You might have noticed that throughout our blogs, we often talk about the importance of research and development. Particularly in regard to an effective web design, and user experience. Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design and web marketing professionals. And we work with companies across the region, from Southport to Wigan, and everywhere in between, delivering high quality and effective web design solutions. Based on our research and industry knowledge. As a result, we thought we would bring you a tried and tested research cycle, that ties up your research and findings, with tangible development options. This is our simple user research cycle, for web design success.
Why is user research so important?
Understanding the user experience, in relation to your web design choices, can help your company to make improvements and adjustments for the future. But by using relevant research, and straightforward research steps, you could get your web design right, the first time. This would save time and money by preventing your company from needing to make any unplanned adjustments further down the line. And it can also help to ensure that your potential customers have a more positive experience with your website. Which in turn, can increase sales and conversions. Helping your business, and your website to grow.
When to start your research?
So when should you begin your research? Well, the key thing is to start your research right at the start of the web design project. That way you can be sure to get off to a good start, with a solid understanding of the key problems and potential issues for customers online.
However, your research should be a cycle that continues throughout your entire development process. This is because you will need to constantly analyse and evaluate decisions that change and transform your web design. And you need to stay on the right path by adhering to your research results.
A simple user research cycle for web design success
So how does this research cycle work? And what are the steps? Well, it’s actually fairly straightforward:
- Stage 1 is about discovery
- Stage 2 is about exploration
- Stage 3 looks at testing
- Stage 4 runs throughout the cycle, and is about listening
Discovering
The first stage is about discovering what your project lacks, or is missing. Try asking these, or similar, questions:
- What is missing from the web design?
- Does our web design meet the users micro-moments?
- Does our website solve users problems?
- Does our website meet user requirements?
Exploration
Once you have discovered the problems or issues with your web design, you can begin to explore ways to correct these. This is stage 2, the exploration process. First of all you need to understand the scope, the size, and the scale of the problem. And then you can begin to look at ways to resolve the issue, including:
- looking at ways your competitors have resolved similar issues
- developing user persona’s to help understand the website users point of view more fully
- reading relevant studies and articles to shed light on key issues
Once you have fully explored the issues, and have developed a strategy to overcome these, you can consider implementing your solutions.
Testing
The third stage is testing. And it generally speaks for itself. This is the stage where you put your strategies into action and test them thoroughly. If you have resolved the issue, you should notice a difference in your traffic, sales or engagement, depending on what you were aiming to achieve.
Listening
The final stage is listening. This should be something that you do throughout your research cycle. It involves gathering data and monitoring all the information related to your website, so that you can see how effective your strategies are, and the results of any testing you do.
For more advice or professional web design support, get in touch with the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.