Author: Alexandra Karabatos, Lauren Sumer
UX research is becoming more and more important at Kinaxis, what is it and why is it so important?
UX research allows you to get to know your users better and understand their needs, desires and behaviors. This deep understanding of the user allows us to inform actionable product enhancements and guide product decisions that center the user’s needs in order to improve the overall product experience. .
what we do
We conduct research at all stages of product development, design and development, and post-release.
early discovery stage
Before the design process begins, sometimes before a clear idea is formulated, we conduct research to help the product team better understand the problem areas they plan to address. Use a variety of methods, such as interviews and concept testing, to find out how your users work, what problems they face, and how valuable early-stage concepts are to them.
Design and development stage
Once the UX design team has prepared a feature sketch or prototype, they are often called in to validate the design with real users. Use A/B testing, research, and usability testing to see if users understand your design, and how to adapt your design to make it more familiar, useful, and easy to use before you start development Gather insights on what to do.
Post-release stage
Track how customers use our products by conducting in-app surveys and interviewing users to examine the value and usability of various features and identify opportunities to improve them; increase.
what we do
One of the most exciting parts of what we do is determining how to find answers to user and product questions. We love to be creative in the methods we use to ensure that our approach is the best fit for the problem at hand and provides valid and authoritative insights. Our go-to method includes surveys, interviews, usability testing, A/B testing, first-click testing, concept testing, and more.
We use a variety of tools, including Alchemer, GainsightPX, Tremendous, Figma, and Miro, for research and stakeholder communication.
who to work with
UX Research works closely with other Kinaxis groups to align with broader product goals and ensure the best use of research findings. By participating in the Kinaxis community, we can better support you in making product and design decisions that meet your needs.
UX designer
UX research is closely tied to UX design. At any stage of the design process, we are asked to perform usability tests to validate our prototypes. This allows designers to get early feedback on their designs and determine what changes need to be made before development.
product manager
We work closely with product managers to gather questions about user needs, pain points, and high-level conceptual feedback so that we can develop surveys that explore these questions. Findings drawn from our research will influence product roadmaps and help product managers make evidence-backed decisions about which enhancements to prioritize and how to approach these projects. let me put it down.
Developer
We communicate feedback to developers and build empathy for the user experience. We also closely track our development process so that we can track and research how our customers are using our recently released features.
Documentation team
Finally, work with the documentation team to help create onboarding materials, ensure design text matches the documentation, and share feedback on the content created.
We are always improving… Stay tuned!
So what’s next for us? We are always looking for ways to increase the maturity of UX research at Kinaxis. This will allow us to expand our methods for leveraging user insights and continue to develop even more powerful processes. We plan to increase our involvement in the early stages of product development and partner with other product teams. We are also exploring new research tools that will enable us to conduct larger, more ambitious studies that will have a significant impact on Kinaxis’ product mix.
Additionally, we continue to build a UX research community with customers and partners interested in sharing thoughts and increasing awareness of the ROI of UX research across Kinaxis.
For more information on the Kinaxis user experience, please visit https://www.kinaxis.com/en/user-experience.
author:
Alexandra Karabatos
Intern Researcher, User Experience
As a UX researcher, Alexandra Karabatsos conducts research with users to inform product decisions and develop strategies to continuously improve the research process. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Ottawa.
Lauren Smale
Contributing UX Researcher
Lauren Smail is a user experience researcher. She has been with Kinaxis for nearly two years and has led various UX research projects throughout the design and development cycle of the RapidResponse solution.
