Qualitative and quantitative analyses, such as group studies, expert audits and heuristic evaluations, should be regularly used in all digital product projects.
The combination of both types of research enables an in-depth and multi-dimensional understanding of the needs of end users, for example customers in an online store, in a more credible and reliable way.
This allows you to create solutions that better meet the needs of end users. Additionally, it allows you to tailor the designs of websites or mobile applications to their specific preferences, identified as a result of the research.
In practice, quantitative and qualitative research should be treated as complementary, not competing.
The differences between qualitative and quantitative research are basic. Qualitative research helps answer questions such as: Why? How? When? Where? Meanwhile, quantitative research focuses on answering questions about frequency and quantity, such as: How often? How much?
Sometimes it seems that in the area of User Experience problems, qualitative research is a more appropriate tool.
Issues of quality of experience, problems with usability - these are the aspects that can be more easily captured using qualitative methods, such as user impressions, opinions, emotions or behavior.
See also what personas are and how to create them
What is the value of quantitative research in research, design or optimization processes? How can quantitative methods be used in the field of User Experience?
Today we will focus on the issue of quantitative research in the area of UX. They are a valuable complement to qualitative research, so it is worth understanding their importance.
This research allows for a comprehensive, multi-faceted view of usability problems. They show us the scope of these problems and their degree of severity.
table of contents:
The goal of quantitative research is to focus on explicit measurement of the phenomena under study. Primarily used in the social sciences and marketing fields, this research seeks to answer one simple question: "How much."
Quantitative research can also answer other questions, which can be both open-ended and sometimes closed-ended, depending on the structure of the questionnaire. These questions may cover aspects of "What?" or "When?" These studies are used to analyze a given phenomenon in a population or in a larger group of people studied using a group interview.
The main goal of quantitative methods is:
Quantitative research involves analyzing data using statistical or mathematical methods.
Their use is wide - they enable obtaining information about the brand image, customer profile, consumer behavior and their reaction to products or services (as part of marketing research). In this research, we focus on specific information about the situation, but our results apply to the entire population, not individual cases.
See our offer:
Such research can be carried out using various methods, such as:
Check also:
It is obvious that in the quantitative method the key questions are "What?", "When?", "How?" and how much?". When analyzing data on a larger scale, researchers may wonder about:
Quantitative research seeks to understand the attitudes, views and actions of specific groups of people.
One important issue with quantitative research is its limited ability to account for small subtleties or details that may influence results.
Common mistakes in quantitative research include ill-considered questions, inappropriate tools, lack of proper preparation, and results that may be unreliable.