UX, UXR, & CX…Oh my!: A guide to design
Whether you work in the tech industry, or you are an entrepreneur trying to validate a business idea, probably you have heard one of these concepts before, or maybe all of them, that is because when they are applied (in a correct way) they help a lot to validate and improve products and services, and for that reason, in the last years they have become more and more known. But, ever if you’re a designer, do you know when it is necessary to apply each one and what is the purpose and benefits they bring? If you’re chomping at the bit already, you’ve come to the right place. ;)
Good design
Have you ever feel frustrated or confused when using a mobile app or a web site? You don’t even need to respond to the question so I can know the answer, all of us have felt that way when we are not able to get a task done while using a digital product, and there is a simple explanation for that: Bad design.
A good design is the one that allows you to complete a task without effort, without getting confused. Good design is when things flow like a charm and you don’t even need to think about how to use the product because it just feels natural. And how do we make a design that good? Well, with user research, user experience testing, and customer experience research. Together, these three processes will help us to understand what our users need, how to create a solution that fits with their mental model, and how to improve that solution once it has been launched to market. Let’s dive into each one.
User research
What do you think makes more sense, invest a lot of effort (and money as well) creating and launching to the market a product based on our assumptions of what our users needs, or, discover what they need and based on that knowledge create something that solves that need? Easy one, right? the second option is the obvious answer. And with that said, how can we discover what the people need? That is where User Research comes into the picture.
User research is the process of understanding what is the problem of our users, in which circumstances they face that problem, and how they handle it right now. Only after we have a full understanding of it we can start thinking about possible solutions for that need. So, as you can notice, the user research process is the first thing we need to do when we want to create a product or a service, it will give you clarity about what will be the product value proposition and will help you to take all the important decisions in the next steps of the project.
And how do we understand the needs of our users? making interviews, of course, the best way to know about the people is just talking to people. Do as many interviews as you consider necessary. But remember that what people say, is not always what people think, and that is not always what people do, so be careful of not only keep with what people tell you, go beyond and look at their faces, their gestures, listen to the tone of their voice, we need to get a deep understanding, not just keeping at the surface. And also be careful with define the objectives of the research, always keep in mind what is the goal your users want to reach, and based on that, focus all the questions on discovering what are the problems they are facing to reach that goal, on which circumstances the problems are happening and how the users are dealing with those problems right now, so we can create something much better than the current solutions.
Pro tip: remember to make the interviewee feel very comfortable and without pressure, in that way, their answers will be more honest.
UX testing
Ok, so, at this moment you know all about that need you want to resolve, you and your team spent the whole day doing brainstorming, you designed an incredible and revolutionary digital product, and now you are ready to build that product that will make you millionaire, life will be pretty good and beautiful, oh yeah… well, is not that easy. You have an idea of how the product will solve the problem of your users, and maybe is a good idea, but, are you sure that your users will find your product easy to use? how do you know they will not get confused at some point in the process? It doesn’t matter how awesome your product is, or what does it resolve, if the users have a bad experience using it, it will be a failure.
The failure or success of a product depends a lot on this one thing: the user experience (UX). You have to make sure that the user will have a very good experience when using your product, and the only way to be sure of that is by testing. UX testing is the process of understanding the mental model of our users and how we can adjust our product to make it fit with that model. And keep that always in mind on every design decision: The product must adapt to the user’s mental model and never the other way around. But what is a mental model? in simple words, is the way the user understands the world, the way he or she communicates with an interface, so, if during the testing we observe the user does not understand something in our product interface or understands a different thing about what should happen when a button or an icon is pressed, that means that our product is not adapting to the mental model of our user, and there we have an important finding because now we know where we have to change the design to achieve a more understandable product.
UX testing should be done in the design process. Nowadays we have very powerful tools such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Invision, Marvel, etc, where we can create high fidelity prototypes that simulate the look and behavior of a real mobile app or website, and use those prototypes to make UX testing, without the need to invest a lot of time and money building robust software. But how we make UX testing? Well, there are several techniques, the most known are usability testing, card sorting, and heat maps.
