In my last post, I discussed why you should conduct lean UX research in order to induce great user experience through Agile development process.
Here, I’ll explain how to conduct lean UX research in dealing with the tremendous timeline and planning pressure posed by the Agile process — that requires you to be creative and leverage alternative user research methods. Let me go through them one by one.
Conduct UX research to complement A/B tests
Given that a big part of the Agile process is test-and-learn – test here typically refers to A/B testing – we can conduct UX research to complement A/B testing. A typical way to do this is to conduct a usability study on the different variations currently being A/B tested. Given that the product is already live with the different variations, it’s very easy for us to test the product, as there’s no need to do prototyping or wireframing in preparing for the usability study.
Conducted in conjunction with A/B testing, the usability study can tell us “why” one variation is better than the other, and if a better solution outside of the variations tested exist.
Case study:
At one point I was asked to conduct a usability study to evaluate the variations of a live-site A/B test in order to encourage users’ shopping behavior. Whereas the A/B test gave us some early indication of which design would fare better, I used the usability study to provide in-depth UI and content recommendations, pointing out solutions that exist outside of the four variations A/B tested. End result: combining insight from the UX research with data from the A/B test, I helped the client create an experience in which users were much more likely to go through the shopping flow, and we saw a truly dramatic lift in revenue as a result.
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