It is now universally agreed that a good user experience plays the most important role in building a great application. This is why doing extensive user research is more significant than ever before. Deeper user research leading to great UX benefits can end up delivering a successful application. This is why we are here to explain how user research can be funneled down to a great user experience and a superb app.
Table of Content
Reasons Why Doing User Research is Crucial for Mobile Application Development
Let us begin our inquiry with the obvious, explaining the key ways user research can affect mobile app development company New York. From helping to landing on a perfect vision about the software product and how it will serve the users to impact on monetization and business conversion, user research plays the mission-critical role behind design and development decisions.
It is best to take user feedback by rolling out a particular product prototype and understanding user preferences. Doing user research on product prototypes can help development in 3 principal ways.
Creating User-focused Design
- When designing, you can go into a granular level of understanding of user activities and how they interact with the interface. The key obstacles can remove to make the user experience better.
- When designing, you can also take into consideration the user feedback from their real-world communication.
- You also can test your prototype with users in different situations to get a more detailed and exhaustive view of the multiple perspectives.
- Lastly, you need to give the project to a design team with experts having a solid track record in customer-focused and empathetic design.
Developing Mobile App Features That Are Easy To Use
Another crucial thing that prototype testing does is evaluate every application feature and its merit in terms of the app objective and overall user experience. You can never design and build a great product without understanding the user preferences of the key features and dislike for a few.
- What are the demographics of your users? This includes knowing their age, gender, socio-economic class, locations, cultural attributes, etc.
- The educational qualifications and social exposure of the users.
- What kind of environment do they work in?
- What are their leisure and entertainment habits?
- How frequently do they browse new apps?
- What kind of apps do they mostly use?
All this information and insights will help you to build an application that fits user needs and preferences. You must keep in mind that not all users have the same level of expertise. So, your app must be designed and built to cater to the ways users are comfortable with.
Evaluate the ROI Potential of the App
Finally, the user research also helps you evaluate the potential of your application in generating revenue. Your app design and features must work together in a complementary way to engage users and make them take actions that lead to business conversion.
The features must directly relate to the specific user needs, and the design must help them to access the features and get away with their requirements as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
In this respect, for a design to stand out from the branding perspective, it must be consistent while being visually impressive and engaging. The design and features must also be highly scalable and future-ready to evolve with business volume and traffic without giving away the branding elements and positive UX elements.
The UX Rules of Product Development
Now, we need to ask some elementary questions concerning the UX rules of application development. Some of the key questions that you need to begin with include the following.
- What problems is the app going to solve?
- To whom are you going to solve the problem?
- What will be the parameters to measure the success of your problem-solving?
- What are the key problems that you need to give priority to?
As you conceptualize the product, over time, slowly, all these questions are answered. You need to think of yourself as a user and accordingly try to approach each of these questions.
While approaching key questions as a user, you also need to consider that not all users have the expertise and knowledge. So, it would be best if you came up with solutions from common people who don’t know much about the app world.
Once you get away with the primary questions and considerations, you need to consider the entire landscape of ideas and possibilities corresponding to your app concept. Think of other application ideas out there.
Also, think about whether you are the only one with this app idea. If others are working on a similar app idea, what else do you have to execute the vision better? Think of other competitive and complementary offerings that you can unfold for the users over time. You need to offer something truly unique and exclusive.
For example, when every online furniture app is bent on selling its products, you can allow users to recreate the room with their preferred furniture and view it on-screen with the help of Augmented Reality.
Whom Are We Solving It For?
The most important aspect of turning a great app idea into a successful app is to continuously focus on the users throughout the development process, from prototyping to design and development to post-development support and upgrades.
This is why you need to figure out your ideal users who vary from most acceptable to your app idea to the marginally and infrequently involved ones. For example, if you are rolling out a food app focused on helping people cook healthy foods.
You will likely have an elegant target user group who will appreciate your app most and frequently return to it. This user group mainly consists of people who are tremendously conscious about healthy food habits and ingredients. They will instantly appreciate your simple recipes and organic food suggestions.
On the second tier, you have the users who frequently give new recipes and ingredients a try despite being obnoxiously gourmet food lovers. There will also be the third tier of users’ interest in experiments with cooking and ingredients of different types.
Every app deals with these 3 groups of intended users having various degrees of engagement and commitment. When an app can address these different users according to their commitment and attention, they will likely enjoy better and louder resonance. User research is key to finding these 3 different user groups for your app.
Quantitative User Research Methods for Mobile Apps
When it comes to user research methods, quantitative research methods are considered more powerful. It is also effective as they deliver specific and convincing numbers for the application developers and strategists to decide upon.
Qualitative research mainly concerns the key questions for knowing the users that we have explained above. Further, each of these qualitative research areas is substantiated by quantitative figures and findings.
- Online Surveys
- Behavioral Analysis
- Automated Logging Activity
- Experience Sample Methods
Online Surveys
Online surveys are carried out to collect user feedback and crucial user data. A questionnaire is presented to the survey respondents. Also, besides getting data through the answers to these questions. The automatically actual behavior of the user tracks and processes as relevant quantitative data.
Two of the key questions that online surveys ask the users include “What do they think of the app? What kind of value do they get from the app?
Online surveys are a highly cost-efficient user research technique. That can grab a large pool of data from people from different parts of the globe. The only downside is the absence of any ways to contact respondents directly.
Behavioral Analysis
Behavioral analysis is the quantitative user research method to find out how the users use the app. It carries out by installing special software on the devices of the users. Through the installed programs in the devices, the conduct and navigation of the users track when they use the app.
Automated Logging
This is another quantitative user research method to evaluate how users actually use the app. Automated logging helps get access to the mobile events and how the users interact. The only downside is that, just like behavioral analysis, it cannot give us insights into the context or user intention.
Experience Sampling Method (ESM)
Moreover, this is one of the widely adopt and popular user research methods for mobile app users as it engages the participants of the users with specific questions. By sending them a message with a question like “How, does the user use our app?” Or “What do they think about the app?” insights about specific user activity can generate.
