UX Research: How to Use It for Better Product Strategy

User experience is a vital element of any mobile application development strategy, which you cannot avoid if you look forward to improving customer engagement. The overall experience of a person when they interact with the mobile application or the website is the User experience (UX). To deliver a good user experience, designers need thorough research and planning, which should be based on the key users’ behaviours, needs, and pain points. Without a user-centred product design, users will not be able to relate to the product. 

You can develop a better product strategy by conducting thorough user research. The UX research strategy is primarily focused on understanding key users. The extent of your user research is directly related to how well the product will perform. By ‘good’, we mean how well the mobile app interface fulfils user goals, expectations and pain points. Hence, in this blog, we will discover what goes into creating a robust product strategy that leads to improved user experience. 

Why UX Research is Important for a Robust Product Strategy

The UX research analytics fit into either one of the categories. You are either building the product wrong or you are building the wrong product. Sometimes users struggle with simple user flows and navigation in the mobile app interface, which leads to usability issues. The common issues related to UX include: 

• The error messages aren’t self-understood
• The links don’t look clickable, or the buttons don’t look clickable
• Users cannot understand the content and interpret its meaning

By conducting thorough UX research and implementing simple changes, designers can create an intuitive and user-friendly app interface. You can create an intuitive and usable mobile application for users that matches their expectations and overcomes their pain points by involving them in the application design and development stage. UX research is not only a single step in the mobile application development process. It is an iterative cycle which you must work on the entire life cycle of product development. Every design decision in the mobile app interface should be informed by user insights.

How to Conduct User Research to Craft a Compelling Product Strategy

You need a strong UX research strategy so that your overall product can fit changing user expectations and preferences. By implementing robust research techniques to fulfil user expectations, you can ensure that your product solves the right problems in the right manner. Conducting user research will give you ideas and connect you with potential customers. It will help you validate your proposed idea and overall product strategy. Let’s look at different types of UX research methods, which you can implement to gather user insights and develop an intuitive application.

There are different UX research techniques, including remote research, in-person research, moderated research, unmoderated research, qualitative and quantitative research, generative and evaluative research, and behavioural and attitudinal research. Let’s see how you can gather user data for your product design strategy:

• You can conduct the moderated research using focus groups, moderated user interviews and usability testing.
• You can speak with your target users face-to-face while conducting user interviews. 
• Focus groups will help you gain perspective on a variety of areas. It gives you insights into what users think about a particular topic. 
• Moderated user research is performed in the presence of a third person who observes everyone and notices their reactions, preferences, behaviour and interactions with the product. 
• Some users may likely behave differently when in the presence of a moderator, hence the unmoderated usability testing is one of the effective methods which you can adopt to identify which users find it difficult to navigate your product. 
• You can conduct a UX survey and live website testing to see how users rate the design elements in your product. 
• Conducting remote research is a flexible option that you have. It gives you timely results and is also a cost-effective solution. 
• You can conduct moderated or unmoderated remote research by employing research tools to record user feedback and behaviour. 

To Sum Up

While developing a mobile app interface, some questions that you need to ask yourself include: Are you building the right project? Will the audience be able to relate to it? Are all design elements usable by end users? A clear and user-centric UX strategy will help you develop a user-friendly application. If you are looking forward to creating an intuitive mobile app for your target audience, conducting UX research is the very first step after ideation, scope and budget planning. You can reach out to VerveLogic, a leading mobile app development company in India, to leverage our services of mobile app development, website development, and much more.