User Experience (UX) Research
User experience (UX) research identifies and understands users’ expectations, needs, motivations, goals, and frustrations (pain points) through methodical and investigative approaches. Insights received from users are analyzed and synthesized to ensure that all mobile design evaluations benefit the user. UX research is both generative and evaluative and provides the foundation for our initial design work as well as a way to validate design direction.
What’s Inside
- Methodology
UX research methodologies and descriptions. - Research Studies
Studies of past MCoE UX Research projects.
UX research helps us better understand
UX research helps us better understand the overall experience journey, productivity & efficiency, key terminology & concepts, target users, mental models, user goals, user pain points, usability, design workflow assessment, first impressions, accessibility, and the broader environment & context.
Image content source Tomer Maimoni, IBM
Role of the UX Researcher
The UX researcher acts as the advocate and voice of the user—advising design decisions and helping users achieve their goals by converting their feedback into actionable insights. The primary goal of the UX researcher is to help drive our designers to create a mobile experience that is both intuitive and user-friendly.
The UX researcher teaches the design team about the user by conducting and spreading foundational research that helps our design team better understand the user, problem space, and the real-life tasks involved in the mobile design.
Example Research Questions
The UX researcher will ask the product owners and stakeholders questions pertaining to the objectives of the mobile experience.
Example questions might include:
- What problem are you trying to solve for users with this mobile experience?
- What specifically do you need to understand about the experience to make a decision?
- Are there main tasks users do when in this experience?
- What problem are you trying to solve for users by changing the experience?
- What measures are you trying to improve for users by changing the experience? (Time, accuracy, ease, confidence, completion, satisfaction, usefulness, findability, clarity, etc.)
- Do you have any current hypotheses about the new experience and how users will react?
- Has relevant research been done in the past? Where can it be found?
UX Research Overview PowerPoint
This downloadable PowerPoint gives additional information and explains the benefits of UX research.
