By Owen Fay . Posted on February 2, 2022Understating the behavior and needs of users is important to competing in today’s market, right? With the diversity and number of competitors today, companies that don’t understand their audience don’t do very well.
There are a lot of ways to understand your target audience, the most popular one is user research testing. However, the main question is if the user research testing is really impactful? No matter if you are new to business or have experience in the industry, there’s still a lot to learn.Â
User Research is the process of identifying behavior patterns, opinions, and needs of users by gathering feedback from real people on any business resource.Â
What Is A User Research Test?
Getting feedback about the interactions between your customers and your products is a simple definition of user research. It is an investigation of the user and their behavior patterns, thoughts, needs, and wants by gathering feedback.
Usability A/B testing with Poll the People is one of the easiest ways to gather these insights to grow your business or achieve your goals. When a product or design is created and used by the audience, it leaves an impression on the consumer’s behavior and that’s where the user research test comes in.
There’s always a target audience to focus on, if user research testing can sync the abilities, limitations, needs, wants, and values of the target audience to the business goals, why would you not test?
Any time a user interacts with an element of your business an opinion or insight is formed. To understand the opinion and needs of the customer, a proper UX design is created to keep the communication channel alive.
Benefits Of A User Research Test
Is user experience testing worth the time and money? It is the question that a lot of people ask once they know what a user research test is.
Multiple studies have shown that businesses that effectively use user research tests experience a higher return on their investment. It gives you real evidence to make design decisions.
at least 50% of a programmers’ time during the project is spent doing rework that is avoidable –usability.gov
A user research test helps the teams in understanding;
Understanding Customers
Deeply understand your target audience. Who is buying your products? Which age segment is interested in your product?
You will get an insight into consumer behavior patterns. Grasping the needs of customers aids the company in making consumer-friendly decisions.
Product Development
As you’re highly intact with your customers and the communication barrier is broken, the company is flooded with unnumbered suggestions regarding the product. The business experiences an acceleration in product development.
Reduces Risk
There isn’t any way to run a business without risk. Yet, there are always tricks to minimize risk by lowering the margin of error. Giving your users a way to voice their opinions helps the company make products that match their needs, ultimately reducing the risk of making bad decisions.
Choose The Best Design For Your Resources
When a company makes data-backed decisions you set yourself up for success. The first step to utilizing user research is choosing a design for your tests. Poll the People makes it easy to do all kinds of user research and has templates for multiple test types as you can see below.Â
When To Do A User Research Test
So, what’s the best time to invest your money in a user research test? The perfect time to invest your time, money, and effort into testing is when you have any usability issues or a new concept in mind.Â
With Poll the People, you have the opportunity to conduct usability A/B testing that aids in making the best decisions as it backs up your concept with research and evidence.
Let’s suppose you have two logos in mind. Which one do you choose? Who would tell you that? Testing gives you a rational approach to making a decision rather than using the emotion of the opinions of just a few close friends or colleagues.
When you start relying on facts, you reduce the risk in your decisions. Better-informed decisions are always helpful in setting up a successful business. Even its messaging, logo, new features, and just about any other business element, optimize every part of your business with data-backed decisions.
How To Conduct The Test
Conducting a user research test with Poll the People is easy, it only takes about 60 minutes and costs less than traditional research platforms. We have an in-depth guide on running a usability A/B test here, but we’ll give you a short overview of how to run a test.Â
Objectives
What’s the objective of your test? Are you planning to understand the behavior pattern through interviews? Decide the part of your product you want to test, appearance, usage, durability, or what else?
Creating clear and specific goals will help you analyze the results while telling you and your team if the test was a success. Make sure they are measurable and specific to get the most out of the testing process.
Questions
Once your objective is defined, prepare the question you are going to ask the audience. Make sure the question lines up with the objective of the test, and make it detailed enough to help you understand the exact opinions of users.
A simple A or B question work the best, it eliminates the stress that comes with too many options and helps you achieve the ultimate goal of your user research test.
Choose Your Audience
The audience you test with does matter, make sure it lines up with who your target audience is. But you don’t need to be too specific, testing with people that have a wide range of experiences and opinions will give you the most valuable feedback.Â
Consider the people that will be responding to your questions. Poll the People has a great panel of users that are dedicated to giving you actionable feedback. You won’t just get a vote on your test but also provide written feedback that other platforms don’t give you.
Analyze
The last phase is to analyze the obtained data. You have your feedback, dive in to understand the answers given by the users. This part of the process is probably the most important.Â
You need to take a look at the version that won the test and filter through the written responses. Even some of the negative feedback can give you actionable insights.Â
User Research Testing – Post Test
Use The Data To Communicate Findings And Decisions
After attaining the results, you can use the data to communicate your findings and successfully apply them to the project. From user research, the product managers and stakeholders can find insights and recommendations.
Understanding Results
You need to divide your result into multiple sub-sections to understand it properly without any overlapping. You can filter the answers users gave to understand why they chose one option over the other.
Analyze Qualitative Feedback
Here, you can transform the observations of user behavior into further information about the customers. Let’s suppose what was most liked by the users regarding the product? What were the themes in the user response?
Organize Data
After the data is gathered you should organize it, making sure you look at all of the data is important to find every issue, insight, and benefit. There are a lot of ways to organize your data but use the method that works best for your team.Â
Make A Final Decision
Based on the findings, it is time to make a final decision and start making changes that improve your business. Turn the recommendations into solid changes to your design.
Conclusion
The whole guide was made to give you a bird’s eye view of user experience. User research testing is about practice, the more you practice, the more your skills enhance, so does your business.
Poll the People makes the process easy and effective, it gives you a number of valuable tools to understand your audience, including usability A/B testing.
- How To Retain SEO Ranking After A Redesign - February 22, 2023
- Ultimate Guide: How to Write Brand Names - February 17, 2023
- 10 Best Practices for Using Video in Your Email Marketing Campaigns - February 8, 2023
