Making the Case for UX - Introduction
The business case for User Experience research is clear to those of us working in the UX field. Products that target the right audience, and are easy and enjoyable to use will be more successful, right? It can sometimes be challenging, however, to convince business stakeholders of the value of investing in UX. The reality is that sometimes, certain UX research processes get sidelined. This is an introduction to a series of posts that explores the benefits of UX research methodologies that can take place throughout a product development lifecycle. These benefits are not just for end users, but also for the business and for the design and development process. The benefits of good research to end users have been well documented. One of the benefits to business is that investing in UX can ultimately result in a large cost saving. If the appropriate level of research isn't done at the beginning of a project, there's a good chance that you'll end up with a product that users don’t want or don’t fully understand. Meaning more budget will eventually be required to redesign and develop the product. As well as lowering the risk of having to re-work features, the benefits for the project team can include reduced development and support costs. A good UX process also helps to build clear consensus between the team and stakeholders around what features to prioritise. This consensus helps to keep the project on track. Here is an outline of what I cover during this series:
Stakeholder insights
This post will look at why it’s important to meet stakeholders and subject matter experts as early as possible in a project and how eliciting information on the target audience will help to form the basis for subsequent product design.
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User Research
This post will explore different methods of primary research with actual users, including user interviews and contextual interviews and explain how these approaches can provide valuable insights that stakeholder meetings alone often cannot deliver.
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Usability Reviews
Internal UX reviews allow User Experience professionals to examine a user interface and compare its usability against accepted UX principles. Comparative analysis is another method we use where we examine products with similar users or features and assess the strengths and weaknesses of these products in the context of what we are designing.
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Usability testing
Usability testing is a methodology that we highly recommend when designing any kind of complex product with transactional flows, such as registration or check-out. I'll explain in this article how it is a fast and effective way to validate whether you are on the right track with your product design.
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Conclusion
In our upcoming posts, we'll look into the above processes in greater detail and examine how they add value to the overall product design. We’ll show how they provide a return on investment, not only helping to increase revenue but also resulting in reduced development and support costs.
Other posts in this series, "Making the Case for UX"
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X Communications.