Sharpening Your Competitive Edge with UX Research by Rebecca Flavin.
From the post:
It’s part of our daily work. We can’t imagine creating a product or an application without doing it: understanding the user.
Most of the clients we work with at EffectiveUI already have a good understanding of their customers from a market point of view. They know their target demographics and often have an solid sense of psychographics: their customers’ interests, media habits, and lifestyles.
This is all great information that is critical to a company’s success, but what about learning more about a customer than his or her age, gender, interests, and market segment? What about understanding the customer from a UX perspective?
Not all companies take the time to thoroughly understand exactly why, how, when, and where their customers interact with their brand’s, products and digital properties, as well as those of competing products and services. What are the influences, distractions, desires, and emotions that affect users as they try to purchase or engage with your product or interact with your service?
At EffectiveUI, we’ve seen that user research can be a powerful and invaluable tool for aiding strategic business decisions, identifying market opportunities, and ultimately driving better organizational results. When we’re talking to customers about a digital experience, we frequently uncover opportunities for their business as a whole to shift its strategic direction. Sometimes we even find out that the company has completely missed an opportunity with their customers.
As part of the holistic UX process, user research helps us learn more about customers’ pain points, needs, desires, and goals in order to inform digital design or product direction. The methods we generally employ include:
Great post that merits your attention!
What I continue to puzzle over is how to develop user testing for topic map interfaces?
The broad strokes of user testing are fairly well known, but how to implement those for topic map interfaces isn’t clear.
On one hand, a topic map could present its content much as any other web interface.
On the other hand, a topic map could present a “topicmappish” flavor interface.
And there are all the cases in between.
If it doesn’t involve trade secrets, can anyone comment on how they have tested topic map interfaces?