When building or redesigning a website, it’s important to know that these new iterations or changes are necessary. User Experience (UX) research backs up design decisions behind these tasks and allows designers to understand what users need and what is useful or relevant to them for a website. User experience research can bring both quantitative and qualitative data for understanding what actions to take moving forward with your website.
Research Methodologies
User interviews are a great way to gain qualitative data. They are targeted towards an audience that is relevant to your website in question. They’re a way to learn why users do what they do, versus what they say. You are able to ask deeper questions and see the emotional landscape of general behavior. You can find out user’s wants and needs and expectation of products.
Surveys are the main source for gaining quantitative data. They’re useful for collecting quick data, are remote, and this data us very useful for backing up design decisions. They can give statistically significant data based on results. When putting together these surveys for research, you must use clear language and ensure questions can be answered and not guessed on.
Comparative/Competitor Analysis is another method that does not involve gathering users. Here you would research other competitors to your website and compare similar site features, menu items, business models, and more. It’s a useful way to see why other competitor sites are successful and have that concrete information when thinking about your own sitemap and feature sets for your website.
Analyzing Your Data
After your research tasks are done, you then would analyze your data for similarities and common themes. Doing this can allow you to fully visualize commonalities among user data and know what is useful or necessary to include within your website. Research synthesis creates insights for designers. It’s not just research findings, it’s determined thoughts from the findings.
These insights are useful if:
- They’ve backed major themes in your research
- They uncover something different, not fully known
- They challenge assumptions prior to the research
After sorting your insights, they will help you move forward with developing your website. You will have gained valuable data that supports your design decisions.
UX research is certainly a process that is helpful to gain insights on a problem that could be unknown in the web development world. There are common methods for developing and building sites. These components have already gone through research in the past and may not need further research. However, gathering useful data can solve solutions to issues where a common solution does not yet exist. It can help support your decisions for developing your new site, or back up reasonings for changing it.
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