#user experience research

[yahooaccessibility]

Agile User Research

Frank Bentley, Senior Principal User Researcher

At Yahoo we move quickly.  Our product teams are often shipping new features every week or two and designers are constantly exploring new solutions. While User Research methods have traditionally been fairly slow to execute, especially in the academic traditions of anthropology and human-computer interaction, we have a need to move more quickly and fit our work into the weekly sprints of our product teams.

For Yahoo Mail, we tried an experiment last year where we conducted weekly user research every Friday.  This gave teams Monday through Thursday to work on their new designs and implementations and Friday for us to conduct research and for them to observe and plan for their next week from our research labs. Concepts could be tested in a design state iteratively from week to week, and then tested again in a working build in a subsequent week once it was implemented.  This allows us to rapidly test new designs, iterate each Friday until we get something that both provides value and is usable by our participants, and test final implementations once they are ready.  We augment this with larger scale surveys and field studies as necessary for bigger features and strategic directions.

Along with testing prototypes, these sessions also include in-depth interviews on particular topics of interest, including walkthroughs of current behavior and understanding of recent experiences.  These questions help us to understand particular domains over several weeks and dozens of participants and help to set strategy when combined with other qualitative data from surveys and usage logs.

These weekly studies have transformed the design and product process to truly be user focused.  We test a wide variety of concepts and implementations each week.  Product Managers and Designers don’t have to worry about setting up a special study for their topic, getting users recruited, and waiting several weeks for studies to be executed.  They can rely on having spots in the weekly study for last-minute additions of new prototypes or qualitatively testing topics that have appeared in logs or online user feedback.

All of this has helped bring the Yahoo Mobile Mail app to its highest ratings ever, hitting and then staying at 4.5 stars on both iOS and Android for most of the year, while shipping a wide variety of new features for our users.

[yahooaccessibility]

Time Is Money!

HC Lai, User Experience Researcher

As a UX researcher working on advertising products, a decent portion of my day is spent observing how advertisers use advertising solutions. During various studies I have conducted, it came to my attention that their frustration often rooted in time and efforts required to complete a task. Additionally, we heard search advertisers’ needs in achieving even better results with their search campaigns on Yahoo Gemini while spending less time and effort managing multiple platforms. We came to realize that “time is money” to our advertisers.

Informed by these insights, Yahoo Gemini recently introduced an account sync feature that addresses advertisers’ needs. Account sync is a powerful tool to help search advertisers manage large-scale search campaigns across multiple search engines. The ability to sync accounts can make it simple for advertisers to import their entire eligible portfolio of campaigns from other platforms into Yahoo Gemini, with just a few clicks. By seeking a deep understanding of users’ values and beliefs, UX Research helped to inform product opportunities and we hope to continue improve the Yahoo Gemini experience.

[yahooaccessibility]

Dangers of Self-Reported Usability

By Danielle Lottridge, User Experience Researcher

Usability testing is a method for evaluating the ease-of-use of a product or feature by testing with with people, or “users” of a system. The goal of usability testing is to observe behavior during task flows, observe whether and how users complete flows, and note any conceptual misunderstandings that occur. Participants' reactions are important for other methods such as surveys and concept testing however in usability testing we care whether participants can get the task done. Usability testing provides direct feedback by observing how real people use a product. Usability testing tends to be structured as a one-on-one task-based interview where a facilitator prompts a participant to complete a series of tasks; for example, for an ecommerce website, we might test the usability of adding an item to the shopping cart and completing the checkout process.

One-on-one testing takes time and a facilitator. What if, to save time and money, we tried to have users report usability problems – would they be able to do it? Of course it depends! Participants who frequently participate in usability testing for services such as usertesting.com have a disproportinate amount of experience completing tasks and articulating any hiccups that they encounter along the way. They are more likely to be able to describe their mental model of what they expected and how what they encountered was different than what they expected. However, these participants have so much experience with different systems and design patterns that they may no longer be representative of the general population, but instead representative of the extremely tech savvy, or of amateur UX evaluators. Armed with this experience, these types of participants may encounter a different set of usability problems compared to the general population.

