What is UX research?
The days when businesses were only using UX as a primary concern for designers aren’t around anymore. Instead, UX design aims to provide users with the right experience when interacting with your product or service.
For that reason, user experience design is becoming a priority for most social media marketers because these interactions can happen anywhere, especially on social media.
Social media channels are becoming widely used and leaving a good first impression when interacting with your product is important. So let’s dive deeper into this article to learn more about how UX and social media work together.
How does social media aid UX research?
When you conduct UX research, it’s much easier for you to give answers to users because you are discovering what their needs are. UX research can be used during any stage of the design process. However, UX researchers often begin with qualitative measures and identifying users’ needs and motivations.
Anyhow, to be successful in gathering data, you need to be well prepared and structured. Therefore, these methods are important for gathering enough data for your research and clarifying many question marks while conducting UX research.
Social media and UX are similar in different ways
Social media channels have come a long way into being our main communication source and give us a constant desire to interact on these channels. As a result, presenting ourselves on social media is becoming a primary thing in our life, whether it’s for business reasons or personal ones.
Social media grants us ease in expressing ourselves, such as following the things we like and removing the things we don’t. Also, the comments you make show your feedback on what you think about a particular product or service.
This type of feedback gives UX research teams an excellent source on how they can use social media to gather feedback. In addition, social networks are excellent sources for collecting data for user experience research, which can help them answer many questions they need in the product development stage. In other words, social intelligence has developed to a point where you can do much more research than just likes and followers.
Social media channels provide you with enough data and analytics to gather data and provide valuable insights for your user journey.
How does social media make the UX research process easier?
Many people will wonder what is UX research? It’s studying more about your target audience (users) and seeing how they react to the design process. In general, UX researchers will use various methods for solving problems and taking advantage of their design opportunities.
UX research is highly important during the design process. It requires you to gather as much data as possible to improve the usability rate. In addition, UX research aims to understand people in your market and reveal any issues they may be undergoing and their pain points.
Social media is an excellent tool for allowing you to find out more about people’s experiences when using your product or service. For example, the second you find out what your customer isn’t happy about or needs a solution. Furthermore, you can consider creating user personas for this to clarify any uncertainties.
Create user personas with the help of social media data
Whichever industry you belong to, your user persona will have to say a lot for you. Revealing the experiences your users have with your product is the most important information you can gather. You can easily access this data through social media networks.
First of all, you need to clearly state the people you are promoting your product or service to. Then, in case you make your designs more focused on what your users want, you’ll be successful. To do this, as we said before, you need to create a user persona. Again, social media is precisely great in helping you do so.
Secondly, a user persona is a document that represents the desires and pain points your customer has. Moreover, it’s important to identify how your customer generally behaves, whether they use your product or not. Their personality traits have a lot to say about them. Your best bet is to learn more about them and present the ideal product that satisfies their wishes and desires.
Lastly, you can get this valuable information from social media networks. The most important things to know are what will be on your company’s profile and who will mention you. Your overall goal should be to combine all these pieces and see if you fit with your target users. Once you identify this, everything becomes easy.
5 Ways social media is impacting your UX
1. It helps your users achieve their goals
To hook your user’s attention, you need to make it easy for them to accomplish their goals. However, this firmly depends on the type of social media channel you are using. For instance, if you’re using Facebook or Instagram, they can provide you with great engagement levels, but they have declined in their organic reach over the years.
According to statistics, it shows that this year Facebook showed an engagement rate of around 8% and Instagram, 13%. As a beginning, you can use both and see which one helps your users the most and which social channel enables you to get the best feedback. Many other social media channels can help you achieve results too, such as LinkedIn and more.
Above all, the most important part is to know who you are promoting and what you are promoting. Therefore, you can always consider using Facebook ads to overcome the decline in organic reach.
2. Don’t put pressure on your audience
Regardless of the social media channel you are using, you want your followers to be fully engaged in what they are doing. Followers should be able to process what you are trying to say quickly. This is the whole point of UX design, ensuring that your followers quickly identify why and how they are engaging with your content.
Whatever can make people understand faster, it’s a practical choice for you. So, therefore, posting on social media and seeing that your audience can quickly understand what you are posting about is an excellent indicator for identifying if your UX design is at the right level or not?
