User research and testing helps us understand user behaviors, needs, and motivations and creates a better experience for the user.
There are five categories of testing:
- Readability
- Accessibility
- Searchability
- Navigability
- Usability
The results you get from the testing within these categories can be either qualitative or quantitative.
Qualitative research
- Research that asks users to rate their degrees of feeling or opinion — agreeing or disagreeing with a statement, or how likely they are to use a product.
- Helps us understand why users perform certain actions and often requires interviews with open-ended questioning, like asking why something is easy or difficult to use.
- Qualitative methods are better suited for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem.
Quantitative research
- Research that is measured numerically and answers questions like “how many people could find the call to action” or “what percentage of users made a particular error?”
- Quantitative research is valuable in understanding statistical likelihood and, similar to data analytics, what is happening on a site.
- Analytics offers certain insights into the qualitative data around a site.
Results from both types of research can prove or disprove assumptions and find commonalities across target audiences. Every UX project is different and could require one or many different ways to test your content to answer the assumptions in question. Some of the most popular forms of research are usability tests.
Does your program office want to perform user testing? Email the Digital Comms Team to set up an initial chat!