There is always a question from someone who wanted to switch their career to UI/UX Designer. Is User research important? if you just wanted to try to be UI/UX designer you can skip that part. It’s so different if you wanted to switch you need to consider understanding what is user research.
Also Read: First Step into Product Management Field
A user design approach is a method you can use in developing your products that focus on your users. Both in design/business or event in your company itself. Why is this method important? because we want our product to solve the problem the user has.
Let’s try to understand what is user research and hope what I write here will help you.
The Important of User Research.
Widening your view
When we kick off our process of designing a product, we tend to make ourselves the user who will use the product. We know, we have the problem and know how to solve it. But it’s not always the same with others, maybe we are just one in a thousand people who solve a problem like that.
Having that kind of process of thinking is one of the design processes, which you can read in my previous article called Six Hat Thinking.
Read it: Six Hat Thinking
It happens when we understand what we want, but how about another user? will they use the same method to solve the problem as yours? or do they have a different way of so that problems?
That is why user research is important. Using user research will widen your view about how users have many ways to solve the problem which our product what to solve.
Opening new Facts
User research widens our view of how to solve a problem. It also opens new facts we did not see before. And surely it will help you understand the solution for your problem and implement it in your products.
also read: Dark pattern some designer use
Also with new facts, you can understand how to improve your design. So it’s so important when we have the data from the user who use our products.
Everyone can do this.
Not like UI/UX designers, becoming user research can be done by everyone. For someone who wants to become a user researcher, you don’t need to have a master’s degree and you also didn’t need to have a big budget to do it.
Read it: Understanding User by analyzing their behavior.
Because of the rising of industries in this field. There are many tools you can use to do easy, quick, and cheap surveys for your user research. Because of that many people tempting to switch their careers to being User Researchers.
for a better understanding of the techniques their use you can read it here
Read it: UX Research Techniques and Their Applications
Make developing easier.
After understanding the problem from your users. we can use that data to think about the next features for our product. It’s not just for the next features, you can also help improve the latest design you already release.
Using the data for testing, analysis or even prototyping will avoid the mistake you made when designing the products. The less mistake you had when developing your products the better products you have and the better products you have the more user will keep coming back for using the products themselves.
There are 3 easy ways to understand why user research is important. It’s not just to make your products better, it’s also to avoid mistakes when you release new products you have.
