UX Research

Increasing the value of products through user research methods & insights

What is UX Research?

UX research is a vital part of the product design process to evaluate how well your product solves problems for your target users, and addresses their pain points. It helps you to understand your audience and create better products for them as you develop a new product, improve an existing product, or measure how well a product is performing once in-market.

There are many types of UX research tools and methods, from user interviews & usability testing to field studies & questionnaires. These types of qualitative and quantitative research help you to better understand real users needs, as well as how effective your product or service is in addressing them.

By diving deeply into how users interact with a product or experience through user experience research, Highland can help you validate (or invalidate) assumptions throughout the design process.

How is UX Research Valuable?

Create Feedback Loops

Conducting UX research helps to create an ongoing feedback loop between your users and your product or experience. These feedback loops are a direct look at goals and mental models of end-users that allow you to:

  • Understand the needs and behaviors of your target audience so you can create a better experience for them

  • Gain valuable insight into where your competition stands in terms of usability and design

  • Inform design decisions that make sure your product or experience is relevant to your end-users lives

  • Stay up to date with the latest trends, technology, and user expectations to help identify product requirements

Reduce Uncertainty

User experience design and research is all centered around finding the right insights to inform your design and strategy. Before you begin product development, UX research methods help reduce risk and align business goals with user needs. Highland can help you:

  • Conduct usability testing to ensure that your product is aligned with user needs, and demonstrated behaviors

  • Prioritize features that are most accessible, desirable, and valuable to your target audience

  • Make informed, objective decisions when choosing the direction of product development and underlying strategy

Evaluate Design & Product Effectiveness

Through design research, you are able to evaluate the effectiveness of your design before, during, and after launch. Throughout the UX research process, you’ll be able to:

  • Uncover issues with designs and pinpoint product opportunities that are better aligned with user behavior

  • Optimize prototypes, concepts and features based on user feedback and research findings

  • Encourage growth & support retention with existing customers and stakeholders by continuously learning to improve your product, and the experience they have with it

How we do it

All of our research methods relate to whether or not the user’s context is accessible to us and the length of the behavior that we are interested in observing–short or prolonged.

UX Research lives predominantly in the evaluative space. Depending on the prototype or idea that needs to be tested, research methods can range from qualitative to quantitative, as well as measurement of experience at a given moment or across the entire journey.

"We wouldn’t be achieving our business goals without Highland. Everyone on their team was very clear on what we set out to do. We worked with an incredibly high-caliber group."

- Jill Cole Mesaros, Director of Membership at Thrivent Financial

How can we help?