10 UX Research Steps to Take When Building a Website or App

To drive sales, your product (and the platform you sell it on) must be attractive to potential customers. Hard-to-use platforms and unappealing site designs that pause consumers should be avoided at all costs. But what seems intuitive to you and your team may not be to the average user.

If you’re building a company website or app, user experience research can help mitigate this problem. Below, her 10 members of the Young Entrepreneur Council explain how to conduct effective UX research and how it can help your business in the long run.

1. Have an audience test your prototype

Start with a minimal viable product (MVP), develop a working prototype, and test it with your target audience. This is the only way to check if it is easy to use, if it solves your problem, if it provides the functionality you are looking for, etc. Give them tasks to complete and let them use the app as they would in their daily lives to see how it actually works, not just how it looks. – Jonathan Pritchard, MattressInsider.com

2. Plan different customer journeys

Before you do anything, you should plan the different types of customers you will serve. B2B and B2C customers focus on very different aspects, and both need to be incorporated into the design. The same is true for average and high-end customers. Knowing who these groups are makes planning the customer journey much easier. – Karl Kangur, Above House

3. Use heat maps

Heat maps are a great way to understand how users interact with your website or app and where they click. This insight can help you modify your website layout and design to encourage interaction. Tools like Crazy Egg can be used to see which features users prefer and whether a particular color layout translates better. We also need to track page views and time spent on pages to better understand user behavior. —Brian David Crane, Spread Great Ideas

4. Conducting surveys and interviews

One key piece of advice is to use surveys and interviews to collect data from your target audience. You should do this before you start building your app so that you weave the needs of your target market into your app or site before you do anything. This ensures that you don’t have to rework parts of your app later, and that you’re creating exactly what your target market wants. – Syed Balkhi, WP Beginner

5. Ask open-ended questions

My advice for conducting effective user experience research is to use open-ended questions. This allows your target audience to more freely share their experiences and provide valuable insights, so you can improve her UX of your website or app. User experience is a qualitative metric, so leave the canvas blank for user input. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Form

6. Test your site on multiple devices

When testing the user experience of your website or mobile app, we recommend using multiple devices and platforms to make sure everything looks good and works smoothly. For example, you don’t want to alienate part of your audience by creating an app that works like a dream on Android devices but fundamentally doesn’t work on iPhones. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC

7. Empathize with your users

Empathy is a “no-nonsense” approach. This puts you in the user’s shoes. You can understand other people’s motives. Empathizing with users allows researchers to better understand their needs and desires, which helps them create better digital products and services. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day

8. Define your research goals

In order to conduct effective research, it is important to first clarify the purpose of the research. If this is not done correctly, the research will be expensive, time consuming and inconclusive. Goals largely determine the stage, and therefore the type of research to be conducted (eg, discovery, divergence, idea iteration, etc.). This will help you come up with appropriate discussion guides and activities for your research.- Vinay Indresh, Spacejoy

9. Launch in stages

User experience is perhaps the most important aspect of any website or app. No viewers, no sales, no traffic. We encourage you to launch your site or app in phases so that you can make incremental changes to meet your readers’ needs. After each stage, send a survey to your email subscribers and include an on-page survey so you can gather actionable feedback. – John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC

10. Run an A/B test

Improve your UX research with A/B testing. This gives you a richer insight into user preferences. During testing, she simply presents her two slightly different prototypes to the customer and asks them what the pros and cons of each option are. – Wholesale Suite, Josh Kohlbach