User Research
Experience Design starts from user research
What are the ingredients of a great customer experience? What creates loyalty and appreciation in your customers? What makes you customer satisfied and ready to recommend your business to their friends?
To design outstanding customer experiences, we need to answer these questions. Knowing who your customers are, what they need, and what they expect from your company will give you a unique competitive advantage. Learning about your customers is not difficult: we need to ask them questions, listen to what they have to say, and observe what they do.
User research is the first step of the User Experience Design process and the foundation for the creation of products and services that meet your customers’ needs. We start by collecting information already available in your company through internal research. We learn about the competitive landscape through competitive research; finally, we conduct user interviews and observations.
Internal interviews
Precious information about your customers is usually already available within your company. Your customer service representatives talk to customers every day; your company receives emails from your customers and perhaps you already collect customer feedback through surveys. Our first step is interviewing stakeholders and decision makers to understand the culture, the business objectives, and the structure of your company. We examine customer information that you have already collected. We interview people in your company who have direct contact with your customers.
The internal interviews often reveal crucial information and help structure the next phase of user research.
Competitive Research
Examining your competitive landscape provides invaluable information about how other companies have approached similar problems. Competitive research provides useful information on your customers’ expectations about products and services, and helps identify gaps in the marketplace.
User Interviews
When we conduct user interviews, we learn who your customers are, what they do, what they expect from your company and from your products, and what their goals, desires, and needs are. We investigate how they currently use your product (if you are working on a redesign) or similar products (if your designing a new product). We learn what features work for them, which ones don’t work, and what is missing.
User Observations and Contextual Inquiries
Observing your customers’ behavior is the best way to learn how to design a product, or what works and what doesn’t work in an existing product. In some cases you can observe users in a lab or in your location, in other cases it’s important to visit them where they live and work and discover how their environment shapes their behavior and their needs.
The information collected in user interviews and observations is crucial in defining features and requirements for your product or service.