Figure 1. Sketch of Elements of a Mental Model

Image Credit https://openclipart.org/detail/187444/andrew-loomis-drawing-the-head-and-hands-potrace-43

Those with less awareness of their mental model and less experience articulating it won’t be able to report usability problems. A case in point: in a recent quantitative diary study with a few hundred participants in a gen pop sample, a market researcher measured agreement with the statement “This app is easy to use.”  Perhaps unsurprisingly, most participants reported the app was extremely easy to use! Behavioral data showed that participants were not able to complete basic tasks. Also, dozens spontaneously asked for instructions for the app. The behavioral data and requests for instructions directly contradict the self-report data. Why is this? Participants may’ve genuinely experienced the app as easy to use and didn’t realize that they weren’t able to complete basic tasks. Based on literature that says that Western people feel competent and don’t realize it when they aren’t [1], participants may feel confident in their abilities and thus don’t entertain the possibility that they weren’t able to figure out an interface. The bottom line is that self-reported usability data are easy and cheap to measure but most likely misleading. As we say in our group, bad data is worse than no data. Observing the behavior of representative participants is a gold standard in usability testing and should remain so.

[1] Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121.

[yahooaccessibility]

Rapid Surveys to Support Design

By Frank Bentley, Senior Principal User Researcher

Often a design or product team will have a question in the course of their work where an immediate answer is needed in order to proceed. Perhaps they want to know if it's worth it to support a feature given people's current behaviors. Or perhaps they want to test some different icons for intelligibility. Ideally, they'd have answers in a few hours so that they could continue their work. Larger product teams might have multiple questions like this per week in the course of their work.

However traditional User Research activities take time. In-person studies have to be planned, participants need to be recruited and data needs to be analyzed. This can typically take a week or more. Large market research studies often take even longer and are very expensive. But product teams in agile environments need to work faster than these traditional methods can support.  

Over the past two years, we've developed a process for quickly designing, running and analyzing mid-scale surveys to support design and product questions within hours or a day at most. Frequently we can have a question one afternoon, run the survey that evening and have data by the morning of what a representative sample of Americans do. We can run dozens of these surveys every month to understand which use cases to support, where current frustrations lie and the intelligibility of designs. The key is to have a few focused questions and to deploy the survey using a large online survey platform (e.g. Survey Monkey or Amazon's MTurk) to a broad audience. These are not marketing-style attitudinal questions, but questions on actual behaviors that people engage in as a part of their everyday life, so that we can quickly quantify whether a use case is worth supporting. This method has helped us to learn that over 90% of Americans receive coupons and deals in their email and that 64% had used one in the past two weeks. We've also learned about the percentage of email users who turn off their notifications by platform and have tested a variety of icons for the Stationary feature of Yahoo Mail, finding one with 7x the recognition rate of the current design within hours of receiving the files from a designer.

Behavioral surveys like these help User Research to work at the speeds of agile teams and provide quick data about user behavior in the wild to designers and product managers to help set product strategy. And we've seen that the results are often within just a few percentage points of larger, much more expensive market research studies that can take months to fully execute. In a study using eight questions covering a range of user behaviors (everything from using coupons received in email to enabling mobile mail notifications to subscribing to particular video streaming sites), we observed an average error of only 3.6% with SurveyMonkey panels and 7.1% with MTurk panels compared to a gold-standard n=1000 market research panel. This is well within the margin of error needed for rapid feedback in the design process. If you have $100 (the approximate cost of a user study) and 2-3 hours, you can quickly get representative data from 150 participants and move design along at a rapid pace! Running multiple studies over time and triangulating findings can serve to further increase confidence in the results.

[yahooaccessibility]

Expanding the Notion of "User"

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director of Accessibility

Starting today, you’ll notice some significant changes to our blog, both in design and in content, that better reflect who we are and what we do. I’d like to to tell you why we’re making these changes and what you can look forward to as you follow our blog.

One of the things that makes Yahoo’s approach to accessibility unique is that its Accessibility Team and its User Experience Research Team are integrated. That may sound like an obvious approach, but it hasn’t always been this way at Yahoo and we’ve come to find out it’s pretty unusual in the tech industry. In the all-too-rare organizations that actually have a dedicated Accessibility Team, they often report to the chief legal counsel, or are part of an administrative or compliance group. Other times they’re siloed in one division, which prevents them from being able to impact product development or customer support in another. Having a dedicated Accessibility Team and where that team is placed in an organization says a lot about a company’s values, and this is especially true of Yahoo.

