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We are always talking about user research in the world of UX. I just wanted to write something about this topic as not many people understand the importance of UX research in Hong Kong. Is it the same as market research? No, they actually complement each other. They are different in terms of scale where user research has a smaller scale that focuses on qualitative data over quantitive data.
My practice is to send surveys to gather a large set of information on a wide range of topics. This is easier to get an overview of the data before going deep dive into specific topics when I carry out user interviews.
You can refer to this article written by Susan Farrell on the guidelines to consider when designing a survey.
Interviews are particularly useful to explore users' general attitudes and how they feel and think about a problem. I will ask users to recall and describe the circumstances when they encounter difficulties or when things work out really well for them. It should consists of mainly open-ended questions as we could not gather any insights by asking yes and no question.
I recommend you to read this article by Kara Pernice on how to conduct user interviews successfully.
Apart from gathering data from users by asking questions, you can study users' behavior by observing them. It is important to understand how they achieve their goals and tackle different issues. It is also a good to see how they behave in certain context.
This is a great video to check out the steps to carry out field studies.
The key of conducting user research is to have the best interests of users in heart, being able to listen and empathize the users' motivation and frustration. The better understanding of the users, the better we are able to formulate design solutions. So when you hear quite a few users pointed out an obstacle they are facing when they are using the product, ask them more questions to uncover the real problem. Because, the problem is the solution.
