UX research is a vital part of any online business because it allows you to discover how your users are feeling about your product or service. While many companies base their user research on various methods, they often face repeating challenges that disrupt the process. That’s why, in this article, we’ll elaborate on the 5 most common UX research challenges and how to solve them.
By highlighting some of the most frequent issues you may come across, you’ll be able to easily identify and solve them. Since we understand how frustrating it can be for a challenge to distract you from the main research objectives, we’ll also provide you with the best solution for each instance. Continue reading to discover how to streamline your UX research process with the best solutions for common research challenges.
Before we elaborate on the most common UX research challenges you may face, we first want to explain the use and importance of this research process. The main goal behind this practice is to gather feedback from your users and use it to make data-driven decisions about future improvements. Besides gaining insight into the user experience, you’ll also be able to identify key areas of improvement and pain points, which should always be addressed promptly.
Furthermore, user research can help you create a user-centric design and reduce the risk of product failure. By improving the overall usability of your product, you’ll not only increase your customer satisfaction but also gain a competitive edge.
Regardless of your company’s size, gathering, storing, and analyzing user insights can be a long and complex process. Even if you have a full team of experienced researchers on your side, you may still come across difficulties that may affect the duration and final outcome of the research. To ensure optimal results from your efforts, here are the 5 most common UX research challenges you should familiarize yourself with beforehand and their potential solutions:
The first difficulty you may come across during your UX research is recruiting the right participants. Remember that the feedback you gather is only as qualified as the user who provided you with it. Thus, one of the primary issues you may experience is finding the right users from your target audience.
Depending on the industry you’re in, users with specific demographics, backgrounds, and experiences may benefit you more than others. However, the real difficulty lies in getting access to the users that fit your ideal customer or target group. Even after you’ve found the right participants, you still need to encourage them to provide you with their feedback by taking part in the UX research study. Thus, you’ll need to focus on scheduling the user interviews within specific timeframes and come up with questions that best suit their expertise.
To successfully combat this challenge, there are two main solutions you can try out, each requiring you to define your ideal participant’s criteria beforehand. The first option is to get in touch with users through online participant databases. On the other hand, the second option requires you to manually reach out to users through multiple channels and encourage them to partake in the study with rewards or incentives.
To accelerate this process, User Evaluation allows you to choose between manually inviting participants or choosing the ones that fit your criteria through a designated participant panel. Before launching an interview, you can get access to over 500.000 participants from various backgrounds and levels of expertise who are more than ready to respond to your queries.
Image by tirachardz from Freepik
The second challenge you may come across is slow research progress. As mentioned, UX research takes up a lot of time and requires undivided focus and attention to detail. Since user interviews, usability tests, and observations can be quite long, you may be tempted to skip crucial research steps, leading to inadequate results. If you’re part of a fast-paced industry, this may lead to numerous missed opportunities and prolonged product development.
The best way to accelerate your UX research process is to automate it. In today’s modern age, there are numerous online tools designed to aid in UX research and customer understanding. For example, User Evaluation is an AI-powered platform that allows you to conduct user interviews, store research data, and generate insights all in one place.
With the help of the latest technology, you’ll be able to automate each aspect of the process, from conducting an interview with an AI agent to creating an AI-curated presentation based on all your findings. Instead of spending time manually going through the research process, you can save time by having this platform deal with time-consuming and repetitive tasks.
One of the most common challenges during the UX research process is analyzing the data you’ve gathered. The main reason behind this issue is the large volumes of data required to draw actionable insights. Even if you’ve only conducted a couple of interviews, you still have to go over long transcripts that don’t always display the most important findings. Instead, you may find yourself amongst piles of documents with tons of data you’re yet to interpret.
If you plan on analyzing the gathered data manually, you may miss crucial information that can result in shallow or misinterpreted findings. Not only can this lead to misinformed design decisions, but it may also negatively affect your overall user satisfaction.
Similar to the previous challenge, the best way to address the data analysis struggles is by automating the process. Once again, you can make use of the User Evaluation platform to get AI-generated insights from all your research material. Instead of risking manual errors, you’ll get clear and actionable insights with just one click.
To further optimize this aspect of the user research process, our platform allows you to appoint tags and notes alongside the content source of each insight. By collecting the most valuable findings in an organized Kanban board, you’ll never lose track of your progress. Even if you get stuck during the analysis, you can turn to the multimodal AI chat, which is capable of creating data visualizations and brainstorming ideas based on your customer conversations.
After you’ve analyzed the necessary data, you may come across an issue when communicating the research insights. Even if you understand the main conclusions from the research, you still need to share and explain the findings with your team or clients. Failing to properly communicate the gathered insights properly can lead to costly misunderstandings and confusion. Additionally, it could result in ineffective product changes, hurting your overall user experience.
The best way to combat such research challenges is by crafting concise summaries of your research findings and backing them up with data visualizations. If you’re looking for ways to automate this process, User Evaluation offers AI-generated reports and presentations that summarize all the essential data across your research. All you need to do is type in a prompt to let the AI know which information you want it to focus on and you’ll have a meeting-ready presentation in just a few seconds.
Another common challenge faced by UX researchers is the inability to quickly access previous research data. As part of a UX research team, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to quickly go back to previous research findings. Whether they serve as inspiration or you need to compare them with the latest findings, lacking a centralized knowledge base can lead to duplicate efforts and missed insights. Furthermore, skimming across a large volume of documents can slow down your research process and result in a fragmented understanding of user needs.
If you’re looking for quick access to your previous research data, you should always have a centralized database where you store all your research, such as a research repository. That’s why our User Evaluation platform offers an organized workspace where you can find all your previous research and access specific information through a global search bar. To further accelerate the process, you’re also able to add tags and notes to quickly categorize your data and remind yourself of the previous findings.
After discovering the most common UX research challenges, we also want to give you tips and tricks we’ve gathered throughout the years on how to improve the process. To successfully optimize your UX research, you should try implementing some of the following tactics:
After discovering the 5 most common UX research challenges, we hope this article provides you with the needed guidance to combat them effectively. Even though you may feel as if your research is going slower than expected, remember that you can utilize the latest technology to accelerate the process and prevent potential mistakes. If you’re looking for a singular tool that can help resolve all the common challenges mentioned in this article, try out our User Evaluation platform and experience the power of AI-generated insights firsthand!