Develop actionable insights from user research

[CXL (CXL Playbooks)]

Great user research can help you create deliverables that lead to tangible improvements.

To deliver good and useful experiences that solve real user problems, strategic user research is essential. User research helps you understand your audience, which in turn allows you to design better product and brand experiences. It allows you to take a user-centered approach, from product design all the way to your website.

Know your audience; know what they want

User research ensures that your product and UX decisions are based on actual user needs. At its core, it’s about the ability to empathize with your audience, and then turn that empathy into tangible outputs that help you make improvements.

Companies who research their users perform better on the stock exchange, have more engaged employees, and deliver greater revenue. They’re able to test ideas, ask meaningful questions, and eliminate biases to make better product, messaging, and marketing decisions.

Eliminating misconceptions about user research

Despite established benefits, user research still falls victim to misconceptions that can hurt your brand.

• User research is not just usability testing. Usability testing is one component within the larger concept of user research. User research is designed to have business impact beyond improving product usability.
• User research doesn’t provide all the answers. It doesn’t give you a foolproof roadmap to business success. While user research helps you understand your audience’s goals and needs, you still requires strategic thinking to satisfy them.
• Product research is not just impactful for designers. Product engineers, marketing teams, customer support, and even the executive team all benefit from its insights and takeaways.
• User research is not the same as market research. Market research tends to be larger and more quantitative, whereas user research focuses on smaller groups of people and delivers more qualitative results. A mix of both is most beneficial to companies building comprehensive audience personas and products that solve real audience problems.

Steps

Map out your goals, develop research questions and choose the most suitable research technique for example, surveys, interviews or usability testing.

Choose a user research technique

Effectively answer research questions with techniques that match your business goals and product lifecycle stage.

Conduct interviews to identify gaps in your research plan, and run surveys to validate assumptions or beliefs about your audience.

Apply attitudinal user research

Gain better insights about user and stakeholder preferences and mindsets using more effective surveys and interviews.

Plan and execute product and usability tests that sync with your product development cycle and research goals and produce new insights.

Apply behavioral research methods

Learn how people use your product and improve its usability and usefulness.

Define the most relevant audience and audience size needed to achieve your research goals.

Conduct user research with high-value participants

Get important input more easily by identifying willing user research participants who reflect your highest value users.

Organize your user research by audience, methodology, and findings such that it can be analyzed easily for actionable insights.

Synthesize your user research

Make better business decisions and product improvements.

Choose research outputs to create and deliver based on the needs and priorities of your stakeholders to ensure they are used widely.

Create user research deliverables

Turn user research insights into actionable artifacts that support your research goals and are used across your organization.