Business owners must oversee many aspects, which can often be overwhelming and burdensome. However, ignoring such aspects could lead to a decline in your revenues or profits. For instance, conducting market research is one critical task that you should assign to the marketing department. This is the best strategy to look at your overall business landscape.
By studying the market and conducting user experience (UX) tests, you’ll be able to find out how your target market perceives your products and brand. This allows you to modify necessary changes to improve your business. This is also a great way to check and assess your current market and see what influences their purchasing decisions.
Consider this guide for running market research and setting up UX tests.
Prepare Surveys
Nowadays, marketers leverage using online surveys to understand their target audience better. This is why it has always been an effective medium for market research. You can use a survey to gather information from your users on a particular topic by asking them questions. They can be done in different styles and formats, and you can run them in various lengths, depending on what suits your market.
Many people are willing to answer your surveys for a fee. For starters, you can check out the best survey sites, as these normally provide surveys to those who want extra income. As data is collected from surveys, it is generally analyzed by the tool used, which can inform further user experience studies.
Online surveys provide companies with easy access to a broad audience at no charge or for a low cost. There are diverse ways to spread your survey forms. You can partner with survey platforms, incorporate these forms into your email or short message services (SMS) marketing campaign, and so on. Additionally, surveys enable you to discover who your users are, what they want, and what information they need.
Users’ words and actions are often different, producing inaccurate results. Therefore, you shouldn’t entirely depend on this marketing research medium. Partnering with other strategies to acquire accurate feedback would be ideal.
Some other factors that can lead to inaccuracy are your choice of questions and words used in the survey. These can negatively impact their response and answers. Taking long surveys can also be a problem, as many people dislike them. Therefore, users are more likely to complete short surveys and contribute to future research.
Consider the following tips when designing your surveys:
- Stick To Simplicity: It’s best to avoid using ambiguous or complex words in your questions, as this can make it more difficult for people to understand the data. Moreover, you can make your questions and choice of words simpler as they’re easier to understand.
- Keep It Brief: As much as possible, hand out shorter surveys, particularly if participants receive little or no compensation. In this case, you should include the most information questions only, which can produce valuable data for your business.
- Diversify Your Question Types: Aside from focusing on open-ended questions, it’s ideal to use multiple-choice questions so your participants won’t get perplexed or bored in answering them.
It’s best to keep surveys concise considering that some people may have shorter than 10-minute breaking points before they start to lose attention.
Hold Interviews
UX tests and market research can be done through direct interviews. This can be done either face-to-face or through virtual apps. This allows your marketing team to observe other variables that otherwise may not be available when you just hand out surveys to answer. For instance, you can study and observe the participant’s body language. This is one aspect that can provide you more insights into what they truly think about your products or business.
Interviews are useful in creating buyer personas. You simply ask them questions about themselves which are related to what they do for a living, their age, where they work, their budget, and so on. This buyer profile can shape your entire marketing strategy, from your product’s features to your website’s content. Understanding your overall business performance through interviews can help your business through a slump.
Conduct Focus Group Discussions
Focus group discussions are another way to gather feedback from your target market and leverage it to enhance your products and services. Sometimes this strategy is referred to as a focus group. Unlike interviews, this marketing strategy involves segregating a few participants who will be interviewed based on the market or group that they represent.
An interview reveals a target audience’s desires, experiences, and attitudes quickly and inexpensively. If a company needs a lot of insight quickly, user groups can be useful for user experience research. This strategy is easy to implement and produces effective results. Moreover, they assist in generating future ideas for what users want to see.
Because people often say different things than they do, user groups don’t provide an accurate picture of behavior. As mentioned, you shouldn’t entirely depend on one marketing strategy to understand or study your market. It’s always best to pair it with others.
Users can influence each other’s opinions and preferences in user groups because the interviews are usually done through a group discussion. That said, you may apply the following:
- Be Familiar Of User Group Discussion Steps: The first step is to find participants and gather them. Include your marketing team and delegate roles such as the interviewer, note-taker, and moderator. Moreover, plan your questions and decide how long the discussion will last. You can also determine how many people and groups should be tested.
Next, develop three to five discussion topics for your discussion guide. Recruiting users who are likely to provide good, existing, or potential feedback would be best. Then record any data as you gather them and avoid the pitfalls of executing effective focus groups.
- Ask Relevant And Important Questions: No matter how short or long your discussions are, always be mindful of the questions you want to ask. They should be open-ended, clear, and easy to understand. Additionally, questions should stay relevant to your topic.
- Diversify Topics: As stated, about three topics are ideal for discussions. This allows you to cover many concerns and issues about your products or services. Manage your time well so these topics will be discussed throughout the interview.
- Decide On The Number Of Participants: Ideally, a focus group should consist of three to seven users, so everyone has a chance to speak. This is the correct number of participants that is not too small or too large so that the discussion can be more fruitful and organized.
These suggestions can help improve your interview results and outcomes.
Create User Personas
This next market research strategy is to create user personas. The personas you create should be based on user research and include information about what your target audience needs, wants, and behaves like. A successful product requires an understanding of your users’ needs. It can be easier for you to identify and communicate the needs of your users once you have well-defined personas.
Your overall value proposition will also be enhanced if you use personas to describe the individuals using your product. This strategy can be done in different ways. Below are some tips you can apply when creating your user persona.
- Make Them Short And Concise: Details are good, but overdosing on them won’t do good for your business anymore. Unless it makes decisions easier or affects the final design, it would be practical not to include such details.
- Make Them Well-Defined: User personas should include relevant information and data such as the name of customers, company information, pain points, demographics, personal story, and challenges. There are ways to acquire them successfully.
- Make Them Realistic: Personas are fictional, but you should make them as realistic as possible. Make them close to real-life characters.
Remember that making user personas would require more money, depending on how in-depth or detailed your research will be.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Marketers shouldn’t overlook the importance of studying the competition. You can deeply understand your market and industry through competitive analyses. In fact, the results you generate on this analysis can impact how you can make your UX tests.
In addition to learning what’s working well in your industry, you can gain insights into what your target audience is looking for in similar products. Your competitors might already offer these factors and variables; in such cases, you may need to outdo or offer better than theirs.
Plan Your Usability Testing
Usability testing requires consistency from start to finish. Unfortunately, some marketers fail to do this. For example, somewhere in the middle, they might feel that the process is not fit with the results that they want to achieve. This would mean they need to restart the test all over again, leading to a waste of resources.
In order to prevent it, you should plan your usability testing carefully. Undoubtedly, the usability test plan is one of the most important steps in the whole process. You should define your goals clearly at this stage. Decide if you want to focus more on qualitative or quantitative data and whether the participants can test out your prototype products.
Limiting your goals will help you get clear, concise, and specific results. Defining your test’s scope is the next step. Furthermore, include relevant questions that will help you understand which product features the participants love most and which need improvement.
Conclusion
Adaptability is crucial, given how rapidly markets are evolving. Market research and UX tests are essential strategies that you should never lose sight of. Most businesses struggle to know how to leverage such a strategy. Hopefully, this guide can assist you with how to run market research and UX tests effectively.
