Understand how to select the appropriate research method for each phase of your project.
I've already talked about the difference between Quantitative and Qualitative research, as well as Attitudinal and Behavioral methodologies. It's also crucial to differentiate when is the moment 🔎 Explore and when is time to 📝 Evaluate.
Exploratory Research (or Generative)
It typically happens in the Discovery Phase, in early stages of the project, it might not be a tangible product or the product concept may still be foggy. It's also relevant when introducing a new feature or product to your project. You want to understand the terrain before you step in, ensuring that your efforts are directed towards the right place.
The goal is to gather information about who are your users, their behavior, needs, motivation and to collect insights from them. With this information, you will be able to:
Understand the problem/opportunities
Gain understanding of your user base, differentiate them, understand their behavior and needs/desires (also anticipating what they would desire one day - innovation!)
Determine the essential features and functionalities that the product must incorporate to effectively serve your users (as well as those aspects it should avoid)
Formulate the requirements for developing the new product/feature, establishing desired outcomes before diving into ideation.
Some methods:
Interviews, Surveys, Diary Studies, Field Studies
Evaluative Research
It's time to evaluate - validate your concepts, test your prototypes and understand if your product serves its purpose. Evaluative Research can be applied in many stages after de Discovery Phase, and, as you can imagine by now, the insights gathered during your Exploratory Research (along with additional data from the Discovery Phase) serve as foundational elements for conducting Evaluative Research.
Your goals may be identifying usability issues, measuring user experience/satisfaction, or testing the effectiveness of your product, all achievable through Quantitative or Qualitative metrics. You just need a question to be answered or a hypothesis to be proven along with a wireframe, prototype, product, page, or information architecture - it works from the moment you can interact with it. To decide the method, look to your question/hypothesis.
With the information gathered from your tests, you will be able to:
Collect data to make informed decisions
Write reports
Make improvement recommendations
Improve your product
Prove it works (find investors)
Some methods:
Think Aloud, Preference Testing, Surveys, Tree Testing, First Click, A/B Testing
🧠 (( It was a quick bite to instigate your curiosity, go further and research more about the subject! ))
Beijo,
Mila Monteiro
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