Picture this, the business proposes a new product that they believe will benefit our users. Before proceeding, we have to quantify the defining factor on whether or not the product will resonate with our users through UX Research (UXR). UXR is the study of behaviors, needs, and emotions of the end user to help organizations ensure their products, and systems don’t fail.
UXR defines user experiences, and in turn helps create engaging and satisfying solutions by defining the product language, features, and/or how the product is laid out. This helps us:
Improve customer experience
Increase customer loyalty
Homogenize brand & product
Understand customer engagement
Research & Klivvr
Users are divided into two categories based on which will provide the necessary insights: external (customers, citizens, clients) or internal (employees, operational staff, field teams). The recruitment is done based on the product to be tested. When working on enhancing a product, we prioritize external users as internal users often have biases to the organization making the research invalid. However, when introducing a completely new concept, recruiting internal users makes us more time efficient.
UXR is often placed under the UX umbrella—which also houses UX design and UX writing—however, collected insights go beyond just design and serves other functions within the organization. If you were to imagine a diagram of all the different functional areas within an organization, UXR will be located in the middle of them all
Different Types of Research Methods
Research methods provide empirical evidence that guides the design process to reduce assumptions, and enhance the overall user experience.
The two main types of research methods are qualitative and quantitative. The former includes interviews, usability testing, and digital ethnography, and provide rich and detailed insights into users’ motivations, feelings, and behaviors. It uncovers the why behind users’ actions. Quantitative research method includes surveys, A/B testing, and analytics, yielding numerical data that can be statistically analyzed to identify patterns, measure user satisfaction, and test hypotheses. Both methods are essential for validating findings on a larger scale, and making data-driven decisions.
By combining both qualitative and quantitative research methods, UX researchers can gain a comprehensive view of the user experience. This dual approach ensures that our design decisions are both empathetic and evidence-based, leading to more user-centered and successful products.
Integrating our Research into Continuous Product Discovery
The insights we collect from research methods are then integrated into a continuous product discovery process. This process is divided into a discovery stage, and a delivery stage.
Discovery
This stage determines opportunities through our research using both methods. To paint the picture clearly, we will use our Saving Jars as a case study. Our reference statement from the collected insights was:
“Users need to save in order to feel financially secure, yet they have a discipline problem towards putting money aside.”
We took this statement to conduct a design sprint and started with our first prototype. After this step, we started learning from users directly through multiple rounds of usability testing and design iterations. We validated our findings through a digital ethnography—an observational research method employed to study users in their day-to-day life to gain a contextual understanding of their needs.
Delivery
In this stage we launched our Saving Jars product which provided us with the user feedback needed to enhance the future versions of the product.
We collected the feedback from users after the product release in the delivery stage. Data collection is done through our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team, data engineering team, and user behavior data analysis tools. We primarily focus on comparing our desired flow results versus what the user is actually doing. This is done through highlighting how common UX issues are in user sessions by calculating the percentage of said issues amongst users going through the same flow. By collecting these data, we extract the potential development areas to make the experience more convenient.
The Impact
The integration of UXR at Klivvr is pivotal in developing products and enhances many areas within our app. By using a blend of qualitative and quantitative research methods, we ensure that our design decisions are both empathetic and data-driven. This not only improves customer experience and loyalty, but also enhances brand consistency. Ultimately, UXR helps us stay aligned with our users' needs, and ensuring that Klivvr remains at the forefront of user-centered innovation.