As a product leader, you might find yourself relying on ongoing usability testing as your primary tool for improving your product. Evaluative qualitative research can help you understand which prototype design is the clear winner or how to iterate on an existing product experience.
But taking a step back to think big picture—exploring user motivations and wants on a large scale—can help you drive future product development from a more strategic perspective.
We recently worked with an established gaming client to do just this. AnswerLab was already conducting ongoing qualitative research for this client team, but they wanted to get a bigger picture understanding of the motivations of gamers to drive future planning.
A global gaming company asked us:
How can we better understand gamers' motivations and choices when playing video games?
We answered:
Based on our client's overall goals, our UX research team set out to:
- Identify primary motivators, genres, and favorite games by gender
- Define the prioritization processes when choosing a game
- Establish correlations among age, platform, and frequency of play
With 18+ years of UX-specific experience, our quantitative research team consistently delivers the type of data this client needed to inform their next steps. AnswerLab scoped additional research that would supplement their existing qualitative program, utilizing a quantitative survey to better understand the full picture, and ultimately synthesize findings across research methods.
Quant UX research can help you accomplish a range of goals: testing assumptions and patterns, defining user trends, benchmarking metrics, and more.
Designing the study:
We designed a custom quantitative study for over 2,000 participants, equally distributed by gender identity - 50% of whom identified as female and 50% who identified as male. The participants we recruited played video games at least three times a month on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices, consoles, computers, and VR headsets.
The survey captured the variables that gamers deem to be most appealing in a video game, their gaming habits and preferences, why they played video games, how they played (alone or with friends), favorite genres, objectives, and more.
Additionally, AnswerLab’s quantitative research team created a tool to segment the data by different variables to see which combinations were most appealing to certain audience segments.
Outcome:
AnswerLab managed the quant research project from start to finish: defining research objectives, questionnaire design, analysis, and reporting to get the client the data-driven insights they needed. We delivered a full report with detailed MaxDiff data including the programmed survey, analyzed data tables, as well as raw data.
Through MaxDiff analysis, we presented strategic insights and patterns, and created detailed customer profiles to help our client roadmap future gaming content and product development.
While both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies provide beneficial insights individually, combining both methods can greatly improve your evaluation capabilities by ensuring the weaknesses of one methodology are balanced by the strengths of the other.
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Connect with us to talk about your quantitative UX research needs.
