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A 7-step adaptable UX research process

Every team knows how important great UX research is for satisfying and converting users. But with so many tasks to juggle, research can get pushed to the bottom of the workflow. 

You conduct research—but only in response to stakeholder requests, user complaints, or a major new web or product launch. By then, it’s too late for your research to shape your design. The result? Scrappy research and a missed opportunity to forge your product around user needs.

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Be proactive rather than reactive by implementing a solid user experience (UX) research process from the start. Stay tuned to learn how to structure a flexible, 7-step research process that will guide your product development and design thinking to help you generate customer delight.

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Why a strong UX research process is key

The UX research process acts as the foundation for all other stages of UX design and product development.

Mar P., product researcher at Hotjar, says: “The main goal of UX research is to create a product that works for your users and your business. It's about understanding real user problems so the team can work on solutions and move away from assumptions that can lead to bad product decisions. ”

Without a strong UX research process, you’ll end up with frustrated users, low conversion and customer loyalty rates, high error and churn rates, and costly redesigns. In short, if you rely on guesswork rather than research , users suffer—and so do your business objectives and team.

What are the benefits of great UX research? 

Great UX research helps you make confident UX decisions. 

It lets you validate your assumptions and weed out unpromising ideas before you waste resources on them, and ensures your product is designed to delight users from the start. 

Ongoing UX research is crucial to cultivating empathy for users throughout your organization . User experience data helps you solve problems and continually optimize your platform or product to meet user needs, and gives you the insights you need to get stakeholder buy-in on fixes and redesigns.

UX research is critical in validating that a team’s concepts are on the right track. It fosters alignment between an idea and the reality of what users actually want and need. UX research also allows teams to ‘fail early’ and adapt before large sums of time and money are spent.

The UX research process

Clearly, research is critical to UX design and development success. 

So it can’t just happen sporadically to put out customer or stakeholder fires, or when you happen to find yourself with extra time—which, let's be honest, never happens .

Instead, engage in a structured UX research process to prioritize research and infuse all stages of UX design with data insights.

But remember: a structured process doesn’t mean a rigid process. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to UX research: the best processes are flexible, adaptable, and tailored to the unique needs of your users, team, and business. 

Use our guide to establish a solid UX research process—tweaking it throughout to fit your workflow, company culture, and customer types.

You want your UX research to inform decisions, rather than post-rationalize decisions that have already been made without customer input. That’s why you need to define a research process.

7 steps for user research with impact

Our step-by-step guide to UX research is based on lean UX design principles, meaning continuous iteration, testing, and user feedback are central. 

Lean UX is based on an agile cycle with three phases: 

Think: brainstorming and reflecting on areas for improvement 

Make: creating new designs or features to solve user problems

Check: testing assumptions and verifying designs with real customers 

UX research is a non-linear process—research doesn’t end when design and development begin. The best research centers on continuous discovery at every stage, and involves circling back and forth between those stages. 

These 7 steps will get you well on your way:

1. Clarify your goals 

Clear goals will help you define the process, efficiently distribute resources, get stakeholders on board, and maximize the user insights you uncover .

Start by formulating hypotheses and topics of interest based on the potential problems and opportunities you want to learn more about. These might emerge from previous research, new opportunities you’ve identified, or from creative brainstorming. 

Then, define the key UX research questions you want to answer . These might center on user behavior (why are customers abandoning carts?), on different UX design options (which new CTA option performs best?), or on customer goals (which new features would most improve the user experience?). 

Pro tip : design user questions that are focused but flexible enough to allow for free discovery. Don’t go in armed with too many assumptions and don’t ask leading questions. Make sure you leave space to discover new information from your users that might not have occurred to you. Set up Hotjar’s Feedback widget to collect open-ended feedback from users to start.

Next, make sure you contextualize UX research goals in line with larger organizational objectives and success metrics: how will decreasing cart abandonment impact conversions and revenue, for example? 

Finally, explain to key stakeholders what you’re doing—and why—to get their support and maximize the reach of your research.  

It’s important to set research goals around current problems. For instance, if we need to offer an advanced search function for an ecommerce website, the goal will be to find the best solution for our users that’s easy to implement from the development perspective.

