User Research: Why Do You Need It? Goals and Requirements

Do you remember the hype about smartwatches from Microsoft? We don’t either. It turns out that the Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates, presented this multi-billion dollar idea back in 2002, even before the advent of smartphones, and, oddly enough, failed. In turn, when it was repeated by Apple in 2015, the Apple Watch quickly became one of the most desired gifts for people around the world. 

What is this paradox? One of the reasons why the idea has failed lies in the incorrect user research: the smartwatch concept was ahead of its time, so it is not surprising that it was not accepted by the mass audience. Below, we will consider in detail this essential part of high-level design services, web development services, and mobile application development services, compare its main approaches, and also determine in which cases and which ones should be applied.

Why Do You Need User Research?

The main task that user research helps solve is to understand the circumstances that will surround your product like requirements of users. The aim is to add realistic contexts and insights to design processes. A lack of understanding of certain aspects can lead to the failure of your product despite conducting market research, especially if it claims to be somewhat innovative. Generally speaking, this stage of the software development life cycle lays the foundation for the formation of a unique value proposition for a product.

Benefits of User Research

Let’s summarize everything that was said above and highlight the key advantages that user research gives product owners.

User-centered Design

User-centered design, facilitated by user research, ensures a comprehensive understanding of users, guiding informed decision-making throughout the design process. This approach minimizes the need for extensive design iterations, optimizing the development cycle. The focus on creating intuitive and user-friendly interfaces enhances product adoption and user satisfaction. In essence, user-centered design, supported by user research, forms a strategic framework that aligns design choices with user needs, fostering the creation of successful and well-received products.

Saved Time and Money

Changes in an implementation of planned features, adding new functionality, and adding all latest trends in website design, can delay the project release date and increase its budget. At the same time, product owners who took time to devote enough time to user research have the opportunity to save their money and filter out redundant functionality at the planning stage, improve usability, and focus on the most important points for users, when the development of none of the features was started.

Predictable Budget

Unlike other stages of the software development cycle, user research is one of the most controlled from a budget point of view. The fact is that based on the budget and deadlines of the project, the team can choose methods and types of research and, thus, not go beyond their scope. This allows product owners to still gain critical insights while sticking to their original plans.

Reduced Risk of Failure

By gaining a deep understanding of user needs, businesses can mitigate the risk of developing products that do not resonate with the target audience. User research provides a data-driven approach to decision-making, reducing uncertainties.

Increased User Satisfaction

User research allows businesses to delve deeply into the needs, preferences, and pain points of their users, ensuring a precise understanding of user expectations. By incorporating user feedback, businesses can optimize the usability of their offerings, making them intuitive and easy to navigate. This optimization directly contributes to a positive user experience.

The Goals of User Research

Now, let’s look at the main goals of user research.

Provides a Deeper Understanding of Users’ Behaviour

For those who are more or less familiar with the concept of a future product, it can be challenging to determine how users interact with it while having never heard of it or encountered it before. In this regard, when product development is based solely on the team’s assumptions about “what is convenient and understandable,” this approach often leads to failure. Moreover, it also happens that for one audience, the created solution turns out to be more or less intuitive. In contrast, for an audience with other parameters, it turns out that this intuitiveness is absent.

In order not to build a product based on these false consensuses, user research can be conducted, i.e., a study with the participation of real representatives of the target audience of this particular product.

Investigates Context-of-Use

Development teams must always understand and anticipate the true intentions of users, as well as be aware of the typical problems they have previously encountered when dealing with similar solutions. These insights always provide an excellent start for creating a superior user experience and discovering unobvious prospects for its optimization.

In particular, user research can help you identify common ways for your audience to solve a problem, points where the user journey gets stuck, the use cases of the product, opportunities to improve it, and so on.

Note that all these aspects are important both when launching innovative solutions and when developing updates for existing products—in the second case, user research helps make them even more intuitive than ever before.

Defines Users’ Goals and Motivations

User research provides empathy for the problems and pain points of the target audience, helping development teams create products that solve them. It also provides an excellent foundation for further product updates since these audience characteristics may change over time, and the solution that they found five years ago can already be behind its competitors today.

