UX Research: Understanding Your Target Audience

One of the most important aspects of creating a new digital product or updating an existing digital asset is keeping user experience (UX) top of mind. However, to put UX front and center, it’s important to understand what your target audience wants, what end users actually need, and how they think when it comes to using technology. The best way to do this is through UX research.

Whether you’re interested in conducting UX research on your own or plan to hire a qualified UX research professional through a remote talent platform like Upwork, this article can help you understand how user research methods work. Topics covered include:

• What is UX research?
• Types of UX research
• Common approaches to UX research
• UX researcher responsibilities
• UX research stages
• How can UX research help brands?

What is UX research?

User experience research entails uncovering users’ behaviors and understanding their motivations so you can design products and provide services that meet their needs and expectations. Through UX research, you should be able to gain an intimate understanding of who your users are, where they come from, and what makes them tick.

Regardless of the kind of design project you’re working on, UX research can go a long way in ensuring you end up with all the right design elements to attract, engage, and delight your target audience—so they keep coming back for more satisfying interactions with your products and brand.

Types of UX research

There are two distinct yet complementary types of UX research: quantitative and qualitative. While the approaches to the research might differ, the results can help you get to the same place. You’ll come to better understand your users and how to enhance their affinity for your site or product.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research encompasses collecting numerical data from user testing protocols and then analyzing those results to reach objective, measurable data to inform your UX design elements. Quantitative UX research answers the empirical questions that can be measured without bias or subjective inquiry, such as:

• What percentage of users engage in (and complete) a particular task?
• What amount of time does an average user take to complete a task?
• What errors or problems did users encounter and with what frequency?
  

To be most useful, the results of quantitative research are analyzed against some kind of baseline. Often, data is compared to research analyses from a competitor’s product or from an older generation of the same product.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is concerned with the quality or meaning behind a particular user’s experience. While quantitative research seeks answers to “what” questions, qualitative research explores “why” questions.

Qualitative UX researchers want to know why individuals behave the way they do. The insights gained from qualitative UX research can help designers create products that align with their behavioral characteristics. While it may seem that qualitative data can be too subjective to be useful, when qualitative data is compiled systematically, it can provide great insights into potential user problems and how to avoid and/or solve them.

Common approaches to UX research

There are different approaches to conducting UX research. If you’re seeking qualitative UX information, you might want to use attitudinal research protocols. However, if you’re looking to quantify user experience, behavioral research techniques can prove useful.

Attitudinal

With attitudinal research, the UX design researcher attempts to understand, measure, and categorize beliefs about a product or service. When conducting attitudinal UX research, an interviewer looking for insights into how potential users feel about a particular user interface might ask for user feedback by asking:

• What is your overall impression of using this digital asset?
• Do you see yourself using this app or website going forward?
• How often do you think you would want to use this site?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of using this app or digital asset? What excites you? What makes you hesitant?

Behavioral

Behavioral UX research is concerned with what users actually do, which may not always  align with what they say or think they would do. Behavioral research provides designers with data related to how users actually interact with the product or service in real time.

Behavioral UX research is usually conducted with a larger sample user population than attitudinal research and focuses on limited or discrete tasks to gauge actual behavior, rather than user attitude or conjecture. For example, you might ask users of a new e-commerce website to go through the motions of selecting an item to purchase, placing it in a virtual shopping cart, and checking out. As a behavioral researcher, you’d then analyze data to gauge how long users spend selecting items, how long it takes them to complete the purchase process, and what difficulties they encounter along the way.

UX researcher responsibilities

To provide useful information that can be acted on by product designers and developers, a UX researcher needs to be able to:

• Understand what the UX design professional needs to know
• Select the best method of data collection to meet the designer’s needs
• Conduct sound analyses of collected data
• Communicate their UX findings in a way that’s useful to the product design team

Understand research needs

Sound UX research begins with understanding what information is relevant to the product designer’s process. This entails delving into the goals and functional aspects of the web product and who the web product’s target users are.

A good UX researcher will spend some time examining the site or app in question. They’ll do this by actually engaging with an existing product as a real user or—if it’s in an early stage of initial development, such as in prototype wireframes—use a similar product or gain user insights through deep discussions with the developers. The information gained from this initial inquiry can help inform which types of research methods to use and what type of information will prove valuable to the UX designers.

The UX researcher will also discuss user personas with the developers to gain insights into the characteristics and demographics of the target audience. This will assist the UX researcher in choosing research subjects.

