Why can UX research bring value to your project?  

There is no doubt that design is essential from a business perspective and product development process in so far as it improves user experience. The product design manager in user experience projects makes design decisions to provide excellent service and a pleasant website interface. The users’ experiences gained by using your product will significantly impact whether a given client will return. So, you should not ignore the fact that understanding user experience will make your digital product succeed. Nowadays, the market is very competitive. So, users choose applications and websites that user experience includes, rather than those with poorer graphics or those that are less intuitive. Some numbers demonstrate the value of UX design in business:¹

• 89% of users purchase from a competitor after a poor customer service experience.   ‍
• 70% of new projects fail because of a lack of user acceptance.   ‍
• Investing in good UX design can reduce development time by up to 55%.  ‍
• 80% of post-launch fixes in digital products impact user experience.
• ‍Investing in a good UX design reduces support costs by up to 90%  ‍
• Good UX design improves key performance indicators (KPIs) by up to 83%  

Conduct user experience is not only designed experience, but this field also has an impact on service design and SEO. That means that it helps your website to rank higher in Google search results. What’s more, research proves that if you have a pleasant website with a design process focused on user experience strategies with experience design tools to reduce the number of inquiries to e-commerce customer service, which reduces support costs.  

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User Experience design and benefits which came from their experience

‍User experience requires creating and maintaining websites with the care of steps users, but only some know what this field is about. Everyone has had positive and negative user experiences while using websites and services like online shopping and/or internet banking. Through these user experience elements, we have become aware of the user’s feelings. That's why a product design manager using inspirational user experience while making a quality product or service is important in maintaining good user flow. That way, the potential customer gets a good first impression and returns to us. User experience covers what users think and feel.  

Moreover, user experience depends on the context in which the product is used; as well as its role in the market. It is essential to know the profile of the users i.e., for whom this product or service will be intended. The term “user experience” was coined by Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. According to Norman, “user experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” UX design is, by definition, the process of creating products that are practical and usable. There are six ideal features of user experience that product design managers should know by Peter Morville:  

• Usable – the product or service needs to be simple and easy to use  
• Useful – user needs to be fulfilled when using the product  
• Desirable – the product’s appearance needs to be esthetic and attractive  
• Fixable – the user needs to find a quick solution if a problem appears  
• Accessible – it is important to create a product that is easily accessible for everyone including those with disabilities  
• Credible – the user needs to trust to the company and its product  

Experienced design companies know that usability is a must-have for user interactions. It's imperative when discussing user experience fundamentals. It helps them create functional and intuitive products to enable users to do tasks effectively and efficiently.  

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What is UX research, and how can it help your product team?  

To improve user experience, there is User Experience Research which is part of User Experience Architect. The focus is more on the user's experiences and responses to the product design. When creating a digital product, we ensure the user experiences pleasant feelings and engages behaviors consistent with the intended digital product design goals.

Product experience insight aims to gain insight into clients’ thoughts, behaviors, and values. A user experience questionnaire helps to reach it. From this research, you can form a hypothesis. However, qualitative research is lengthy and only involves a limited number of users. To validate that hypothesis and service design, you can conduct quantitative research with a larger group of participants.

Another field that is integrated with design user experiences is AI (artificial intelligence). AI is changing how we design products and services because it can design more immersive experiences. The power of this technology can also improve our health and help to make us happier. AI takes into account lots of data so AI UX enables highly personalized user experiences.  

When choosing a research type and experience design tools, it is important to consider the information we hope to get, the budget and resources we have available, the time we plan to devote to user testing, and the status of the study group's availability. We can classify them and divide them into groups:  

• Moderated and unmoderated, due to the participation of the person conducting the user experience questionnaire  
• face-to-face and remote, due to the form in which they are conducted  
• product and contextual, due to the subject of research  
• expert and with users due to the presence of respondents  
• behavioral and attitudinal  
• quantitative and qualitative, due to the type of data obtained in the survey to conduct a user-centered design  
• formal and informal, due to the criteria they meet  

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Method of UX research  

Individual In-depth interview - a conversation between a user interaction designer and a respondent. Discussions that focus on areas relevant to researchers. The purpose of the interview is to obtain information about the users and the context in which they operate. They are divided into structured, open-ended, and semi-structured interviews based on how questions are asked.  

