Why does product development require user experience research?

When we talk about the user experience, the topic ultimately tends to be about user experience design. Many people will be one thing for user experience and user experience design, which is not true. Of course, today we are not going to delve into the differences, but to talk about "user experience research".

To explore this topic, we have to try to answer the two main questions that are relevant:

What is the value of user experience research?

How does user experience research fit into the product development process?

Before we talk deeply, we might as well warm up the basic meaning of user experience. Traced, you have to cite the user experience in the field of pioneering fathers Jacob Nielsen and Don Norman for its description:

"The user experience encompasses the total interaction of end users with related companies, services, and products. ”

So when we explore its user experience for a product, it involves not only the experience of the product using itself, but also its design, copywriting, advertising, its sense and experience, related websites, the UI and the main features and features, its usability, the purchase experience, Even included in the relevant service email design!

Obviously, creating a satisfying user experience is not a simple thing to do, but if you know exactly what your users need, what skills they have, what kind of services they can offer, there is a certain likelihood of creating a satisfying user experience.

In short, user experience research can help you get the information and knowledge you need to design and build your product.

Next, let's take a look at how Dan Willis describes the process of user experience solving user problems.

According to Willis, user experience (UX) includes visual design, information architecture, interactive design, usability design, user research, and content strategy.

His statement once again emphasizes that the user experience is a multidisciplinary mix, and if you want to create truly stunning products, these different areas and components need to be combined harmoniously to promote each other.

With all of the information above, we can begin by answering the first question:

　What is the value of user experience research?

User experience research, in essence and user research, design research is not significant, it is the user and the important bridge between products. A mature product or business is ultimately to solve the user's problem. So what is the solution to the problem? How to be a solution to satisfy the user's ideas?

User experience design attempts to make people the core of the product development process.

If we're going to give the user experience a definition, it might sound like this:

User experience research aims to gain feedback and gather ideas through different observational approaches to understand user behavior, needs, and attitudes.

Therefore, the real value of user experience research is that it is based on the user feedback of the meridian bias.

It is not subject to the shadow of authority and opinion leaders, and it simply and intuitively feeds the user's ideas.

　How does user experience research fit into the product development process?

User Experience research presents the idea of a valuable user, but how does it fit into the product development process? Do we need to do user experience research before development, or just after the development process or with the development process?

There is not a fixed answer to this question. This usually depends on the product type and the life cycle of the product. However, if you develop product development as a dynamic process that does not stop with the release, user experience research can take two roles throughout the process:

Initial user Research

Ongoing goal-based user research

Initial user research is a user study in the early stages of product development, which helps development teams and stakeholders, entrepreneurs find out what the target users are using, when and where to use the product, and what the basic issues are to be addressed by the product.

Typically, the results of initial user research output are user roles, product usage scenarios, and user journey maps.

This information is critical when making product and design decisions.

Ongoing, target based user research can be done at any stage of product development, especially when there are obvious problems to be addressed.

For example, when you find that your online store has a very low percentage of the final payment, you need to find out why, so you can choose a small number of target users to perform user testing and find the crux of their difficulty in paying.

This approach helps to make important decisions based on actual user feedback. In particular, the user Research Society plays an important role when the product is in the process of development and there are a variety of design options to choose from.

Depending on the type of problem encountered, target-driven user research may vary, for example, if you need to optimize your information architecture, you can use a card taxonomy; If you try to find a more serious usability problem, you can use heuristic evaluation.

User research, if it can be integrated into every aspect of product development, is of the best utility. In this way, we can test, validate, and iterate based on the feedback from the actual user.

Conclusion

Although in the process of creating quality products, interface and interaction design played an important role, but they can not without real user data as a support. User Experience research solves this problem by bridging the gap between the actual available product and the attractive visual design, and if you know when and where to use the user experience research approach, you can use the data wisely and make informed design decisions.