UX Research is an essential step in designing digital experiences that are truly adapted to users’ needs.
Creating a high-performance website, business application or intranet is not simply a matter of developing a set of functions and presenting them in visually attractive interfaces.
A successful digital project starts with a detailed understanding of users and their real needs.
This is where user experience research (UX Research) comes in. This is a set of qualitative and quantitative methods used to gather essential data on the objectives, behaviour and usage contexts of end users.
At Contraste Digital, we insist on this crucial design stage (UX Design) as the initial phase of projects. It enables us to align the company’s objectives with users’ expectations. The aim? To come up with tailor-made solutions that improve the customer experience.
Why is UX Research essential?
🚀 Improving commitment and satisfaction
A user who immediately understands how an interface works and can quickly find the information they are looking for is a satisfied user. The more fluid an experience, the more it encourages engagement and loyalty.
💡 Anticipating users’ real needs
All too often, companies think they know what their users need, and base their thinking, and even their specifications, on unverified hypotheses. UX Research provides an objective view thanks to analysis methods (user tests, interviews, behavioural studies, etc.).
🔍 Reducing costs and risks
Investing in UX Research upstream puts the design on a solid footing. As far as possible, this avoids having to correct errors after development or after the site has gone live.
This avoids the risk of developing solutions that are ill-adapted or outside the relevant scope (functionalities that will only benefit marginal cases), while at the end of the day winning on all fronts: development time, budget and brand image.
The key methods of UX Research
At Contraste Digital, we use a number of proven techniques to better understand user expectations and behaviour:
- Interviews and user testing → Understanding their needs, behaviour and context. Observing actual behaviour during user tests provides particularly valuable and reliable data.
- Heatmaps and behavioural tracking → Observe how users interact with the interface via anonymised session recordings.
- Card sorting → Understanding the mental structure of users: how they group and classify information.
- Online surveys → Measure satisfaction or validate specific hypotheses by gathering quantitative and qualitative data
- Competitive analysis → Assess the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services
- Heuristic evaluation → Identify user interface design problems on the basis of ergonomic criteria (called heuristics)
- User path mapping → Identify friction points and possible improvements.