USER EXPERIENCE RESEARCH (UX)

How to identify if you need User Experience Research (UX)?

You’ve got a website, you’ve spent money on SEO and you have written some great content, put up company awards, and a cute photo or two of the team having fun at the last bonding day.  You may even have a quirky website that makes you look cool and funky.  Well done so far – but have you thought about this?  Who really owns your website?   

If you answered your customers, clients, or consumers then you really need to think about your website as a service, rather than just a marketing tool.  It is a way for customers to contact you, get something from you or interact with you in some way.  This means that you need to think about how your website delivers to your users and the best way to do this is to conduct some research prior to the design.  Do you actually understand what customer problem or need you are solving for in your website design? 

What is User Experience Research (UX)? 

User experience research focuses on the rational and emotional responses of users in the moment.  It should help you understand your customer/buyer needs and motivations, how they like to navigate, what kinds of information they expect from you and it should also provide a customer’s perspective on your competitor sites.  It should also provide recommendations on how to keep the site simple, easy and convenient for your customers. 

Broadly speaking the way to make your website simple is to use industry conventions in common language and terminology, and simple navigation heuristics but the site should ultimately be built using buyer personas, understanding buyer or customer typologies, needs, typical behaviours, browsing habits, and information typically searched for on websites. The goal here is simplicity and research can help you get there. 

Importantly a website should never frustrate, annoy or confuse your customers.  You must always consider how adding new widgets, or extra pages will impact the user experience and potentially push them away, rather than pull them to you.  Research can also test existing digital sites from website to social media platforms to understand the total user experience of these brand touchpoints and what you can do to create better engagement and gratifying customer experiences.  We need to understand functionality, features, content and user flow. 

From our research, we often see 7 things that really annoy, confuse or impact user experience on websites.   

  • The circle of death – a slow loading site is a buzz killer 
  • Hard to navigate sites with too many clicks down to the desired information 
  • Creative elements that don’t do anything, or do too much (eg: video that plays automatically when page loads) 
  • Sites that can’t be read easily on mobile or tablet 
  • Lack of search function, inaccurate results or complex search functions that always lead to 0 results 
  • Forms that request too much information and passwords requiring complex construction   
  • Content that says nothing or is designed to hide rather than share 

But there are many more than this, and research can help you understand frustrations and barriers to better usability and customer engagement and how to overcome them. 

Independent of buyer behaviour and preferences, we can understand if a page on your site changes the visitor’s state of mind negatively or positively.  We can understand if your visitors disinterested or confused, or do they seem to be exploring, engaged or focused and identify which elements on the page encourage positive behaviours.

UX services at Ruby Cha Cha 

Research that listens to and understands your customers and end users – from initial exploratory work into post launch research.  Our services include: 

  • Website and social media audits 
  • Focus groups with usability testing facilities (desk, tablet, phone) 
  • Workshops 
  • Buyer persona development 
  • Competitive reviews 
  • Agile testing of site development and prototyping 
  • Eye tracking and emotional measures and video recordings of usability 
  • Heat mapping 
  • Ux testing – we can help you user test your new designs (usability test) quickly and make recommendations 

 

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Give us a call if you want to find out more about Usability (UX) Research and how Ruby Cha Cha can help you design or execute a better brand touchpoint. 

  

FAQs

User experience, or UX research, is a useful way to get real data and insights about how your customers are experiencing, on an emotional and rational level, the service or product you’re providing.

It takes the decisions you’ve made about the way to structure a customer experience — such as navigating your website — and tests this against real users, to see what works and what doesn’t. UX research can be undertaken at any stage of a project and is a useful way to recentre your efforts on meeting customers’ needs, wants and expectations.

There are several research methods you can use when conducting user experience research, including:

  • Generative research — helps researchers develop a deeper understanding of the user for developing opportunities for solutions and innovation.
  • Evaluative research —  is used for assessing a specific problem to ensure usability that is grounded in the wants, needs, and desires of actual people.
  • Qualitative research —  focuses on obtaining data through open-ended and conversational communication using focus groups and in-depth interviews.
  • Quantitative research —  using surveys or secondary data for analysis.

If you’re not sure which approach is right for your brand, an experienced market research agency like Ruby Cha Cha can help you determine the best one.

The most effective UX research plans have a clear set of goals. They define a problem statement and identify the objectives of your research. Your plan should choose the right research method for your product or service and recruit relevant participants.

In your plan, you’ll also need to prepare the brief for research, establish a timeline and decide how you’ll present your findings. At Ruby Cha Cha, we can help you establish a clear and focused user experience research plan that gives you the most valuable insights and user journey mapping.

UX research insights are some of the most valuable to a business. They can help you understand what parts of your design are meeting audiences’ expectations and needs and which are falling flat or causing pain points along a customer’s journey. When you’ve identified these areas, you can work to streamline and redesign the experience in order to funnel customers more effectively towards conversion.