By thinking about end users as we develop new technologies and policies, we can educate users, encourage the behaviors that lead to good security practices, and help users when, inevitably, something goes wrong.

Consider diary studies when your team is interested in users’ behaviors, preferences, and subjective reactions over time and where understanding context is particularly important.

While there are a lot of uncertainties as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is one thing I am certain of: businesses that focus on the customer experience stand a better chance of weathering the storm than businesses that don’t.

Instead of making UX changes blindly—hoping the right design, content, and features magically fall into place—consider involving your users to shape a dynamic and evolving UX strategy that is far more likely to deliver the results you expect.

IA refers to how things are organized, structured, and named. Everything you do online requires you to take notice of, process, and interact with a website’s information architecture in order to find information or accomplish a task.

User journeys break down a complex series of interrelated actions and feelings into a visual format that is comprehensive but also digestible and easy to share.

Many organizations don’t understand that digital security is a human problem. That means we can’t solve it by building bigger and bigger barricades. We have to understand humans: their behaviors, goals, and motivations.

User experience research is required to develop a clear plan for moving forward. And, since digital projects inevitably require flexibility, user experience research will help you adapt your strategy throughout the lifetime of your digital product.

A persona is the output of user research, which may have taken the form of ethnographic studies, user interviews, surveys, and diary studies with actual or representative users. Most importantly, the personas you develop were based on research—not guessing.

As a user experience (UX) research tool, surveys can be an effective starting point for UX research—especially if your resources are limited and your stakeholders are skeptical. But, because surveys are cheap and easy to administer to get lots of results, product teams sometimes use them in place of conducting more extensive UX research.