What is User & Design Research – Maya Studios UX Design & Development Inc.

Understanding your customers is the foundation of successful product development. Through rigorous user research, we uncover target audience’s hidden needs, preferences, and behaviors.

At Maya Studios, our research methodologies adapt to your project’s specific goals, whether you’re in the early stages of ideation or refining an existing product. We utilize a mix of research methods and combine quantitative and qualitative research techniques to gain a comprehensive understanding of your target audience.

By creating detailed customer journey maps, we identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Our insights empower you to make data-driven decisions that enhance user experience and drive business growth.

Benefits

Making data-driven decisions
Testing and validating concepts
Reducing cognitive process in the UX design process
Working on solutions that bring real value to customers
Promoting your products both internally and externally

Our Services

Face-to-face Interviews
Focus group interviews
Surveys
Designing questionnaires
A/B Testing
Usability Testing
Card Sorting
Field Study

This is how Maya Studios can help your business

Our Process

Milestones

Face-to-face interviews with stakeholders and end-users

Feature prioritization and Project definition

Contextual inquiry

Competitive analysis

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is UX Research expensive?

On the contrary UX research saves money and resources for the company. By identifying the user’s pain points and motivations even before the product/service is designed as well as by accessing new products and features while the product/service is being designed, critical improvements can be made saving considerable time and effort.

I am the owner of the company and I know what my target audience needs. Do I still need UX Research?

The target audience of any product/service never remains stagnant. With time, exposure and technological advancements, the user’s motivations and needs keep evolving. It is essential for companies to regularly conduct both qualitative and quantitative research so that they dont land in a situation where they have spent time, money and efforts into designing a faulty product or one that their users have no need for because the company didn’t validate their assumptions before starting the design process.

How long does UX Research take?

UX Research varies based on the area of inquiry, budget and the type of research i.e. primary or secondary research. Within a UX research project, analysis usually takes maximum time followed by recruitment, delivery, fieldwork and design. It is critical to give enough time to UX Research irrespective of the nature of the research as lack of enough time may result in the failure to fully mine and translate valuable research insights.

Can UX research tell me why my business is not doing well?

The objective of UX research is to uncover motivations and needs behind the user using (or not using) a product/service. Companies that conduct research early on have a much higher chance of understanding their target audience and designing products that are in alignment. Companies also like to keep a separate budget for conducting research during the design process to test the efficacy of newly designed features. The constant and regular research and testing help in identifying areas of breakdown as well as areas of improvement at every stage. This not only guarantees a successful end product but also saves the company a lot of time, money and effort wasted in the absence of research.

What are the disadvantages of skipping UX research?

UX Research aims at understanding what the user needs and their pain points. In the absence of properly conducted UX research, the company will work on assumptions and most likely come up with a product/service that is not aligned with the user’s expectations.
Most importantly, UX Research helps in finding relevant data. And data is money. When a company decides to skip UX research, it jeopardizes a well-designed product/service for something crappy and of no use to the target audience.

How is UX research different from market research?

Market Research focuses on assessing the market landscape, competitors’ trends and customer trends. Market research gives insights into making strategic business decisions including discovering customer preferences, uncovering market trends, identifying business opportunities and conducting competitive analysis.

On the other hand, User Research is the study of the user’s behaviour, needs, desires and pain points. This helps in guiding the design process to keep it aligned with customer’s expectations and improving product experience and usability. User research helps make tactical design decisions like increased user satisfaction, informing product development, promoting decision-making that prioritizes users, identifying user’s pain points and increasing ROI.

What are the primary cost components when commissioning research?

Costing of UX research varies depending on multiple factors such as the company’s goals, objectives, area of inquiry and services that could be included like unmoderated usability testing, heuristic analysis and one-on-one usability tests.
One-on-one interviews are usually the most expensive, however, they can give the best insights into the user’s behaviour and mindset. Heuristic analysis relies on the expert’s knowledge and expertise that the company hires and can be moderately priced. Usability research, which can be done in several ways, can give quick insights into which direction to take for a product/service and is effective at giving feedback particularly for design iterations. Usability research is most effective for limited budgets and short time frames but not the best for acquiring the deepest user insights.

How to determine the success of UX Research?

UX Research works on unveiling user behaviour and needs to understand what direction to take for creating a new solution or assessing the viability of a new product/service and its multiple features. In that sense, UX Research gives data as its outcome. Data cannot have success metrics, but the way insights from a set of data are executed can be evaluated based on their impact.
However, UX research, if looked at as a task can be measured in the following ways:
Task success rate
Time on task
User error rate
System Usability Scale (SUS)
Completing tasks within pre-decided budget