Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sabah Rahman

There are a lot of articles out there explaining how to do UX research “like a pro” and “on a budget” or “how to find a UX unicorn/ninja”, which is all (mostly) baloney. A dangerously large portion of these articles cut out essential information needed to execute research properly.

Now, I’m not going to give you all my personal tips and tricks on how to do everything because then I’d lose my magic. However, I will tell you how to start carrying out a simple and adaptable research process.

I mean, if you’re not talking to your users — what are you really doing?

Here are 8 steps to help you get started!

1. Get Buy-in

Make sure your management team, your stakeholders, your development team, and your clients are all on board with research. I mean, truly on board. It’s going to cost you, be time-consuming, and sometimes make you feel emotions that you don’t want to feel.

Getting users to open up and be honest is tough work but it’s valuable. Don’t expect the data to always positively validate the work that you’ve poured your heart in to. Most of the time, it won’t.

The beauty of data is that it’s not comforting or judgmental— it’s the truth.

2. Perform Competitive Research

You should study all the other products on the market that are similar to your own from a UX/UI perspective. Ideally, this should be done regularly to understand the usability of the products sold by other companies.

The easiest way to do this is to create something along the lines of a “living analysis grid” when comparing products. This encourages an awareness of what products are competing with yours, an awareness of the updates done to the competitor products, and having a log of what new products are being released.

Know thy enemy.

3. UX/UI Audit

Auditing your products will force you to look at it from different angles. There are important standards and measurements set by the industry, which would be wise to follow when starting out. These standards exist for a reason and innovation can wait until after you’ve established a research baseline.

Audits should be separated out into websites, desktop applications, and mobile applications. The UI audit and a UX audit should be separately done under each category.

4. Create a research budget

UX Research is costly. Doing it “on a budget” is possible (i.e. guerrilla testing) but there are a multitude of cons associated with it. It’s scrappy testing. If it’s possible, try to carry out testing that’s more controlled.

The are a lot of research methods but you should strive to do in-person lab studies as much as you can. When thinking about implementing research, you need to account for: recruitment fees, travel, software, equipment, incentives, etc.

Make sure you have a monthly budget set aside for research because if you fix usability issues early on in the process, then you won’t waste time doing maintenance on a product your users didn’t like.

5. Follow the scientific method

When writing a test plan, make sure to remember the scientific method. Always follow the method. It won’t let you down. Don’t assume that you know the pain points, throw a mock-up together, and fling it in front of a user.

You need to form questions that lead to hypothesizing. Always have research goals that are specific to the project. Are you focusing on the UI as well as the UX? Are you looking at the navigation? How about the search experience? Are you focusing on a specific feature?

Remember to keep the tasks and questions user-friendly and open-ended. Do not lead them in any direction. You will skew your data and waste time.

6. Start recruiting as early as possible

Think rationally about who your audience is and be all-inclusive. In order to figure out who your audience is: pull from industry data or create your own demographics survey.

Aim to find people of many genders, ethnicities, ages, digital skills, and disabilities. Reach out to these people at least 2 weeks before the actual testing begins.

There are many creative ways to find users: Intercept them on the street, put up fliers, use craigslist, email blasts, go to college campuses, etc.

Remember to overbook users. They drop off like flies. You need at least 5 people to find around 85% to 90% of the pain points (see why here). Book 10 users.

7. Be weary about who you include

A common mistake made is trying to include every single person in the research sessions. People open up the research to designers, developers, and managers.

Getting them involved in observation is fine. However, they should only be allowed to observe from another room. There should be up to 2 people in the testing room with the user and those 2 people should be researchers.

Experienced researchers are trained to be neutral and ask well-formed questions. They never get emotional or try to lead the user in a specific direction.

8. Repetition is key

Once you’ve gathered data, make sure that you include the designers when analyzing it.

Ideally, this should lead to a leap frog process. The designers iterate based on the data before the researchers take the new design and test it (if necessary).

If all goes well, you’re left with a cyclical process of iterating and testing. This enforces research and design to depend on one another and decreases the possibility of glaring usability issues.

Lastly — as corny as this sounds — you must remember: research and design are soulmates in UX. Don’t keep them apart.

The Minimal Approach to UX Research was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Minimal Approach to UX Research

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