. It provides an essential foundation for design strategy. It helps you to create an optimal product for users. Most importantly, you’ll have the data to back your strategy and design decisions.
· When it comes to building great products, design is the most important “feature.” We’ve moved into the stage where product design dominates — it’s what sets companies apart and gives a real edge over competitors.
· Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a designer, developer, product manager, program manager, marketing manager or project manager, it’s essential to understand the product development process in order to create your best work.
· Fixing a problem in development costs 10 times as much as fixing it in design, and 100 times as much if you’re trying to fix the problem in a product that’s already been released. In this article, we focused on the main principles and approaches that will help you to design great products. Starting with global things as to what product design is all about and work down to the individual phases of product design.
User Research aids us to understand people’s lives in a better way to transform their needs into products. It is conducted to understand users’ characteristics, aims, and behaviours towards achieving the aims. It affects your entire strategy, from idea conception to the final product and saves an organization from product failure in the market.
Hope these thoughts make an impact on your perceptions about User Research!