Providing a good user experience (UX) is crucial for any successful product or service. It's essential to understand who your users are and what their needs are, or you might risk making something no-one will even use or need which could be fatal. 7 reasons for hiring a UX research consultancy like ours 1. Expertise and experience A primary reason to hire an agency is the depth of expertise you’ll have access to. Our UX researchers are well-versed in user behaviour, accessibility, and usability. They design studies that offer insights, ensuring that products are not only user-friendly but also ..read more

Paper-prototyping is a technique many are familiar with, but few get the chance to use. I first tried this technique in a training course 8 years ago and only recently did I get to use it in the real world.  Why has it taken me so long to use this method?  Apart from a 2 year global pandemic severely restricting in-person research, digital prototyping tools are everywhere. They make our lives easy and they’re perfect if you want to quickly visualise an idea and get feedback on it. It’s so easy to create realistic and interactive prototypes that a lot of UX designers will overlook th ..read more

Photo by Mohamed Boumaiza https://unsplash.com/@mbuiux Thinking about using metrics in your usability testing? Metrics can be great when used at the right time, but they’re not always appropriate.  What do we mean by metrics? Metrics are measurements that can give numerical scores to aspects of a product’s performance. Numerical scores make it easier to quantify and compare different sets of data that would otherwise be qualitative.  Things to consider before using metrics in your testing Gathering metrics can increase costs through longer analysis times, use of unique tools and a n ..read more

Aimee recently joined the team as a Junior UX Researcher and we’re very happy to have her. We caught up with her to find out a bit more about her! Where are you from? I am from a small town 20 minutes east of Glasgow called Coatbridge. I really love it as it’s close to Glasgow and there are plenty of trains and buses which take you all over Scotland. All my family are from Coatbridge which is really nice, so if I need anything at all I am minutes away from them and I get to spend time with them often. What were you doing before you joined UserLab? Living my best life as a student teacher at t ..read more

As user researchers, we shouldn’t assume anything. But sometimes it helps to theorise about people’s behaviours in the very early stages of a project - specifically, during the planning phase of participant recruitment. By anticipating people’s behaviours and context, we can design a recruitment strategy that is more relevant and engaging to the people we want to include in our research. We can also ensure our recruitment adverts and messages are posted where users are more likely to see them. On a recent project we did for Diabetes UK, we wanted to understand more about our audience before la ..read more

Usability testing is all about getting insights on the functionality of a website, app or product from the people who use it. Testing involves asking users to complete tasks using the product and measuring both how successful they are and their feelings about the experience. This process helps us to understand things from the perspective of the people we make things for! Seems like a no brainer, right? Make sure you test with humans! User testing or usability testing? The proper name is Usability Testing but you may have heard of it as user testing. User testing is a bit of a misnomer, we are ..read more

Doing any kind of user research is a good thing but if you don't mix things up regularly, you'll become blinkered. We often repeat the same things in our lives and work wether out of laziness, habit, or simply because we lack the confidence to try something new. Although this behaviour may not be massively detrimental in our personal lives, doing the same kind of user research day in, day out will seriously limit your view of the landscape and the quality of insights you collect. I’ve witnessed many product teams doing the same old usability testing sprint after sprint, constantly refining int ..read more

Whether you’re a team of one, or you’re doing user research for a large organisation, planning is a fundamental part of the user research process. Communication is the key to any successful UX research strategy and this technique is a really simple and effective way of communicating and planning your user research activities with your team and stakeholders. Why you should use this: It’s faster than writing a document It will increase team engagement Anyone can use it with no training needed It’s quick and customisable to your needs You can use any tool you like to make it, including ..read more

Photo by https://unsplash.com/@will_myers Focus groups can seem like a quick and easy way to get a lot of insights in a short amount of time. You invite a group of people to a conference room, ask them some questions or ask them to give some feedback on your product. The problem with using focus groups is that they can lead to subjective and shallow outcomes. There may be participants in the group that are the loudest and influence everyone else’s opinion and more importantly, people don’t always tell the truth in a group setting. If you discuss sensitive topics, you run the risk of people no ..read more

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, bigger video conferencing tools have been updated, a few lesser known have surged in popularity, and there has been an increased interest in finding the right video conferencing tool for our needs. When it comes to choosing a tool for moderating remote research, we usually choose a tool that works best for our teams and we don’t always consider the impact our choices have on our participants. We’ve been running our remote research sessions mainly using a combination of Google Meet and Skype and we were curious to see how other tools performed in this ..read more