Usability testing. It is a one-to-one test where we ask a user to perform certain tasks in our interface, and we also ask them to say out loud all the thoughts they may have. The purpose of this test is to find all the places where the user may get stuck or confused, and why.
Card sorting. It is a simple test where we ask a group of users (5 is a good number) to organize a bunch of cards that have categories or topics written on them, in a way that they feel makes sense. The intention here is to understand how the users group the information. This technique is very helpful to define the best way to organize the menus of an app or a website.
Heat maps. It is a data visualization that determines how users of an interface click on the different elements that compose it. You define steps to complete a task and ask the user to follow the steps. The heat map tool will record the exact point of the screen where the user made a click. Usually is made remotely, so you can apply the test to any users you can. By the end, you will get an image that illustrates the areas where the users made more clicks and vice versa. This helps us to verify if the users can find the interface elements easily.
Pro tip: As with user research, make sure that the user feels comfortable during the tests and always observe their body language, what they tell us with their facial gestures is much more valuable than what they tell us with their words.
CX research
Finally, you built a product based on all that knowledge you got after the UX testing process and you launched it to the market. Surely everything will work fine and the product will be a great success, after all, that’s why we did the user experience research, right? Well, sorry for disappointing you again but, is not that easy.
Now that our product is available for the users, it will be subjected to a test that it had not been able to face before, use under real conditions. Not even the most experienced UX researcher can predict all the circumstances in which our product will be used, we can try, and that’s why we did the user research and the UX testing process, but it would be naive to think that we have everything fixed and that nothing can turn out differently from what we thought. And because of that, we have to do customer experience research (CX research) once the product has been launched.
CX research is the process of finding all problems and latent needs that our product is not yet solving and that need to be solved to improve the user experience. Its purpose is to discover if the product is useful for our users and what we must improve to generate loyalty and retain them. Our focus here is to find all troubles our users may be facing with our product, using techniques such as interviews, usability triads, and diaries. Let’s see what each of them consists of:
Interviews. They are just like the interviews we do in user research, the difference is on what we put our focus on. With user research, we want to understand the circumstances of the users’ needs, while here we want to understand the circumstances of the troubles the users have when they use our product. Again, you need to make the user feels comfortable and in an environment of trust so that their answers are more honest.
Usability triads. It is a focus group with three users that have used our product in real situations. The idea is to extract all the information we can about the troubles and difficulties the users have experienced. An interesting way to do a usability triad is with call center personal because they have lots of information with feedback from many users.
Diaries. This technique takes more time, but it’s worth it. We ask a user to record all the experiences and opinions (especially the bad ones) they have with our product any time they use it. They can take pictures, take video, write their thoughts in a diary, and also fill a form, any evidence that can help us figure out what we need to improve is welcome. The process consists of three steps, a first interview to explain the process, the recording period (15 days may be a good period), and finally another interview to close the process. During the recording period, we can keep in touch with the user to monitor the process as well as give and receive feedback, this will increase the trust of the user, which will improve the accuracy and quality of user feedback.
After all this research we can go back with our team and generate ideas to correct what is wrong with our product and to improve the user experience in the next release. This is an iterative process, so once we designed the new changes we need to do UX testing again, then after launch that new release we will do CX research again, and so on.
Pro tip: Remember to keep the research and the improvements focused on the main need that your product solves, because surely we will find things that can be unrelated to the research objectives and that can distract our attention from what is important. If we find something interesting but unrelated to our objectives, we can save it in the drawer and come back to it in the next release.
Conclusion
Great companies do two things without exceptions: Listen to their users’ needs and create solutions according to those needs, no more no less. If we want to create useful and memorable solutions we need to listen to our users and react according to that, and the way we can do this is by doing user research to understand the problems, making UX testing to build solutions that fit with our users mental model and doing CX research to improve our product and generate loyalty in our users.
I hope this information will be useful to you in your future projects. See you in another story.