Why Statistics in UX Research Matter.

15 October 2023

Picture this: You're designing a brand-new app or website. You've got the perfect interface, the animated buttons, and the catchy copy all sorted out. But how do you know if your design actually works? Enter statistics. These awesome numbers help us make sense of user behavior, preferences, and pain points.

Take Amazon, for instance. The e-commerce giant uses A/B testing like it's going out of style. By splitting users into groups and testing different recommendation algorithms, Amazon fine-tunes its product suggestions, leading to higher sales and happier customers. And hey, who doesn't love getting personalized recommendations for stuff they actually want? Then there's Google. Ever noticed how search results seem to magically anticipate what you're looking for? That's not magic – it's statistical analysis at work. Google's UX researchers dive deep into user behavior data to refine their algorithms, ensuring you get the most relevant results every time you hit that search button.


Key Statistical Concepts
let's talk about some of the nitty-gritty statistical concepts that underpin UX research. We've got mean, median, mode – you know, all those terms that might make your eyes glaze over. But trust me, they're worth paying attention to.

Mean:
It gives you the average value of a dataset, helping you understand the central tendency of your users' actions.

Median:
Unaffected by outliers it gives you a clear picture of the middle point in your data.

Mode:
The MVP of categorical data, it shows you the most frequently occurring value.


Real-World Impact
Let's bring it back to the real world for a sec. Twitter analyzed user data and found that the mode tweet length is around 50-60 characters. Armed with this insight, they expanded the character limit, giving users more room to express themselves without feeling constrained. It's a small change with big implications for user experience.

Wanna know where can you learn more about statistics in UX research? Well, there are plenty of books, online courses, and research papers out there to sink your teeth into. Check out "Quantifying the User Experience" by Jeff Sauro and James R. Lewis for a solid primer on UX research methods. And if you're more of a hands-on learner, platforms like Coursera and edX offer courses on statistics and data analysis that you can take at your own pace.

We use statistics as a compass to navigate through the vast sea of user data, guiding us toward insights that shape the digital experiences we create. – Jeff Sauro, co-author of "Quantifying the User Experience"