2. Define your research methods

Once you’ve set goals and designed user questions, decide what kinds of research you’ll do and the type of data you want to collect. 

Use a variety of methods to cover all the bases and fill potential gaps. These will depend on your user and business needs, and the resources you have available. 

Make sure you include both attitudinal and behavioral UX research methods .  

Behavioral research is about observing how users act. Heatmaps, A/B testing, user recordings, and eye-tracking are all important sources you can use to understand user behavior data.

Attitudinal research tells you how users are thinking and feeling . This often involves asking them directly through surveys, focus groups, customer interviews, concept testing, and card sorting.

If you rely on only one of these, you’ll be missing out on the big picture. Combining behavioral and attitudinal research fills in the gaps between what users say and what they actually do , which don’t always align.

Seek to also explore a mix of qualitative and quantitative UX data. 

Quantitative studies put a number on user behavior. Analyzing the number of users who scrolled past your CTA or clicked in frustration where they couldn’t find a button will help you spot patterns in clickthroughs, conversions, user engagement, and retention. 

Qualitative data uncovers the reasons behind these patterns. They’re opportunities to learn what your users really think and help you understand their needs more deeply.  

Remember: Hotjar’s tools combine behavioral and attitudinal research methods through a blend of quantitative and qualitative data. Use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to collect voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback, and Heatmaps and Session Recordings to round out the picture with behavioral insights.

3. Dive into discovery

Once you’ve set up research questions and UX analysis methods, the next step is to jump into the discovery phase, where the spotlight should be on speaking to your customers and understanding what they need to convert. 

Seek to develop a deep understanding of your users, the problems they experience, and what will help them with their jobs to be done. 

User interviews are a great way to start—video tools like UserInterview can really help when paired with Hotjar's brilliant interview tips .

Check out our in-depth guide to UX research tools that can help streamline the process.  

You should also: 

Observe customers using other similar sites (lab studies are great, but you can also use session recordings to see how users behave in their own environment)

Deploy Hotjar Feedback widgets to learn what users are thinking while they browse and understand blocks in navigation

Use surveys to ask users questions about their current and ideal experience

Run competitive analyses and conduct market research to understand the UX offered by other companies and identify areas of improvement and exploration

Make sure to ask customers open-ended questions about their experiences and what they’d like to see, as well as targeted questions around navigating particular product pages or features. For example, are they finding all the information they need to confidently complete the checkout process? You might discover that your users like to check out reviews before making a final decision, so making reviews more accessible could help UX and conversions alike.

4. Dig deeper and explore

Use the insights from the discovery phase as a starting point, then get more specific and home in on answering your specific UX research questions and really understanding your users at a granular level.  

Map out customer journeys and develop user personas and stories to clarify and communicate the information you’ve learned. 

You should also use your discoveries to inform preliminary idea development, design sketches, and wireframes and prototypes.

Maybe you’re losing customers at the checkout stage, and discovery phase feedback has suggested it could be because you don’t have a ‘guest checkout’ option, forcing users to sign up for a full account, which creates friction if they’re browsing your site on mobile.

Start by validating the guest checkout idea with your users, then design and test different iterations through prototypes, mockups, and card sorting experiments. 

5. Iterate and test

Once you have a working model of your website or product redesign, focus on testing the user experience to refine it. 

Here's how:

Start with usability testing to ensure that your website hierarchies, user flow, and search filters make sense. Run A/B and multivariate testing to see which designs users respond to best, and use heatmaps to see exactly where they're clicking and scrolling. 

Make sure you also evaluate accessibility: is the guest checkout option easy to find? Is it visible to users across different devices, and with different vision needs? 

Next, go deeper: seek to build a complete picture of the UX and how it facilitates and blocks users from getting their needs met.

Observe users in action. Use Hotjar Heatmaps to identify click and scroll patterns and Session Recordings to track the entire user journey. This helps the UX team see what their customers see, which is crucial at this testing stage when you’re often too close to the design to understand the experience from the outside. 

