UX research

In the user research stage, we focus on understanding the product itself first, the user's behavior with the product, their needs, their pains, and their motivations for using our products.

Research is the key part of UX process because it prevents us from designing the wrong product. Also, research is considered as one of the key areas of UX itself because it is involved in all the stages of the UX process, so depending on the need for informations on a specific stage, we have to conduct research as many time as required.
Imagine that we design a product that nobody wants to use just because we didn't do the research; all our hard work, time, and money will be wasted.

There are tons of reasons why UX research is important; the following are some:

• It removes assumptions from the design process
• We will have a lot of data to back up our design process and work
• It will save our company and clients valuable time and money if it is done properly
• We don't have to go back and forth fixing the mistakes that could have been avoided from the beginning, because the later in the product design process we discover that our assumptions are wrong, the more time, money, and resources it will cost us to fix it

When our research is done correctly, we will quickly discover the right requirements for the right people at the right time, because research affects our entire UX process from the conception of an idea up to the product's delivery.

In the UX research stage, we have to provide reliable data insights that will help our product teams to make decisions. A comprehensive insight into the data can help us to build better, more useful, and resilient products for our customers.

The UX research phase is a proven and correct way to get more insight, pieces of information, and correct measurements to create a successful design solution.

There are a lot of different methods and techniques that can be used during the UX research process, but we can separate these methods based into two groups:

• Quantitative research
• Qualitative research

Consider the following diagram:

Quantitative research is research that can be measured numerically. Usually, here we are talking about the data that we understand and is valuable to us.

We have it on a statistical manner, because we gathered this data from people's actions when using our product.

This data includes how many times they clicked on a specific button, how many times they interacted with our call to the action button, and which part of our product they were using more.

We can get this kind of information by including third-party software or even analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, and in the end, we can see the complete statistics on what users have been doing when using our product.

Qualitative research—often referred to as soft research—helps us to understand why people are doing the things they do. Usually, this kind of research happens via interviews or conversations with the users. For example, why they are switching our product on or off that way, why they cannot find that specific thing that they were looking for, and how they interact with our product.

The key to performing better qualitative research is observation–always observe the user's actions in relation to your product.

As per the Nielsen Norman Group, the UX research process can also be separated into four different stages, as follows:

• Discover
• Explore
• Test
• Listen

Each different research methodology falls into one of the preceding stages:

A good guide for selecting a specific UX research method is by knowing at the initial stage what you want to achieve by the end of the research, otherwise you will be gathering all that data without a specific goal.