Benefits of UX Research

When we are just starting a project, we can use secondary research to learn the statistics, facts, and figures that already exist about our users. For example, imagine you are designing a budgeting app. Maybe you want to study historical spending trends of people in their 20s. Or you might want to learn what these young adults are actually spending their money on. Chances are, there's already a credible study on the subject.

Finding one can save your team time and money. And why repeat work that's already been done? Another interesting aspect of secondary research is that it is immediately accessible. Usually, all you need is a good internet connection.

Secondary Research can be used to back up your own primary research. If users mentioned something in the interviews, you can use secondary research to back it up. But secondary research also has drawbacks.

Drawbacks of UX Research

Secondary research doesn't allow you to observe users interacting with your your solution. So you do not get feedback on how users rate your product.

Through interviews, you can find out what users think and why. During interviews, you also have the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and really understand the user experience. The biggest downside is that interviews cost a lot of time and money. This means you'll end up with a small sample, which can be risky when launching a brand new product.

One compromise is surveys. Surveys allow us to gather feedback from a larger sample of users. Other advantages of surveys are that they are fast and inexpensive. You can get the opinions of many users in a very short time. A major disadvantage of surveys is that user feedback is limited. The questions in the surveys do not allow for in-depth feedback.

Usability studies allow us to observe firsthand how users interact with your product. Your designs make sense because you developed them yourself. But that's no guarantee they'll make sense to every user. Usability studies prevent assumptions from interfering with the user's actual experience. In addition, usability studies give users the opportunity to provide detailed feedback.

The disadvantage of usability studies is that they only measure one thing: how easy the product is to use.

Another disadvantage of usability studies is that they are expensive because you have to take users to a lab and compensate them for their time. The way a user interacts with your product in a lab environment is different from the way they will use it in real life.