User Research: Best Practices & Methodologies
Source: Adobe XD
User research, or UX research, is a booming field that every UX designer should know about. An essential part of user experience design, it’s carried out to learn as much as possible about your users in order to improve your products — what they need and what’s important to them, how they behave and use your products or services, the challenges they encounter, along the way, and how you can fix those. Put simply, if you don’t take the time to engage with real users, how else would you know what they need or struggle with?
To conduct user research, there are various observational techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies you can use to help improve the usability of your product and service. It’s an interactive process that’s typically done at the beginning of a project, but that’s also very valuable throughout, right up to the end when you conduct user testing with real users to refine your finished product.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance of user research and explore the two main categories of user research methods — and the many techniques you can use for each — to gather valuable data. Whether you’re new to user research, or need some inspiration for new methods to try out in your projects, we’ve got you covered.
