Quant and qual UX research
Editor’s note: Lisa D. Dance is a UX research consultant and founder of ServiceEase, Richmond, Va.
User experience (UX) research is often misunderstood because it’s more associated with its qualitative aspects. While UX research can be both qualitative and quantitative, its qualitative methods range from user interviews and observations to usability testing – all providing invaluable, rich data. Researchers gather data by observing and listening to the participants to help understand “the why” behind people’s behaviors and decisions.
Quantitative UX methods – including card sorts, usability metrics and A/B testing – provide numerical or statistical data that can be used for comparison. Qualitative and quantitative UX research are often used together (a mixed-methods approach) to enhance findings. For example, if a news app with a redesigned interface sees a substantial decrease in the number of daily users, hearing from users and former users about the challenges and frustrations of trying to find new articles can provide actionable insights.
Benefits of UX research
1. Context becomes clearer
People don’t live in a sterile environment just waiting to use our products and services. Understanding their needs and wants or what problems they need to solve in their often busy, complex lives helps us better design products, services and technology. On a project where I was interviewing people about their plans for aging, they expressed concerns about their own aging, but their parents’ aging was a more pressing concern. A survey might not have captured the deeper level of worry and overwhelm many felt. Observations or nonverbal cues that you see in interviews aren’t easily expressed in numbers.
2. There’s gold in smaller sample sizes
You may be surprised that I typically conduct customer interviews with as few as five-to-eight participants per persona, per round. But I’m gathering detailed understanding of participants’ behaviors, motivations and preferences and looking for patterns (clusters of similarity) across all the participants. Depending on how strong the patterns are, and if I am not getting new data, I might not need to conduct another round of interviews at that stage of the project.
Another way small sample sizes are powerful is for discovering usability issues of a website, app or digital product. When focused on usability, you only need one person to point out an issue like a broken link. Having 15 other people agree the link is broken doesn’t make it any truer. You might consider the number of people who noticed an issue to help you prioritize what to fix, but if it’s a link to a key feature, its impact sets its priority.
3. Doesn’t have to be used alone
Utilizing analytics or surveys in combination with interviews, observations or other UX research methods can be a superpower. On one project, we saw a sudden 40% jump in the bounce rate on the login page. When we looked at site recordings, we noticed visitors scrolling past the error message without noticing it because of the proximity and similarity to a new alert message that was on the page. The analytics pointed out an issue, and observation helped us identify the “why.”
4. Provides business value
Companies lose money and customers when customers leave because of user experience issues. During a project to help redesign a complex purchasing, invoice and payment process that was costing the company both money and productivity, we conducted a series of group interviews to understand the depth of the problems facing internal teams. We followed up with a survey to quantify and prioritize the most important issues, so development now knew what areas to work on first. This research helped the company save money by redirecting efforts to the right problem.
5. The UX research report is not the end
A common misconception is that delivering the UX research report is the end. That doesn't have to be the case. On one project for a Fortune 500 company, insights from initial customer interviews influenced seven other activities/projects over the next three years including refining personas, creating customer journey maps, developing a popular new website feature and choice of content articles for social media promotions. It also highlighted where more research was needed to understand whether a particular persona was viable as a target customer.
A bonus of UX research is that qualitative data captured through customer interviews, observations, call center transcripts, etc., provides details about customer experience problems that span multiple touchpoints that metrics alone won’t capture.