The attitude and experience of customers are essential for any business. Depending on the experience of users, your product or service can become either extremely popular or lose the audience quite swiftly. Digital marketing offers many useful tools to communicate and interact with customers. However, effective work is impossible without a deep analysis based on research work. To help businesses study their clients, all digital marketing strategies should include user experience (UX) research. UX research (or UXR) is a systematic study of the target audience and their demands. As a result, the design processes in your company can get some realistic context based on the real experience.
UXR Components
The research under discussion includes two main directions:
Qualitative research. It allows understanding the motivations of users to do one thing or another by means of interviews, ethnographic field studies, and other types of research work. Thus, it’s possible to find out, why any calls to action were ineffective or why your site isn’t very attractive to users. This kind of research also includes usability testing, which allows monitoring. For example, user stress responses. It’s important to understand that the collected information is most often non-numerical, so it’s required to be careful while collecting and analyzing the data. Make sure your personal attitude doesn’t impact the results.Quantitative research. This kind of study includes more structured methods, for instance, surveys. During the research, you collect measurable information about user actions. Then it’s necessary to compare the data with the information collected during qualitative studies. To reach the objectiveness of the data, it’s important to take care of the right design of the tests or other methods of research to purify them.
As you see, both directions can effectively work only together providing businesses with reliable and trustworthy information about the experience of their customers. UXR is also divided into attitudinal and behavioral. In the first case, you listen to what people say, while in the other case, you look at what they do. To get the clearest view of a design problem, it’s recommended to use all the varieties of UX research.
Why is UX Important?
There’s a common question ‘Why UX design is important’. The most general answer is that UXR helps fulfill the user’s needs, while they are the first priority for any product/service provider. In the wide sense, UXR allows:
Developing and designing the right things (thus, you can avoid waste of time and money)Developing and designing things right (it helps define guidelines to make the right UX decisions).
To understand how UXR helps businesses, it’s necessary to observe the key benefits it provides for you: So, without good research of the type, there are many risks, for instance:
Applying old technologies (simply because they exist and nobody wants to bother changing them)Obsession with design trends (the desire to apply useless design trends, which are neither effective nor necessary for your business)The influence of emotional attachment and personal opinion (it will lead to misunderstanding, what improvements should be made, while the real user needs might stay neglected).
To effectively apply UXR, it’s also required to understand why user experience is important. Any business development is built based on the client’s needs and preferences. Thus, it’s possible to guarantee fast and effective development of your business, a boom of traffic to your site, customers’ delight, and saving time & money. With the right UXR, it’s possible to build a stronger brand image and form a positive reputation among potential and existing customers.
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