Look at the page elements customers are engaging with, and which ones they’re scrolling past. Filter session recordings by rage clicks to see where users may be clicking in frustration expecting a button or action. Pay special attention to dissatisfied customers or users who didn’t complete key conversion actions, and understand what their journey looks like.

Complement this understanding of user behavior with qualitative interviews and survey methods that will help you understand their motivations and product experience (PX). 

6. Evaluate and communicate research findings

By now, you’ve collected many research insights. Organize your data using categories and tags, focusing on user pain points . Look for key patterns and recurring issues—and once you’ve identified them, ask users more questions if needed.

Make your research insights searchable, manipulable, and easily accessible by everyone on the team.

Then, engage in cross-functional communication outside the core UX team. Make sure you keep different departments informed and involved with your UX research process. 

Create UX analysis reports and engage stakeholders with comprehensive UX and user storytelling and strong product narratives. But make sure you also share key nuggets of user data along the way, so your research insights filter throughout the whole organization.

Pro tip : use Hotjar Highlights to easily share user recording clips, screenshots, heatmap snippets, and VoC quotes throughout your company. You can also use the Slack integration to automatically keep different departments up to date!

7. Put your research into action

The UX research data you gather is a potential goldmine. It can help you prioritize brilliantly and boost user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. But only if you turn those insights into action . 

You need to put the data to work in making key UX design decisions. 

Use your UX research insights to prioritize fixes and product updates . Focus on urgent issues that are affecting key metrics and blocking users from meeting their needs. 

Heatmaps and session recordings can help you quickly spot low-hanging fruit. You might find you could drastically improve conversions by positioning your CTA differently or making your signup form more streamlined and intuitive. 

For larger design opportunities that will require significant resources, UX research data can help you to justify the cost to stakeholders.

I follow the process of finding patterns in the data, pulling at least one insight from each identified pattern, and then creating at least one design recommendation or design principle for each insight. When you are designing you can easily refer back to your identified design principles and requirements to help guide your decision making and have data-supported designs when it’s time for handoff.

Building the UX research process into your design culture

UX research isn’t a one-time activity to be forgotten about once you begin designing and developing. 

The UX research process should happen continuously, influencing all other aspects of UX design and product development. Ongoing research, testing, and user conversations are all part of confident, user-led design thinking. 

Prioritizing brilliant UX research will improve your design culture, boost conversions, and keep users engaged and delighted.  

FAQs on the UX research process:

Is ux research important.

UX research is hugely important in data-informed UX design. The UX research process acts as the foundation for all other stages of UX design and development.

Great UX research gives you confidence in your UX decisions, lets you test your assumptions and weed out unpromising ideas before you waste resources on them, and ensures your product is designed to delight users from the start. 

UX research is crucial to cultivating empathy for users throughout your organization . It helps you to problem-solve and continually optimize your platform or product to meet user needs, and gives you the evidence you need to get stakeholder buy-in on fixes and redesigns.

Should I do attitudinal or behavioral UX research?

Use both attitudinal and behavioral UX research methods.  

Behavioral research is about observing how users act. Heatmaps, A/B testing, user recordings, and eye-tracking are all important sources of user behavior data.

If you rely on only one of these, you’ll be missing a big part of the picture. Combining behavioral and attitudinal research methods fills in the gaps between what users say and what they actually do , which don’t always align.

What’s the best UX research process?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to UX research. The best processes are flexible and tailored to the unique needs of your users, team, and business. 

We recommend a 7-step, adaptable UX research process: 

Clarify your goals

Define your research methods

Dive into discovery

Dig deeper and explore

Iterate and test

Evaluate and communicate your research findings

Put your research into action

UX research guide

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The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods

UX research provides invaluable insight into product users and what they need and value. Not only will research reduce the risk of a miscalculated guess, it will uncover new opportunities for innovation.

By Miklos Philips

Miklos is a UX designer, product design strategist, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in the design field.

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“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” —Tim Brown, CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO

User experience (UX) design is the process of designing products that are useful, easy to use, and a pleasure to engage. It’s about enhancing the entire experience people have while interacting with a product and making sure they find value, satisfaction, and delight. If a mountain peak represents that goal, employing various types of UX research is the path UX designers use to get to the top of the mountain.

