It is all about the digital well-being of innovations in the service of people.
Recent reports show that an average person spends more time on their smartphones, tablets and digital devices than watching traditional TV. It is a revolution in the way we live our lives, but it is also a revolution in how businesses can serve people well. For businesses to get the attention of consumers, they must provide compelling reasons to remain with them through the journey, providing seamless products and services meeting and exceeding the expectations. UX and CX research provides insights as to how people use products and services. It also helps businesses of all sizes create innovations that are human-centered and sustainable. Traditional UX and CX research don’t cut in much for globalized products and services at scale, so then what are the options of scaling UX and CX research? Let’s explore.
What is UX and CX research?
User Experience (UX) research and Customer Experience (CX) research are the cornerstones of an in-depth understanding of how people use products and services. UX research – begins with the thought of a concept or a problem statement and continues throughout the journey of the products and services. From the focus on understanding who the users are? To where? When? What and how users might interact with a product or a service is studied in depth. At times it could mean creating a better design that improves the user experience or making functional improvements to the UI or UX and other times it could translate into overhauling an entire system to excel in its services. Customer Experience (CX) research follows up closely and is equally important in finding out customer behavior, needs and desires and walking along with the customer in their journey as they discover, buy, use and evangelize the product or service.
How does UX and CX research help companies?
User research helps companies understand their users and improve their products and services. If an organization wants to scale the impact of UX and CX research, they need to understand their customers and design the journey, creating a blueprint of what might or could go wrong and how to fix the issues and concerns before they arise or impact and disrupt a business. A 404 error page is not the best thing for a user to see. To achieve this, UX and CX research must use systematic processes that follow the same patterns that companies use when scaling a new product or service development. Research shows that users are more likely to try and be convinced to try a new product when they have a great UX and CX. However, many businesses fail to comprehend consumer experience and build new goods and services without considering end-user goals, empathy needed in the experience and setting expectations towards a delightful outcome.
Some tech companies understand how to make products and services better for their customers. For e.g. pushing hard to reduce the time one spends on its product. Research reports that certain digital first company’s users are spending 25% less time on the news feed today than they did a year ago. It is due to a series of Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies, exploring the psychology of how people consume content. One paper has even shown that a certain social media organization’s web presence can be made to feel more natural and more relevant to users. Streaming media companies pick up research data from remote controls, voice interactions and listening devices experimenting with the levels of noise in the environment, what people are searching for and the ambience of it. This will help to reduce how much your brain hears at a given time. By traditional research this kind of studies are possible but time consuming and with months of prep work.
Which methods and tools can help improve UX and CX?
So far, you have become familiar with the terms UX research, CX research and how they can help companies understand their users better. This leads to a question: Which methods and tools can help improve this research?
There are various tools out there that can assist you in helping you get your job done. Below is the list of the “traditional” research tools :
- Card Sorting
The Card Sorting method can help you determine how people understand and classify information. Tools like Maze can help participants arrange ideas or information written on cards into categories that make sense to them in a card sorting experiment.
- Usability testing
Usability Testing is a method where a product or service is evaluated after it is tested with the representative users. The participants will complete the task and the observers will observe the users. Loop11 and Omniscopy will help you manage moderated and unmoderated usability testing on different websites, prototypes, etc.
- User Interviews
A face-to-face interview provides the quickest way to acknowledge the wants and needs of a user that they want to see for a particular product or the new one. Lookback, Userzoom and Dscout provide you with a quality based research platform that helps you collect insights from the people using your products.
- First click testing
When a target user is attempting to perform a job, this type of user testing looks at what they click on first on a website or app interface. A live site can be used to do a first-click test. Usability Hub and Chalkmark by Optimal Workshop make sure that the first click is the right-click.
- Surveys and Questionnaires
In this method, you can design a survey or a questionnaire to do qualitative and quantitative research on the users. Common tools like Survey Monkey, Zoho Survey and Typeform can conduct multiple questions and surveys to help you get feedback on your product or service.
The list of traditional tools is exhaustive. Recently #LUMA Institute open sourced all of their UX, research and design innovation tools for anyone to use. Likewise Interaction design foundation, Stanford D school and many others including IDEO have published methods and tools. But how does this address scale? Especially when applying research for the Digital.
CX and UX research are essential as they help in growing your business. It also gives you an insight into what product to create for your users or customers. The right methods and tools will surely help you achieve your goal as for the digital world the “invisible” team member to effectively provide data at scale across geographies, cultures, time zones is – AI. Omniscopy autonomous research capabilities is one such example where 200 000 to 350 000 user sessions can be analyzed in under 15-30 seconds, far surpassing any physical capability to get such outcomes
Scaling research in the digital realm needs change in strategy to include CX UX tools into the digital products, solutions, portal, websites, embedded systems and all things connected to the internet. The time is ripe and the tools are at hand.
Here’s what we can do together- write to us for a 30 min 1-on-1 to explore your solution need, if it all works well, we could offer a free on premise proof of concept to put money where our predictions are. Game? Write to us at https://omniscopy.com/request-a-demo/