User experience, or UX for short, is the process of understanding how users interact with an interface, software, product, or service. Great UX can’t be achieved overnight and without any sort of research and testing. But unfortunately, 45% of companies don’t do any type of user experience testing.
When you conduct UX research, you make sure that your product, website, or whatever else needs to have a great user experience is easy to use, functional, and enjoyable as soon as it enters the market. This research is about understanding the needs and wants of your customers and gaining actionable insight.
UX and CRO
Whenever website performance is mentioned, UX and CRO (conversion rate optimization) are often mentioned together. While they are similar, they’re certainly not interchangeable nor mutually exclusive.
CRO is a term used to describe the process of providing users with the best customer journey on your website and getting them to convert from visitors to customers. UX, on the other hand, is how the users feel while they’re navigating and using your website.
When you focus on both UX and CRO at the same time, you will see the following benefits:
- Fewer experiments. CRO focuses on making changes on a website and testing those changes while making constant tweaks to achieve optimal performance. If you use UX research for your CRO changes, you will get better results that don’t take a lot of experimenting and guesswork.
- Identifying design issues. Certain issues in design can lead to a drop in conversion rates. As a result, it is important to conduct frequent UX research that will help you spot those issues and deal with them before they affect conversion rates.
- Using device capabilities to optimize the design. CRO professionals usually design with only desktop users in mind while UX designers take multiple device types into consideration. UX research will tell you what devices your users prefer and help the CRO team adapt to the device’s capabilities.
Including both CRO optimization and UX research when designing a website can be very beneficial for your business and your website.
If you don’t know how to do it alone, you should hire CRO optimization services and leave the hard work to professionals. These agencies already have proven strategies that will help you convert visitors into paying customers in no time.
Types of UX research
There are two different types of UX research to choose from, both of which are equally important: quantitative and qualitative UX research.
Quantitative UX research allows you to understand what is happening when users engage or don’t engage with your product or feature on your website.
It relies on hard data such as statistics and a typical example would be user-based and event-based analytics. When analyzing data from quantitative research, businesses can determine what is or isn’t working and what parts of the product need to be changed.
Qualitative UX research tells you how and why something is happening and it relies on observation to gather insight you will later use in your design process.
The most common type of qualitative research is using focus groups to see how customers engage with your product. Other methods of qualitative research include usability tests, field studies, and follow-up interviews.
Different UX research methods
There are a plethora of different UX research methods, but for now, we’ll take a look at the most popular ones:
- Interviews. One-on-one interviews with your users and customers will allow you to understand who they are, what their motivation is for undertaking certain actions, and in what ways they engage with your products. Just make sure you know how to conduct an effective UX interview.
- Focus groups. If you want to receive more data than you would from interviews, organize focus groups of 15-20 people and have them test out your product or service.
- Surveys. This is a great and cost-effective method that allows you to collect your data in a short amount of time. And you don’t have to work with a limited focus group because you can send surveys to as many people as you want.
- Usability testing. This is an especially important UX research method if you’re testing out physical products. It allows you to get real-time feedback on how easy it is to use your product. And as a bonus, 85% of issues related to UX can be detected by performing a usability test on a group of 5 users.
Final thoughts
The benefits of UX research are numerous. From better understanding, your users and gaining insight into their behavior to finding potential issues with your products/services and ways to fix them, all of these can be discovered with thorough UX research.
However, when it comes to user experience, keep in mind that there is no room for guesswork. If you want your business to succeed, you need to make UX a priority. The only way to make sure your UX is up to standards is to conduct UX research. Now that you know all the essentials, the rest is up to you.