In our case, we’re part of a team called User Research and Accessibility or UXRA for short. Our team supports the entire company – every division, every VP, every employee – and it is tasked with representing our users’ unique needs, requirements and points of view in every activity we undertake. We are not just “closely aligned” with our user research team – we are the same team! We share user study labs, training, techniques, findings and the same mission: to accurately represent all users. We work to ensure that users come first in whatever we do, and that this includes people with disabilities, of all ages, of all genders and of all abilities. So, whenever we perform a user study, take a survey, gather product feedback or identify requirements, people with disabilities are included along with everyone else. We can’t imagine any other way.

To better reflect this mission and to give you deeper insight into how we go about understanding and representing our users, you’ll be hearing more from our User Researchers in addition to our Accessibility Team members on this blog.  We have a lot of exciting things to share, and we hope it is informative and inspiring to you and our industry peers as we all continue to reach for greater inclusion.

[reversedout-blog]

User Experience Research | Understanding the Term in Detail!

User experience (UX) is the process of systematic research and analysis of the targeted users’ requirements. This is done for the purpose of adding a realistic context as well as insight into website designing. This entire process of user experience research is formulated into multiple steps that a user experience researcher will follow to understand. To have an idea of what UX research is, you first need to know why as a business owner you should pay attention to this. To understand why user experience is important, you can check our article – Why you as a business owner should pay attention to the user experience of their website?

What is UX Research & How is it done?

User experience research can enable you to understand what users want and plan accordingly. Since it is possible to determine what users are looking for, opting for user experience research is always a wise idea. There are various steps involved in UX research. Every UX researcher begins with qualitative research and moves on to quantitative research. Where qualitative research would determine the motivation and needs of users, quantitative research helps them measure the results.

Let’s discuss each of these phases one by one:

Qualitative research

There are several methods by which a UX researcher performs qualitative research. Some of these methods are – ethnographic field studies or taking interviews. This will help them determine the mindset of a user and understand why users do what they do.

Quantitative research

When quantitative research is complete, the data collected during the process is now gathered in a structured way to analyze it and measure what users do on the basis of the information that is collected.

Different Methods Followed Throughout the Development Process

There are 4 different stages of user experience research – Discover, Explore, Test, and Listen. These are the 4 stages that every user experience researcher follows.

To understand each of these stages in detail let’s get a glance at each stage one by one:

Discover (understanding what is relevant for users)

There are two methods by which you can discover what users are looking for or are interested in. One is through contextual inquiries and the other is via diary studies.

Explore (examining how to best address the users’ needs)

Examining how to best meet the needs of the user can be done through card sorting means or by customer journey maps.

Test (evaluating the design)

Usability testing and accessibility evaluations are two methods of evaluating the designs.

Listen (putting perspectives to solve any issue)

These are usually done through surveys, questionnaires, and analytics.

Whichever method you choose, you will get the information you are looking for. These are different techniques that a UX researcher uses to come to a decision and guide through the entire website design process. User experience research is like the backbone for every website and therefore is very crucial. So, before you hire a website designing company, make sure they have a user experience researcher to guide them.

Finally, we would like to say that it is wise and important for one to pay attention to user experience to improve their website’s and business’s performance.

Contact Us

At Reversed Out Creative, we understand the challenges and opportunities presented by AI disruption. Our team of experts specializes in web design,SEO, graphic design, and digital marketing services. Reach out to us through our contact form to learn more about navigating the evolving job market and embracing the potential of AI. Together, let’s shape a future that combines human ingenuity with the power of AI.

Content resource: https://reversedout.com/user-experience-research-know-it-all/

[114didias]

User Experience Research: Understanding Users for Better Digital Products

In today’s fast-paced digital world, users have endless choices. Whether it is a mobile app, a website, or a software tool, people quickly switch to alternatives if their experience is confusing or frustrating. This is where User Experience (UX) Research plays a critical role. UX research helps businesses deeply understand their users, their needs, behaviors, pain points, and motivations. When done correctly, it becomes the foundation for building digital products that are not only functional but also enjoyable and meaningful to use.

