User research or UX research is important for every UX designer to know. For UX designers, it's important to understand as much as possible about customers to enhance your product and service. It helps us identify their needs, behaviours, goals and mindsets. Using UX research methods and tools improves our understanding and makes our work better.
In this article, we’ll cover interesting UX research methods and UX research tools to ensure that your product is user-friendly and fully functional. Try these techniques and tools in your UX project.
What is UX research?
UX research in simple words is research about user interactions. In other words, it is the process of studying your target user to add context and insights to your design. The main thing in doing research is to build the plan from the perspective of the ideal user.
UX research is divided into two parts: collecting and combining that data to advance usability. At the beginning of the UX project, design research is to understand the business requirements and learn about the user's necessities and goals. After market research, they focus on usability tests or A/B tests that will improve your UX.
The importance of UX research
UX research is the pillar of UX design. The end goal is to create products and services that customers want to use. This process looks optional, but in reality, it’s very important from both a design and a business viewpoint. Which brings your business to the next level.
UX research saves your time & money by uncovering usability bugs and design flaws. Conducting the research, you can design based on accurate statistics to overcome the bugs.
Best UX research methods
Interviews
Taking interviews is the best UX research method to collect valuable insights. It is a quick and easy way to uncover those data that survey and usability testing cannot do. Especially helpful for UX researchers for understanding the user's emotions and experiences with the help of feedback questions. With the help of accurate information, you can create a product structure and user persona.
Surveys
Email surveys and on-site surveys are perfect UX research methods for collecting lots of information without spending a single penny. It is much easier than taking long interviews and no need to coordinate with time and place. Surveys help collect open & close minded questions. Adding too many questions to the survey is getting fewer responses so try to add focused questions.
Card sorting
The card sorting UX research method helps determine the information architecture of a product or service. Card sorting is done by using cards. The UX researchers, write topics on each card, mix the cards into a random order and then ask users to select them. This will help in creating a site and app structure that matches the user's thinking.
A/B testing
Another best UX research method, A/B testing name suggests, a group of users is divided into two for comparing two different versions of the product and service. To finalize which one performs better. For example, show different versions of UX to a different group to choose the winner. In a better way to test colour, banner, font, menu and button placement in your UI design.
Tree Testing
Tree testing is typically used to consider the information architecture of your website. This is UX research method is another step of card sorting. Tree testing is to test the advance of designing page structures or navigation menus of the website.
Best UX research tools
Lookback
Lookback is a powerful UX research tool for taking live user interviews, including features of collaborative & testing analysis and recording of user interviews. Its pricing starts from $17/month and has a 60-day free trial.
Google Forms
Google Forms is a free and easy-to-use UX research tool to collect information from users. This is a favourite tool for many UX researchers and integrates with other apps like zapier.
Optimal Workshop
Optimal Workshop is a popular UX research tool for Card sorting. This tool is best for planning information structures, analysis and recruitment. It also has a free plan, for advanced features pricing starts at $99/month.
Maze
Maze is a leading testing platform that collects actionable insights from real users in minutes. This UX research tool includes multiple analysis, heatmaps, A/B & guerrilla testing and many more. It's free for one project, then the price starts at $25/month.
Userlytics
Userlytics is a user-testing platform for collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. With this UX research tool, you can do card sorting, usability tests, and tree testing using a variety of features. Its price is $49/month.
Wrapping up
This article gives us a brief summary of several best user research methods and the best UX research tools that UX designers use.
By choosing the correct UX research methods and using them properly, designers develop superior products and services that help customers and businesses more effectively.
UX research tools are free and paid but choose the best tool that works best for your project. Each project requires different tools and methods to find what works best.