In general, user research always aims to create products that make their users feel heard, which means it is one of the most critical aspects of winning their loyalty.

Provides Evidence to Challenge Assumptions 

Each developer may have their own ideas about the usability of the product being created, which can 1) interfere with effective work within the team and 2) contradict the true goals and desires of the target audience. As for user research, this stage of the development cycle creates a kind of “evidence source of truth,” providing developers with either a refutation or confirmation of their hypotheses.

This way, the team is less likely to encounter conflicts between its individual members and is able to focus all its efforts on creating a solution that is valuable for its users.

Prioritizes Project Features

Finally, user research can provide critical information about the priority of a particular feature for the end user. This way, project owners get an idea of what their MVP could be, which is sometimes the only option given a limited budget, time, and an unfinished product concept.

User Research vs User Testing: What’s The Difference?

Quite often, user research and user testing are put on the same page, but in reality, these are somewhat different concepts. User testing involves real users assessing the interface and functionalities of a website, app, product, or service, undertaking specific tasks to evaluate their performance. In particular, the supervisor asks the user to complete certain tasks within this interface and asks him to voice their thoughts. At the same time, the supervisor observes how the assigned task is performed without prompting or helping the user in this way. This approach provides teams with comprehensive information about the problems in the interface and, conversely, about those that are implemented flawlessly. This method can be used in combination, for example, with usability tests and field research, which together will constitute the user research process. 

User research is an umbrella term for different forms of user testing like usability testing, interviews, and surveys. User research uncovers insights from users, helps improve your products, and places users at the center of your design process.

User Research Methods

Currently, there are many methods for conducting user research (more than twenty of them are in active use today). Here are just some of the user research methods:

• User interviews
• Testing in focus groups
• Surveys
• Analytics
• Observation
• Field research
• Diary studies
• Search logs
• Competitors research
• A/B testing

It is essential to understand that among all of them, there are no more or less effective ones. Ultimately, you can carry out all of them to get the maximum of valuable information; however, often everything depends on the purposes, budget, and timing of the project.

Types of User Research

Now, let’s look at the four main ways to divide user experience research into types.

Qualitative Methods vs Quantitative Methods 

The fundamental distinctions between qualitative research methods

and qualitative research lies in the data they handle and the questions they address. Quantitative research centers on numbers and statistics, addressing ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘when,’ while qualitative research delves into words and meanings to explore the ‘why.’ And here, it is crucial to decide which of these two types of methods will be more effective for a particular project because each of them reveals completely different facets of it. 

Depending on the project type, It may be worthwhile to use both. The fact is that choosing only quantitative methods runs the risk of losing sight of important ideas that were not considered during the research, while analyzing only qualitative data can lead to the product being a failure in larger samples of the target audience.

Generative Methods vs Evaluative Methods

Generative research aims to identify the unobvious and unmet needs of target users at the ideation stage. It takes place when developing innovative solutions based on a deep understanding of the true desires and habits of end users. Typically, this research is performed before the design and development of a product starts. Early generative research provides a comprehensive understanding of the problem space and the cause-and-effect relationships within it. It also helps to discover new opportunities for improving and refining already launched products.

In turn, the primary purpose of evaluative research is to test an existing solution to see if it meets the audience’s needs, is easy to use, and, ideally, whether that audience enjoys interacting with it. This type of research should be conducted throughout the development life cycle, from prototyping to testing the final product. This is why evaluative methods are usually part of an iterative process.

If we discuss which of these two types of methods is better, there is no correct answer. As you can already understand, they have different purposes and should be performed at various stages of the software development cycle.

Attitudinal Methods vs Behavioral Methods

Many people believe that attitudinal and behavioral research is the same thing, and, indeed, sometimes, they allow one to obtain identical conclusions. However, attitudinal methods answer the question: “How do users think?” while behavioral ones answer the question: “What do users do?” In general, like qualitative and quantitative research, these two groups of methods are sometimes used interchangeably. Still, the best findings are found when they are implemented together.