What Is User Experience Research?

User Experience Research is the systematic study of users to understand how they interact with a product or service. It focuses on answering important questions such as:

Who are the users?

What problems are they trying to solve?

How do they behave while using digital products?

What frustrates them and what delights them?

UX research uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods such as interviews, surveys, usability testing, field studies, and data analysis. The goal is to remove assumptions and replace them with real user insights.

Why User Experience Research Matters

Many digital products fail not because of poor technology but because they fail to understand real users. UX research helps bridge this gap.

1. Builds User-Centered Products

Instead of guessing what users might want, UX research ensures that design decisions are based on real needs and behaviors. This leads to products that feel intuitive and natural to use.

2. Reduces Costly Mistakes

Fixing problems after a product is launched is expensive. UX research helps identify issues early, saving both time and money.

3. Improves Customer Satisfaction

When users feel understood, they are more likely to stay loyal. A smooth and enjoyable experience builds trust and long-term relationships.

4. Increases Business Growth

Better user experiences lead to higher conversions, better engagement, and increased revenues.

Types of User Experience Research

UX research is generally divided into two main categories:

1. Qualitative Research

This focuses on understanding why users behave a certain way. Common methods include:

User interviews

Focus groups

Usability testing

Field observation

These methods help uncover emotions, motivations, and user expectations.

2. Quantitative Research

This focuses on collecting measurable data to analyze what users are doing. Examples include:

Online surveys

Website analytics

A/B testing

Heatmaps

Quantitative data helps identify usage patterns and validate design decisions with numbers.

Key Stages of the UX Research Process

1. Defining the Problem

The first step is to clearly identify the challenge. For example, are users abandoning the checkout process, or struggling with navigation?

2. Understanding the Target Audience

Researchers create user personas based on age, profession, behavior, goals, and challenges. This helps designers build for real people, not imaginary users.

3. Choosing the Right Research Method

Depending on the goal, researchers select the most suitable method such as interviews, surveys, or usability tests.

4. Collecting and Analyzing Data

Data is gathered from users and carefully analyzed to find patterns, pain points, and opportunities.

5. Applying Insights to Design

The research findings guide designers and developers to improve layouts, workflows, and features.

The Role of UX Research in Product Development

UX research is not a one-time activity. It supports the entire product development lifecycle:

Before development – to understand user needs and market gaps

During design and prototyping – to test concepts and refine ideas

After launch – to measure performance and continuously improve

Successful companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon invest heavily in UX research because they understand its long-term value.

UX Research and Digital Success

In the digital age, competition is intense. Users no longer tolerate slow loading times, confusing interfaces, or unnecessary complexity. UX research helps businesses stay ahead by delivering:

Faster task completion

Reduced user frustration

Strong emotional connection with the product

Higher user retention

Even small improvements based on research can lead to significant business growth.

Challenges in UX Research

Despite its benefits, UX research also faces some challenges:

Limited budgets and time

Difficulty in recruiting the right users

Misinterpretation of data

Resistance from stakeholders who rely on assumptions

However, these challenges can be managed with proper planning and a strong research strategy.

The Future of User Experience Research

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and voice-based interfaces, UX research is becoming even more important. Researchers will not only study screens but also voice interactions, emotions, and immersive environments. Data-driven personalization and real-time user feedback will shape the next generation of digital experiences.

Conclusion

User Experience Research is no longer optional—it is essential for creating successful digital products. It ensures that products are built around real user needs rather than assumptions. By continuously listening to users, testing ideas, and improving designs, businesses can create products that users love, trust, and recommend.

In a world where digital competition is growing every day, understanding your users through UX research is the smartest investment for long-term success.

[agiledock]

Inside UX Strategy: Harnessing Competitor Insights for Design Success

Explore the critical role of competitive analysis in UX design. Gain practical tips on leveraging competitor research to refine your design strategy and deliver exceptional user experiences. Visit: https://agiledock.com/what-is-competitive-analysis-in-ux-design/