Your product could be broken and you wouldn’t even know it… unless you measure it.
Usability Testing
Assigning goals or tasks to a user experiencing a product and getting feedback on the experience. Usability testing can derive insights from actual users or potential users and uncovers insights that designers might overlook.
Ethnographic Field Research & Diary Studies
Immersing researchers to observe people in their natural habitats of living, work, or other contexts. A diary is kept by the observer or by the users themselves about behaviors, activities, and experiences over a longer period of time, which can extend from a few days up to more than a month. It allows insight into the normal actions and habits of users.
Heat Maps & Eye Tracking
Observing in a lab how a user’s mouse and eyes travel and hover over hot zones of a digital product to give insight into how they think and behave. This provides real data into where users navigate, where and look, and where they linger and for how long.
Design Audits
Expert analysis on a product ascertaining intuitiveness & usability to find areas of weakness, improvement, or critical fail points. It can be in the form of:
Standalone Design Critique
A group conversation by design experts taking place around a product.
Heuristic Evaluation
The application of Usability Heuristics to evaluate a product.
Expert Review
An expert UX designer inspects a system and reports on usability problems and strengths.
Navigation & Information Architecture
Research that renders information in a digital product easily findable and navigable by users, where participants sort information or click through it to find a certain item, giving insights into how users think about the relationships between these pieces of info. This creates navigation that people find intuitive, allowing them to easily find the information nested within the layers of the product.
Methods include: Card Sorting, Tree-Testing, First-Click Testing, etc.
A/B Testing
Launching two instances of a product, observing and measuring the performance of each to ascertain the best features to roll out. This provides a quantitative and qualitative comparison on which design is better to drive conversion and achieve greater user satisfaction.
Research on products has only one objective: improving the product.
If your product’s function is of any importance to you, then measuring its performance is just common sense.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Antoine-Augustin Cournot