Let’s look at the attitudinal method in more detail: they aim to test hypotheses about how a user might relate to a particular experience—interaction with a specific function, perception of a design, etc. If we go deeper into behavioral methods, they allow researchers to focus on detecting behavioral patterns of users when interacting with a specific product—this may be necessary to identify places where they do not know what to do next or places that require too many redundant actions.

Moderated Methods vs Unmoderated Methods

In the simplest sense, unmoderated research methods involve the absence of assistance from a supervisor when research participants take specific tests. Specifically, they get the opportunity to get tested independently and at a time convenient for them. All other conditions remain the same as with moderated methods.

Moderated methods allow supervisors to control and influence how users interact with the product. It’s important to note that most often, unmoderated research is conducted as part of regular qualitative research sessions, while moderated research predominates in quantitative ones.

When in The Product Development Cycle Should UX Research Happen?

Oddly enough, user research takes place not only in the first stages of product development—it’s also carried out when some part of the work on the project has already been completed or even when the project has already been successfully launched and is now awaiting its update. Let’s analyze in more detail the stages at which user research can take place.

Discovery Stage

In the discovery phase, user research provides invaluable insights that inform strategic decision-making, fostering the creation of user-centric solutions and minimizing the risk of developing products that don’t resonate with the target audience. It ensures a deep understanding of user needs, preferences, and pain points, guiding product development to align with user expectations and enhance user satisfaction. To determine all these aspects, researchers usually resort to the following methods:

• User interviews
• Secondary research
• Competitors research
• Field studies
• Surveys
• Search logs

Thus, the findings obtained with these methods become the starting point for the development team to start working on the product as they determine the possibilities and potential for its introduction.

Prototype Validation and Testing 

User research in the Prototype Validation and Testing stage ensures that prototypes align seamlessly with user expectations, allowing for iterative improvements and refining features based on real user feedback, ultimately leading to a more polished and user-friendly final product. User research guides the refinement process, validating design choices, and ensuring that the prototype not only meets user expectations but also aligns with usability standards.The following methods can be used for this:

• User interviews
• Field studies
• Diary studies
• Search logs
• Formative usability testing
• Surveys

After understanding the problems of the product for its target audience, the team can create best-fitting solutions to cover users’ needs.

Post-launch Stage

The need to conduct user research may raise some doubts among product owners—why might this be necessary if we have already received enough information about the audience and market opportunities at the previous stages? However, it’s no less important at the post-launch stage. User research in the post-launch stage continues to gather valuable feedback and insights from real users, enabling businesses to address any unforeseen issues promptly, iterate on features, and ensure ongoing user satisfaction and product success.

In particular, after the next version of the product has already been released, the development team that worked on it begins brainstorming using the following methods:

• Usability testing
• Field studies
• User interviews
• Surveys

The insights obtained thanks to these methods are usually aimed at optimizing the existing user experience and identifying the product’s problems.

So why does it make sense to conduct user research at this stage of the software development lifecycle, too? The fact is that some user research results can quickly become irrelevant and/or outdated: some due to the emergence of strong competitors in the market, some lose their usefulness after updates and changes made to the product, and some succumb to general market trends and innovations. Thus, the conclusions you based your software solution on about a year ago may be less valuable today and require end-to-end rethinking.

It’s also important to note that projects with a limited budget and time frames are more or less limited in the application of the quantitative research methods, which is why hypotheses that were confirmed when testing limited focus groups may not fit the entire possible audience of the product. Therefore, after launching the product’s next version, you can iteratively expand and refine the insights obtained earlier with new research data.

Final Thoughts

Now you know the importance and inseparability of user research in the software development process and are conscious about the choice of its methods and types. It’s also crucial to remember that the quality of the results obtained depends on the professionalism of the user researchers you choose. Otherwise, you risk wasting time receiving ineffective conclusions and, ultimately, building a product based on them that its target audience will not accept.

If you’re looking for such professionals, feel free to contact NIX. Our outsourcing web development company has colossal experience in developing software products in dozens of business niches, so we are almost sure this includes yours. This allows us to immediately choose precisely the approach that will enable your business to gather data you lack or have some doubts about and, thus, tailor your product to its audience’s needs before or after the release. Feel free to write to us now to discuss the details of your project and thereby lay the reliable foundation for our future cooperation and your lasting success.