3. Engagement levels will help you identify if your UX design is in the right place
When followers see effective social media, they automatically want to engage with it. Understanding what your audience wants is the first step to greatness. Many tools, such as Instagram insights, Facebook audience insights, LinkedIn insights, and more, help you understand more about engagement and interaction levels.
Personalizing your content is what your fans want. For example, look at Starbucks, how they write your name on their coffee cups or Coca-Cola. This is all personalization and allows you to create an effective UX design.
It’s never bad to guide your users through social media experiences and allow them to process the message as fast as possible.
4. Make your content easy to find
If you are creating content that is not connected to your industry, or frequently asked questions, it may be more difficult for people to find it. Of course, you can post across different social media channels, but the most important thing is ensuring you deliver the right content in a suitable social media channel. For example, you can’t have the exact strategy for Facebook and Pinterest, now, can you?
Trying surfing on Google and seeing which questions are trending and frequently asked. This way, you can find content easily, but don’t forget to optimize it for different social media channels. For example, on Instagram, you can use hashtags, on Facebook, you can promote paid ads, on YouTube, you can try including a catchy thumbnail. There are plenty of ways to engage your audience.
5. Highlight important parts
While every social media post can be important, your followers expect your content to adopt and reflect on your brand. Therefore, whenever you post something on social media, point out its main idea. This way, your audience knows more about your brand and increases its trust.
Furthermore, you must highlight what you are promising to your customers. The idea is to let them know the primary thing they should focus on when consuming your content. This is an essential part of the UX research plan.
Users will trust what is unique; when they see content that is different from others, they’ll find out that your content can’t be found elsewhere. There are more than four billion social media channels worldwide, so when you are rare to find, that’s what’s important.
3 Ways social media’s psychology is influencing your UX design
1. What is eye-catching will result in engagement
Social media is a commonly used form of communication in our everyday lives, both in our professional and personal lives. Especially when you are posting your content, how pleasing something looks to the eye will have a powerful effect on how your content gets consumed. Our brains process images faster than text, so it’s important to keep things simple.
Studies show that images get processed 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, eye-catching images are part of the UX design psychology lesson. After all, users will ignore any minor mistakes made on your content or website if you post eye-catching images or infographics, so always keep that in mind.
2. Consider the cocktail party effect
According to the American Academy of Audiology, the cocktail party effect is a term used for selective hearing. In short, it’s a term used for determining the purpose that your brain focuses on something important and eliminates all other information that isn’t.
This term accounts for visitors who consume your content. For example, if you just posted an image on social media, there are plenty of elements. Still, if you include something the viewer is interested in, their focus will automatically only look at. Many companies will usually have chatbots on their website to gain user’s attention or build a deeper connection with them.
It’s these small elements that build long-term connections and have lasting effects. By strengthening your social media connections and allowing you to create better user experiences from these practices.
3. Don’t make your UX design too promotional
The last thing you want to happen is to make your website look as if the only thing it’s trying to do is to be as salesy as possible. People like to buy, but when copy gets annoying, you might bother them more than you do good.
For example, some websites may trick you into subscribing to a newsletter and provide you with false information or the wrong level of information. Unfortunately, many web pages are not providing the right level of information that goes in line with the visitor’s habits, and that’s why they put users in a trap for subscribing to their newsletter and not knowing what to expect.
Nevertheless, these types of tactics will only result in credibility losses and can cause users to be doubtful of your brand’s intentions. Not only will you lose many customers, but you might also face many penalties due to sneaky UX. In other words, these are called “unethical UX practices.” Companies that undergo these types of practices will end up paying large fines that will significantly hurt their overall budgets.
Furthermore, when users visit a website, they’ll pay close attention to how customer-centric your websites are. UX designs that are complicated or aren’t promoting a user-friendly interface.
The end
That’s all for this article. We got a chance to see how important social media is for gathering more data about your UX research. Social media has paved the way for gathering data and is making it much easier for us to provide better insights and answer questions we are concerned about.
Therefore, it’s always important to use social media to your advantage because users will give you honest feedback about what they think about your product or service.
About the author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.
