Should Your Design Team Dedicate Time to UX Research, Despite The Stakeholders and Project Manager Thinking Otherwise?
UX research or design research is helping us identify our assumptions, what is prove and what is not across our target audience, recognize customer needs, and goals. It helps us to improve our understanding and make our product work better.
During the project kick-off meeting, most likely, our clients question what we do, especially when they do not have a design or developer background. “Why you should make a journey map?” “Why do you spend a lot of time create an empathy map?” “Why do you do those things?” “Is that matter?”. We should help them understand how research can add value to their product. User research is an essential part of product design. That’s how we can change stakeholder’s mindsets.
The research phase would not be waste of time and money. Can you imagine you launch a product with wonderful UI and interaction animation but no one wants it or people want it so badly but end up uninstall your product because the product does not work as they thought it would be? Which one is causing waste more money and time? Doing the research or launch a bad product?
User research can provide an essential foundation for design product strategy. It can eliminate false assumptions from the design process. It will create an optimal product for customers. It will help you to make decisions. It will help us to identify early adopter users who would use our product. Design product is an iteration. Do UX research before the launch of the product especially if we are tight on time and budget. Do it post-launch, then fix the discovered issues.
There are so many UX research methods such as competitive analysis, focus groups, surveys, contextual inquiry, card sorting, journey mapping, the creation of personas and scenarios, participatory design, Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions.
Evaluative UX research methods such as A/B testing, design critiques, eye tracking, and usability testing.
Even after you explain how important the UX research is, if the stakeholder or client isn’t allowing you to do the research, you have to be smart by analyzing the current data available. You can prepare a usability test then make design adjustments later on. You can also consider following the research methods below when you run of time:
- Lean UX helps you to avoid assumptions on user needs by launch MVP. The success of each feature in MVP should measurable. Test each feature with real users frequently so you find the quickest way to validate your hypothesis.
- Minimum viable research. Once you have got enough detailed information, you can conduct the research stage. It means doing just enough research to know what you need to learn during the research stage without spending much time on research.
- Guerilla research. This method is doing research with a minimal number of users.
- Heuristic evaluation. This research doing by assessment of digital products and identifies the usability problems and gives each severity rating from 0 to 4. 0: no problem, 1: cosmetic only, 2: minor usability problem low priority, 3: major usability problem high priority, and 4: catastrophe means have to fix before product launch.
- Hypothetical personas. You can create a persona based on reasonable assumptions about the audience that you can make from existing data.
The conclusion is UX research should conduct even in a tight schedule. There are so many research methods available to do so. It’s unlikely to get the extraordinary product that customers are seeking after skipping the user research phase.
Reference:
https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2018/09/ux-research-is-essential-to-product-success.php
https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-to-rate-the-severity-of-usability-problems/