Select the best methods for data collection

Taking the information about the product—its specifications and uses—and its target user personas into account, the UX researcher will then select the best UX research methods for data collection. While there are a number of UX research methodologies, most UX researchers will adopt one or more of the following:

• Interviews. Conducting interviews with users is a simple but effective qualitative/attitudinal data collection type. In these sessions, the researcher might ask the user questions about the site, app, or product in question. For example, the researcher may ask questions about how comfortable the user feels using the site, what they specifically like or don’t like about the site, and what their suggestions are for improvement.
• Card sorting. This qualitative research method helps UX researchers understand the user’s expectations when it comes to site architecture. With card sorting, users are invited to group, label, and describe information in a way that makes sense to them. By understanding how the user categorizes information, the UX design team can better anticipate how they’ll seek information on the site.
• Surveys and questionnaires. The simple act of providing a targeted group of users with a set of questions—either online or in person—regarding their preferences, attitudes, likes, and dislikes can render extremely useful qualitative/attitudinal research data. Surveys and questionnaires are popular UX research tools because they are quick and inexpensive.
• Usability test. This research method lets you evaluate how users interact with your product. Subjects are asked to complete a list of tasks while the UX researchers observe and evaluate their interactions. Usability testing is useful as both a qualitative and quantitative research method. It’s qualitative when the goal is to learn more about the user’s opinions while observing their challenges with a design. It can be quantitative when used for benchmarking and tracking metrics—like completion times or task success rates—over time.
• A/B testing. Sometimes referred to as split testing, A/B testing is used to compare two versions of something to determine which is better for the prescribed purpose. Each version is given to half of the target audience to see how they compare. The data gleaned from this testing can then help UX designers determine which direction to take a particular design element.

Data analysis and optimizations

UX data analysis is the process of turning raw data into useful user engagement metrics. After collecting user information and data, the UX researcher’s next task is to analyze and optimize this data, turning them into findings that can be translated into actionable insights for the design team. To transform raw data into useful information, the UX researcher can:

• Organize the data in a way that makes it easy to pick out concepts and themes
• Mine the data within each theme to identify recurring patterns, ideas, and insights
• Organize these patterns, ideas, and insights into a structure that allows them to reach conclusions for each identified theme
  

Transform your findings into understandable insights

The goal of the UX researcher is to take all the pertinent raw data they’ve acquired and convert it into useful findings that reflect the customer experience. They can then transform those findings into understandable insights to be communicated to the UX design team in a manner that allows them to act on the information to produce real user experience design results.

UX research stages

As part of the product development process, UX research is generally conducted in four stages:

• Discovery
• Exploration
• Testing
• Listening

Stage 1: Discovery

During discovery, the UX researcher works with the site design team to clarify the goals of the research and how they should inform the overall project. This is the time that the UX researchers and product managers will meet to discuss the purpose of the new product and the part that user experience will play in the project’s direction.

While discovery is conducted at a project’s outset, it’s also a stage that can be revisited throughout the course of the project, especially when progress seems stymied or the design or research functions hit a snag.

Stage 2: Exploration

During exploration, the design team moves from a space of imagination to the more practical considerations that inform execution. It’s the stage where UX challenges faced by competition and/or any existing versions of the product are identified and scrutinized through data collection.

The UX researcher explores user personas and begins to assess risk and create workflows to optimize the user experience and reduce attrition. It’s a time to explore not only what can go wrong but also what can be done right through the valuable insights obtained during card sorting, A/B testing, and other qualitative and quantitative UX research tools.

Stage 3: Testing

As development continues, usability testing becomes a real-time pursuit. This is necessary to ensure that the intelligence captured during testing and field studies can actually inform the design process. Working in this type of continuous improvement continuum ensures that UX research and UX design are aligned throughout development.

Stage 4: Listening

Despite best efforts, no development project is ever perfect. There might be issues that only surface at launch and beyond. This is why it’s so important to solicit feedback from actual users and then—most importantly—listen to and act on their real experiences.

The listening stage never ends. It provides a never-ending opportunity to create a partnership with your target audience to address pain points and keep the user experience high.

How can UX research help brands?

While UX research is invaluable in informing a new product’s UX design, it can have a much broader application to your entire brand portfolio. User experience research can help inform design decisions regarding existing product improvements. Adopting UX research protocols, such as online surveys and other contextual studies of user behavior and attitudes can help you with:

• Understanding how users really experience your website, products, prototypes, and more
• Product optimization
• Finding hidden product errors
• In-depth learning about your target audience

Understand how your users really experience your website, products, prototypes, and more

Through UX research, you have an opportunity to solicit ongoing feedback from all stakeholders—including assessing any changing user needs with respect to all of your branded products.

Product optimization

As you work through UX enhancements for your current design project, you can apply what you’re learning to help you optimize functionality across your entire product portfolio.

Find hidden product errors

When you set up mechanisms for UX research, you’re also creating avenues to uncover hidden product errors. Tactics like direct user interviews, focus groups, and real-world product improvement modeling can uncover issues that you didn’t know existed.

In-depth learning about your target audience

The process of developing user personas and engaging users for feedback during the UX research process has the added advantage of providing more insights and a greater depth of knowledge about your target audience.

Outperform the UX of your competitor

Some aspects of UX research involve analyzing and seeking ways to improve on a competitor’s products. Not only does this research allow you to design a product that outperforms your competition but it also provides an avenue to draw customers away from your competitor and to your product. Whether you make an affirmative effort to tout your product’s improvements over the competition or rely on market forces to increase your market share, creating a product that outperforms the competition is a winning proposition.

Hiring an independent UX researcher

UX research is a specialized discipline that requires training and experience to be effective. Few small businesses have the need or financial bandwidth to hire a full-time UX researcher for their organizations.

That’s why hiring an independent UX researcher from Upwork affords you the best of all worlds. You can select a top-rated user experience research professional who knows your industry and can work with your product team for as long as you require at a price point you can afford.