User research is what can make your project at times, but it is ideally what tends to set a UX project apart from a UI project. Gaining that better understanding of the client and their audience will speak volumes in terms of how you craft a solution catering to them. Begin each project by sitting down with the client and gathering their requirements and do some market research. Assess their current offerings and see if they might have any existing research that you can utilize.
Listed below are a number of questions that will help capture some of the initial impressions and requirements of your project:
- What is your product or service all about?
- Who is your target audience?
- What should your solution do for you?
- What should your solution do for your client?
- What are your plans to develop content?
- Why should your ideal user even use your product?
The reason we address their needs for content, is in case they need our help developing a content strategy. A content strategy involves any content that the client may want to place on their site and any content that is provided through the networks of their brand. This too, is also covered under the umbrella of User Experience. Hopefully most agencies will employ someone as a content strategist, but all of the interested parties involved must have a clear understanding of who their product and message is for.
After meeting with the client, begin to mood boarding design ideas. This involves doing some research online and sees if anyone has already accomplished the same goal, if we can improve or build on something, or provide them with something entirely innovative, colors, fonts, etc. Sometimes working remotely I like to use various online tools available such as Pinterest through a shared pinboard with the client or stakeholder. This early on in the process you are conveying transparency with the client and including them to make them feel involved. An existing brand can be both a good and bad thing. The client may already have an idea based around their brand. That isn’t to say that most brands are a bad thing just that it takes getting to know the brand and the client to even tailor their own work experience with you so that you can deliver on time and make everyone happy.
In instances where a client might have an existing solution a heuristic evaluation of their product and a discussion the holes in their current experience design, would be ideal and opens up the topic of different ways that we can improve on them. I use data collected through quick usability testing and assess the situation. The findings are then presented to the client with a projected solution.
If research has not been provided to you then it is up to you to go out and gather all the research you can based on their requirements. In my experience there are two research methods that I continually use with solid results. I’m talking about conducting qualitative or quantitative user research. Qualitative research is about discovering new things with a small sample size. User interviews and usability testing fall into this category, because they consist of interacting with a small focus group of 10 to 20 users to gain new ideas and find problems within the product.
Quantitative research is about testing or proving something with a large sample size. Using the analysis of the site-traffic and doing user surveys are good examples of quantitative research.
