UX Research: Tailor Your UX to Your User Needs

Study your target audience. This is the first recommendation you should use when developing an e-commerce store. Whose challenges are you going to address? What solution will you provide them? It’s possible to create a compelling product only when you answer those questions. UX design plays a significant role in product relevance, as it’s a tool that helps customers to interact with your brand. Therefore, this is one of the fields that require thorough research.

UX research is a range of investigative methods used to get insights into the shopping behavior of target audiences, delve into their prior experience, and determine their expectations. It is the beginning stage of the design process that, depending on the project specifics, involves the following activities:

• Interviews. It is a proven method applied to recognize user needs related to the usability of a particular product. Interviews can be unstructured (questions are open-ended), semi-structured (a researcher follows a predefined structure to steer the conversation in a certain direction), and structured (questions are “closed”).
• Surveys and questionnaires are suitable when it’s necessary to gather a large amount of information in a short period of time. This investigative method fits projects with a large and diverse target audience.
• Usability tests. A researcher asks current or potential users to perform a task to ascertain the product’s ease of use and functionality.
• Card sorts. This method is typically conducted as part of an interview or usability test. Carts sorts serve to determine the correlation between content and create the information architecture in accordance with user perception.
• Tree tests. This method also precedes the stage of information architecture creation and helps to categorize the information and achieve the effectiveness of the navigation hierarchy.
• A/B tests. The goal of this method is to choose between two competing elements, like button design, content styles, or homepage layouts.

UX researchers collect valuable information that allows tailoring user needs and increase their engagement. Visit this article to find out more tips on how to design your digital solution to increase user engagement and boost sales.