Actionable customer insight with UX research

UX research is a process of learning about customers’ needs, behaviours, and motivations to understand their lived experience with brand services and is often more focused on digital platforms. It aims to improve the overall experience created by a brand by ensuring the organisation is not only solving a customer need but also in a way that is easy and delightful. 

There are two main areas of UX research: evaluative and generative.

Evaluative looks at existing ideas or products and gathers feedback on them. Usability testing is an example of this. It evaluates a concept, design or implementation. Generative research looks forward and gathers data about what could be to help come up with new ideas. This is sometimes called discovery research or, as we like to call it, customer research.

UX research can help increase revenue and lower expenses. It’s usually quite hard to work out the exact RIO of research, but when you have experienced products not meeting customer expectations or software projects fail to launch, it’s a very easy investment.

Improves conversion rates

Getting humans to take action is one of the most important aspects of UX research. If you want customers to convert, you need to understand every level of the behaviour change funnel. It’s not possible to do this in a boardroom; not all people are the same, and as they say, “you are not your users.” If the people in the boardroom are your users, then less research is needed.

Increases customer retention

Using best practices can only take your customer experience so far. If you want to differentiate your offering, you need to offer an experience that does not just follow what everyone else is doing.

UX research will help you understand what behaviour change techniques will work and what value needs to be created to get customers to keep coming back.

Reduce development costs

Don’t waste time building the wrong thing or building it in a way that customers can’t use, so more time is needed to fix the UX issues after launch. 

Lowers customer support expenses

One way to lower support calls is to hide the contact number from the website, but that will also mean customers will not hang around. A far more effective way to reduce service calls, it allows customers to answer questions and complete tasks on thier own.

Effective UX research reveals the finer points of how users interact with products, helping to create solutions that genuinely resonate with the target audience, leading to a harmonious user experience. 

If you consider development to be releasing features and stop timing after launch, then yes, it could slow down the development process. But if you consider development to be releasing customer value and include the time needed to fix issues after launch, then no, it definitely does not slow down your development time; in fact, it speeds it up.

Customer research helps to ensure you are building the right thing, but also building it right. If a team is releasing features without customer research, there is a high risk that changes will need to be made after launch or, even worse, that no one will see the value in the feature at all.

Another way to look at customer research is as a risk mitigation process. Generative research helps to ensure you understand the real job that customers are hiring your product to solve, and evaluative research helps uncover any potential issues customers might face using the product. It moves the time spent from the end of the development process (fixing issues) to the beginning.

Conducting user testing and customer research in South Africa and broader Africa requires a knowledge of the local market inside and out. The unique mix of cultural, tech and economic factors at play here can hugely influence how users interact with digital platforms. That’s where we come in. With our deep-rooted understanding of the South African market and good partners in other countries in Africa, How Might We can help you get your usability testing just right. 

We’re clued up on the unique user behaviours and preferences that shape the digital landscape in South Africa. Armed with this knowledge, we can make sure your UX really hits the mark with your target users, leading to more reliable and valuable outcomes. 

Absolutely. Remote UX research has become a valuable and often preferable method for us to gather insights, especially when working with geographically dispersed users or limited budgets.

Remote research can reduce observer bias, feel more natural to participants, and still allow for rich qualitative insight, provided it’s planned well. While in-person sessions offer more control and the ability to read body language more easily, remote sessions often lead to more authentic behaviour because participants are in familiar environments. At How Might We, we offer both in-person and remote research and can help you choose which one is best for you based on your research question and respondent group.

For a more detailed answer, read Remote vs in-person UX research.