Focus group interview - a study that resembles an individual, in-depth interview, but there are a group of interviewers. This allows you to get more people's opinions in less time. Another characteristic of focus groups is the dynamics of the participants, causing individual interviewees to influence each other. These interviews tend to focus on one topic because talking to multiple people about many topics can take too much time.  

Ethnographic research – based on an observation of a selected process, events, and people from the social sciences. Through ethnographic research, it is possible to observe a process's natural setting and context.  

Questionnaire surveys – the form of the survey with closed- or open-ended questions completed primarily online. Questionnaire surveys may be used to get quantitative data on a particular subject and essential details about the group being surveyed. They are also used when the survey concerns sensitive issues.  

Diary survey - the respondents keep a diary for a specified period, answers questions asked in this and describe their activities. They are in both paper and electronic forms. They allow an in-depth understanding of the long-term process focused on brand experience.  

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Visualizing the results of UX research

Finally, if you finish your work on user experience revolution, your client is waiting to see it and figure out what to do in the future with his/her digital experience. It is essential to present the results and design user experience decisions in a clear and engaging manner. There are some ideas on how to visualize the experience design concept and research's results:  

User Persona    

Representation of a typical user should be created based on research because a persona based on user feedback tools gives us a true picture of the user interaction. The typical persona describes the user by their goals, needs, concerns, age, and demographics. If the persona wasn’t created based on user base, but on the designer’s knowledge, it is a proto persona.  

Empathy Map  

It's a collaboration tool that enables teams to gain deeper insight into their customers and their experience design principles. Like user personas, empathy maps can represent user groups such as customer segments. Traditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or persona in the middle. The Empathy Map provides us with an image of who a user is, and it’s not chronological or sequential.  

User Journey Map  

A user journey map shows users (preferably personas) when and where users meet up with a product or service, their emotions, their user interactions, and the artifacts they use in one picture. This map shows the interactions between users and products and analyzes how the relationships change over time and space. User journey maps are usually in the form of infographics, with elements arranged in chronological order.  

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What is UX writing and how can it increase user experience statistics?  

UX writing is increasingly in the scope of user experience objectives and research on user experience community. This tool carefully considers information that responds to people's contexts, needs, and behaviors. The text prepared by UX writers appears throughout the interface of digital products (websites, mobile apps, etc.). But UX writing differs from copywriting because it aims to guide users through a user interface intuitively.  

More generally, UX writers deliver product messages of the product from the inside (pages, emails, buttons, and push notifications). It requires a deep and complete understanding of your users, often through UX research.  

Many UX writers are former or current copywriters. A copywriter's job is to help sell a product, but a UX writer should also add value to users by creating experiences that improve their daily lives.  

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UX writing and microcopy  

We mentioned in the above paragraph that UX writers prepare text for small pieces of websites and apps. They are called microcopy and are one key element of your design process that is probably overlooked.  

Small bites make a significant impact on our experienced users. Microcopy refers to a small copy of a product. It's used everywhere in the interface, from call-to-action button labels to placeholder text form input fields.  

In the past, terms and messages often contained technical terms understood by developers but not always by ordinary users. With the focus on improving the user experience and the popularity of experience design platforms, developing products that are easier to use has become the norm. According to Maria De La Riva’s article² there are three features for good microcopy:  

Compact  

This copy aims to help users move from one level of experience to the following (building relationships where necessary) as smoothly as possible. Good microcopy is not wordy, lengthy, or rambling. Concise, simple, and to the point witch design focuses on optimal user interactions.  

Aware  

Recognizing user interactions and goals is very important, focusing on the user-centered design (where the user is at a particular point in the journey). Where were they earlier? Where do they go from here? Good microcopy considers the goals of the product and the user and understands the purpose of achieving perfect user experience.  

Charming (ly effective)  

Simplicity and a sense of purpose don't have to be boring. Good microcopy should be talkative and engaging to get users where they need to go. It should be fun and smart to make the experience more fun and engaging.  

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‍It’s a beginning to reach valuable user experience

As you can see, there is a lot of knowledge and tools at your disposal to help you prepare or develop your website and/or app. Still, in software development, there are lots of misused and misinterpreted terms about UX and UI (term wasn’t mentioned in this article). From brand awareness to fostering customer loyalty, good UX matters. User experience covers and requires top-notch design skills, which in turn, improves the experience in the designing process. UX designers create products considering user interactions and research. All that helps in spreading brilliant user experience and design elements.

¹ https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2021/04/how-ux-designers-can-add-value-to-a-business.php

² https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/what-is-microcopy-ux/

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