UX research? Why it is so often mentioned? If you work in product design, or you are interested in doing so, this is a concept that you should perfectly understand.

Prepare your Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and let's go to investigate what UX research is, what it is for and how it is carried out.

User research focuses on empathizing with the behaviors, needs and motivators of the user through techniques and methodologies. When carrying out user research methods, the most important thing is that the process must be focused on people and the segmentation of people we are going to study will depend on the problem. The purpose of executing user research is to produce designs that improve their activities and ultimately their entire lives.

UX research is basically the research on a user's experience on our website. That is, its behavior, motivations and needs. When we want to increase a website conversion, research into the user experience is essential. Thanks to this research we will get to know our user better, we will discover what she expects from our website and we will be able to adapt the navigation, the texts and the structure to what the user is expecting. This is especially critical in e-commerce.

The conversion of a business with products with a value from 1 and 100 dollars should be around 3%, for products between 100 and 500 dollars between 1% and 3%. For products over 500 dollars, it is usually around 0.5%. If you are above it, congratulations! If you are below, you should do some research on user experience.

How can you do UX research? These are the main techniques:

- Eye tracking: it consists of tracking the user's gaze and seeing what he reads, what he doesn't read, what he looks at, what he clicks, what word makes him decide to continue reading or click the button to take the product to the shopping basket, etc.

- A / B Testing: It consists of making several copies of different pages of your website and testing which of them converts more users. Google has a tool to carry out this type of test called Google Optimizer and it is free (it used to be called Google Experiments).

- Card sorting: It consists of testing a group of users by giving them a series of cards with the products you want to sell or the different sections of your website. They have to group them by categories and give the category a name.

You will definitely be stunned when you see the differences between your way of organizing things and theirs. This technique will help you define the structure of the website, decide what you will put in the home page and how you should label the navigation categories of your website.

You can also do focus groups, but they are expensive and the results are not the most reliable. There is a technique that also works: use your mother as a beta tester. Yes, your mother!

Your mother will always tell you the truth, she is not a heavy Internet user but she knows how to navigate and since she uses Whatsapp and has registered on Facebook, there is no one to stop her. If your mother doesn't understand what your website is about… your website is wrong.

If your mother can't find your contact information… your website is wrong. If your mom can't make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter, your website is broken. And don't forget to make your mother try the mobile version of your website… if she doesn't understand it, then it's wrong.

When should you apply user research?

You can do this during all 3 stages of website creation:

- During previous research: cart sorting is the ideal place to start.

- Research in the process: the mockups of the website can be tested with eye tracking and thus only the versions that have been best understood by the user go into production.

- Research of real users: when the website is already online, you can do eye tracking and you can do A/B testing… or you let your mother try it.