User Experience Research is incredibly important to creating great User Experiences. As stated by interaction design foundation, “research is the systematic study of target users and their requirements, to add realistic contexts and insights to design processes”. The research can reveal detailed information which will help create a better product.

When conducting this research there’s a lot information out there to gather so just try and organize your findings so it’s easier to read and show the team. This will help you create better solutions to the issues. You will be able to learn what many people have issues with and possible ways to overcome these issues. If you were creating an app, you would need to do research on the topic of the app and figure out who your target audience would be. Once this is done your research should explicitly show how this app will help the user and what the outcome will be. Some types of reasearch that can be done to create better User experiences are:

Observing which is where you just observe what the user does and from there you can see any setback or issues they come across.

Attitudinal which is where you simply listen to all the issues or anything that the user has to say about the experience.

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doing both can also be done and I personally recommend doing both since you can obtain a very clear view of the user and how their experience is. So understanding what it is the user wants is the first part. Next figuring out how the user feels towards the experiences. Next test the experiences by doing usability testing and making sure your designs are clear, and accessible to anyone. After the testing observe and put down any more issues or concerns that the user has with the product. Do some pros and cons of what the user likes what they don’t like. After understanding your user to the best you can, you can implements the designs and create wonderful user experiences.

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What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a process to understand and redefine issues in order to design better products. It helps provide solutions in order to solve the problem we may have in a product. A lot of companies use this process to better enhance their products. Design thinking uses logic and understanding in order to create amazing products we can use every day. After Testing you still need to maintain it and continue enhancing it and meeting all the expectations. Even Though it works doesn’t mean it can’t be enhanced! Let’s break down the process so we can get a greater understanding of each. The process looks like this:

Empathize – with your users
Define – your users’ needs, their problems, and your insights
Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
Prototype – to start creating solutions
Test – solutions

Empathize

You want to get an empathetic understanding of the issue you are trying to find a solution to. In order to achieve this is important to observe the user and know what it is they want and desire. Listening to them is like how a therapist listens to their clients in order to provide solutions to their problems. In this stage, you need to get as much information as you can from the user or audience. Knowing your audience is a must and knowing their likes and dislikes is also great.

Define

This is where you gather all the information you have gotten from your audiences and analyze the main issues/likes. We need to know everything people enjoy and dislike in order to fulfill their expectations. If we can obtain enough information, it will help the team be able to implement their ideas and possible functions for the product. Once we can define the things the audience didn’t like or want to see, we can come up with questions that can be answered.

Ideate

Here is where the team can start asking and generating ideas. Here is a space to think freely. So you can ask questions about the issues and possible functions of the product. You draw, write, and use sticky notes or photos to visually show your ideas. In this stage we need to bring out all solutions we have that can be used to solve the problem.

Prototype

Here is where you basically create the product but in a smaller version and less expensive. In this stage, we will implement the solutions. It’s basically a trial and error for the ideas we came up with in the early stages. This way when we use trial and error we figure out if the solutions we came up with will work, if they don’t we will revise or just reject it fully.

Test

This is where it gets intense because we need to test the best solutions again and again to see whether or not they hold up. During this stage, solutions are still being brought out in order to provide the best of the best. This stage is a bit hectic more than the other stage but it’s amazing to see all the work come to life. After testing is done you’re still finding better ways to enhance your product and see further into what people enjoy or don’t enjoy within the product.