Continuously Evaluating the User Experience
Developing and enhancing the user experience through research is key to informing product and business decisions. Trends like virtual and augmented reality, AI and machine learning and voice assistants will no doubt influence user experience engagement and digital design in the future.
UX247, in its blog “UX Research Trends for 2024,” outlines several other key trends impacting the UX research field:
- Micro-interactions: Micro-interactions are the small, subtle elements and animations that make digital interactions more fun, appealing, and informative while giving users feedback for their efforts.
- Sustainability: UX professionals should be searching out eco-friendly, responsible design choices. Can we enable designers to reduce their products’ carbon footprints by optimizing energy usage and reducing digital waste?
- Personalization: Everywhere you turn online, you see personalized ads, content, and suggestions based on the information all those clever cookies and other trackers gather. Despite first glances into personalization appearing to benefit the user (and they do), the real benefits are to the providers and advertisers, reaching far more potential customers and engaging users with their products.
- Research repositories: With budgets getting squeezed, accessing or revisiting existing data will play a big part in recycling resources to understand users’ behaviors instead of funding further exploration. Research repositories are libraries of all the data you’ve acquired already, centralized in one place.
- Democratization: More operations are utilizing non-professional researchers to conduct suitable studies, leaving the critical work in the hands of qualified UX researchers. It allows stakeholders, product managers, and their teams to cover more research more economically.
- AI: Expect to see more automated processes, productivity, segmentation, visualizations, and personalized experiences, improved data collection, speech, emotion, sentiment, and contextual analysis.
- Continuous research: UX designers know the product launch isn’t the end of the UX journey. The market, their users, and their business needs are constantly evolving, requiring their UX research to evolve with them. That means more user testing and more qualitative and quantitative research to deliver constant user satisfaction to match their business strategy.
Designing With Awareness
In “Attention Metrics: User Engagement,” All Things Insights’ Seth Adler caught up with Aarti Bhaskaran, Global Head of Ad Research & Insights, Snap Inc., at the Media Insights & Engagement Conference in 2023. Bhaskaran, who held a session, “The Battle for Attention: How to Plan for Maximizing Attention Among Audiences and Ad Formats,” at the event, discusses through the lens of Snapchat the social media user, engaging with the audience and other platform initiatives.
Looking forward to The Media Insights & Engagement Conference? It will be held February 3-5, 2025, at The Scott Resort & Spa, Scottsdale, AZ. The keynote, “Designing with Awareness: Netflix’s User Research Approach,” will be presented by Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer, Global Conversion & Monetization at Netflix. Discover how Netflix’s Growth team uses data-driven strategies and innovative research to enhance user engagement and drive business success. Learn from real-world case studies and gain practical insights for user-centric design.
Register for the Media Insights & Engagement Conference
10 Trends in User Research
User research is always evolving and presenting itself with challenges and opportunities in the shifting media and entertainment landscape. We asked Gemini to identify some of the top trends in user research.
- Increased focus on diversity and inclusion in research: Ensuring that research participants represent a diverse range of users.
- Rise of remote and asynchronous research methods: Leveraging online tools and techniques to conduct research more efficiently.
- Growing popularity of qualitative research methods: Delving deeper into user motivations and behaviors through interviews, focus groups, and ethnography.
- Integration of AI and machine learning in research: Using AI to analyze large datasets and identify patterns in user behavior.
- Emphasis on user experience research: Focusing on understanding the emotional and cognitive aspects of user interactions.
- Shift towards continuous research and testing: Conducting research throughout the product development lifecycle to gather ongoing feedback.
- Increased use of mobile and wearable device research: Studying user behavior in real-world contexts.
- Growing importance of ethical considerations in research: Ensuring that research is conducted responsibly and respects user privacy.
- Collaboration between research and design teams: Fostering stronger partnerships to create more user-centered products.
- Adoption of agile research methodologies: Incorporating research into iterative development processes.
Staying Ahead of Content Creators
The media and entertainment world is expanding in myriad ways as consumers consume and engage with content ever faster. Yet user engagement will continue to drive product success. While the introduction of AI and other new technologies has streamlined processes, high-quality, authentic research is still of paramount importance to discern user experience insights. UX researchers will have to stay ahead of the curve and continuously adapt to emerging trends as the media and entertainment industry charts its future course.
Video courtesy of Maze
Contributor
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Matthew Kramer is the Digital Editor for All Things Insights & All Things Innovation. He has over 20 years of experience working in publishing and media companies, on a variety of business-to-business publications, websites and trade shows.
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