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Five types of research for the app development process

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When shaping the User Experience of your app, common sense, logic and best practices only go so far. Each app is different, solving a different problem for a different set of users. As experts it can be easy to focus on the solution, forgetting about the problem—and leading to costly oversights.

OVERVIEW

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OVERVIEW

“ We had new features in mind that we thought were cool, and we spent over a year building them only to find nobody wanted it,” says Kishan Gupta, founder of UXCam.

“ Now we have taken the lean startup approach of build-measure-learn, and have everyone in the team review data and do customer support. This has allowed all of us to know where the highest ROIs are, and be aligned on the product roadmap saving us huge time/effort/money.”

By including the voice of your users in the design and development process, you avoid relying on guesswork. Here are 5 ways to conduct user research and involve users in the process.

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One-on-one conversations are a great way to get a deep understanding of target users’ motivations and perspectives. Good user interviews involve asking the right people open questions. The right people to interview are those that match the target users of the app. Open questions help the interviewee open up, and can be as simple as asking what they find difficult.

USER INTERVIEWS

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Contextual inquiries involve interviewing and observing the user where they encounter the problem, usually a workplace. The information gathered during contextual inquiries is very reliable, because it comes directly from the source. This often leads to new perspectives on the problem and ultimately, the solution.

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES

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Surveys can be used for a range of feedback gathering purposes, from finding out why people use an app, to quantifying results from contextual inquiries and user interviews. Good, reliable results only come from well-designed and written surveys. Questions need to be easy to understand with a logical flow.

SURVEYS

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Group discussions help uncover feelings, attitudes and ideas. Focus groups give you a chance to watch people build on, or argue with, other peoples’ thoughts. That type of discussion doesn’t happen during one-on-one interviews.

FOCUS GROUPS

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During usability testing, users interact with a version of your app, often a prototype, and attempt to perform designed tasks. Measuring the results of the tasks, whether the user failed, succeeded, or partially succeeded, is important to quantifying problems with the UX. This is a great way observe how well the UX matches up with users’ expectations. The information gathered from usability testing will help steer UX design.

USABILITY TESTING

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Different methods provide varying levels of information, and are suitable to different stages of the project—while a survey may show how a user perceives your app’s difficulty, it doesn’t compare to a contextual inquiry to illustrate exactly how they engage with the app. Make sure to budget time for various forms of UX research into your app development process: By incorporating a combination of user researching methods, you’re able to gather more genuine data, and end your reliance on unproved guesswork and assumptions.

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Yeti collaborates with industry leaders to design, develop, and ship the products that shape the future. Leaders from industries such as robotics, IoT hardware development, virtual reality experiences, data science analytics, and community building applications partner with Yeti to define and solve problems. Our team designs, prototypes, and builds effective solutions, elegantly delivered through an iterative process that continuously evolves the product. For more information, visit us on the web at yeti.co.

Additional Resources: The Product Design Process Guide

Video: Intro To Agile Development

Webinar: Taking Your Product Idea To The Next Level