Web Research encompasses a wide range of activities performed on the Internet, such as collecting, validating, processing, and analyzing data to meet academic or business needs. Compared to classical (traditional) methods, this approach provides easier, cheaper, and broader access to information sources, which ultimately leads to better information, timely decision-making, and increased competitiveness.
Main areas of web research:
- Market research and business intelligence
- Web Mining & Data Science
- User Experience (UX) & Design Research
- Academic & Technical Research
- Emerging Technologies & Trends
- Lead Generation & Prospecting
Market research and business intelligence
With the transition from an industrial to an information-based economy, the Internet changes the paradigm that refines the traditional elements of the marketing mix, facilitating
achieving marketing goals, ie sales and building customer loyalty.
Although a lot can be said about market research, its main areas include:
- Advertising & communication optimization: Designing successful marketing and brand advertising campaigns depends on the right understanding of your brand’s market position and effective communications with your target audience.
- Brand value building: Brand tracking studies are a valuable instrument for evaluating your brand vitality and visibility. Most traditional brand monitoring surveys deal with problems connected with weak measurements and poor communication effectiveness.
- Pricing study: One of the biggest challenges company deal is setting the right prices for new products or services, or changing the prices of existing ones. If your price is too high or too low, that will result in lower profits. We use sophisticated applications and methodologies to help our clients build efficient pricing policies, including:
- Conjoint and Discrete Choice methods that measure how consumers trade off price versus other attributes.
- Demand curve analyses that use pricing surveys to optimize pricing by projecting revenues and demand at different price points.
- Loyalty evaluation & customer satisfaction: New ventures are not just about increasing efficiency and higher profit margins. Identifying factors of consumer experience or evaluating how your company corresponds with business protocols also represent foundation of market success.
- Product development: Product development deals with key product stages of a product’s life cycle, based on real-life business issues, to help clients make the best business decisions.
- Business growth & market opportunities: Anticipating early market signals is the key issue for recognizing opportunities and transforming them into a business strategy. But the riddle is how to know which one is efficient and effective.
Web Mining & Data Science
Web mining, as a relatively new field, uses data mining techniques to extract useful information and knowledge from data on the Internet.
The results of these activities are widely used in the areas of popout electronic commerce (improvement of commerce), identification of needs and preferences, online learning in order to raise the level of efficiency of electronic learning systems, optimization of Internet sites, etc.
- The basics of the web information component are:
web content – text, images - web structure – links, tags
- web usage – http logs, server logs
Some of the important types of web mining:
- Web Content Mining: Extracts information from web page content, such as text, images, and HTML/XML documents.
- Web Structure Mining: Analyzes the structure of hyperlinks and node connections (web graphs) to determine the importance of web pages.
- Web Usage Mining: Examines server-side logs, client-side data, and proxy-side data to analyze user interactions.
- Web mining in the process of data science
- Customer segmentation: Identifying and profiling groups of visitors or users based on various marketing segmentation criteria.
- Predictive Modeling and Advertising: Using Web Data to Predict User Behavior and Optimize Marketing.
User Experience (UX) & Design Research
User Experience (UX) & Design Research
UX research (UXR) is the systematic study of user behavior, needs, and motivations to inform the design process, ensuring that products are intuitive and user-centered. By using qualitative (interviews, usability tests) and quantitative (surveys, analytics) methods, design bias is reduced and product success is driven by data rather than just aesthetics.
TUX research (UXR) is focused on the concept of design, user behavior, needs and motivations in order to create the best user experience.
This ensures that the products not only meet the visual elements and product interfaces, but also meet the functional needs of the user.
Basic stages of UX research:
1. Planning and conducting user research
User research planning begins with defining the goals and objectives to which key questions should be answered.
To understand user behavior and expectations, surveys and interviews are conducted, yielding feedback on the current user experience and gaps that arise during interactions with the product/service.
2. Data analysis
This phase should give us an insight into the profile and needs of the target user, with patterns of their behavior, frustrations, and expectations.
The point is to reduce as much as possible the gap between the wishes and needs of the user regarding the use of the application
3. Usability testing and iteration
Evaluation represents a planned, systematic approach to product evaluation in order to launch or improve the product.
As a mandatory part of product development, especially in the field of new technologies or new ways of interaction, this phase involves various experts from the domain of computer science, including experts from other fields such as sociology, psychology and statistics. While computer science scientists are mostly focused on evaluating the technical elements of the product, sociologists are focused on the socio-demographic study of respondents. Psychologists are focused on analyzing the perception of habits, needs and expectations of users. The goal of all evaluations is to provide feedback to interaction designers and developers on how to improve the user interface through an iterative process.