User experience research is one of the most misunderstood yet critical steps in UX design. Sometimes treated as an afterthought or an unaffordable luxury, UX research, and user testing should inform every design decision.

Every product, service, or user interface designers create in the safety and comfort of their workplaces has to survive and prosper in the real world. Countless people will engage our creations in an unpredictable environment over which designers have no control. UX research is the key to grounding ideas in reality and improving the odds of success, but research can be a scary word. It may sound like money we don’t have, time we can’t spare, and expertise we have to seek.

In order to do UX research effectively—to get a clear picture of what users think and why they do what they do—e.g., to “walk a mile in the user’s shoes” as a favorite UX maxim goes, it is essential that user experience designers and product teams conduct user research often and regularly. Contingent upon time, resources, and budget, the deeper they can dive the better.

What Is UX Research?

There is a long, comprehensive list of UX design research methods employed by user researchers , but at its center is the user and how they think and behave —their needs and motivations. Typically, UX research does this through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

There are two main types of user research: quantitative (statistics: can be calculated and computed; focuses on numbers and mathematical calculations) and qualitative (insights: concerned with descriptions, which can be observed but cannot be computed).

Quantitative research is primarily exploratory research and is used to quantify the problem by way of generating numerical data or data that can be transformed into usable statistics. Some common data collection methods include various forms of surveys – online surveys , paper surveys , mobile surveys and kiosk surveys , longitudinal studies, website interceptors, online polls, and systematic observations.

This user research method may also include analytics, such as Google Analytics .

Google Analytics is part of a suite of interconnected tools that help interpret data on your site’s visitors including Data Studio , a powerful data-visualization tool, and Google Optimize, for running and analyzing dynamic A/B testing.

Quantitative data from analytics platforms should ideally be balanced with qualitative insights gathered from other UX testing methods , such as focus groups or usability testing. The analytical data will show patterns that may be useful for deciding what assumptions to test further.

Qualitative user research is a direct assessment of behavior based on observation. It’s about understanding people’s beliefs and practices on their terms. It can involve several different methods including contextual observation, ethnographic studies, interviews, field studies, and moderated usability tests.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group feels that in the case of UX research, it is better to emphasize insights (qualitative research) and that although quant has some advantages, qualitative research breaks down complicated information so it’s easy to understand, and overall delivers better results more cost effectively—in other words, it is much cheaper to find and fix problems during the design phase before you start to build. Often the most important information is not quantifiable, and he goes on to suggest that “quantitative studies are often too narrow to be useful and are sometimes directly misleading.”

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. William Bruce Cameron

Design research is not typical of traditional science with ethnography being its closest equivalent—effective usability is contextual and depends on a broad understanding of human behavior if it is going to work.

Nevertheless, the types of user research you can or should perform will depend on the type of site, system or app you are developing, your timeline, and your environment.

Top UX Research Methods and When to Use Them

Here are some examples of the types of user research performed at each phase of a project.

Card Sorting : Allows users to group and sort a site’s information into a logical structure that will typically drive navigation and the site’s information architecture. This helps ensure that the site structure matches the way users think.

Contextual Interviews : Enables the observation of users in their natural environment, giving you a better understanding of the way users work.

First Click Testing : A testing method focused on navigation, which can be performed on a functioning website, a prototype, or a wireframe.

Focus Groups : Moderated discussion with a group of users, allowing insight into user attitudes, ideas, and desires.

Heuristic Evaluation/Expert Review : A group of usability experts evaluating a website against a list of established guidelines .

Interviews : One-on-one discussions with users show how a particular user works. They enable you to get detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences.

Parallel Design : A design methodology that involves several designers pursuing the same effort simultaneously but independently, with the intention to combine the best aspects of each for the ultimate solution.

Personas : The creation of a representative user based on available data and user interviews. Though the personal details of the persona may be fictional, the information used to create the user type is not.

Prototyping : Allows the design team to explore ideas before implementing them by creating a mock-up of the site. A prototype can range from a paper mock-up to interactive HTML pages.

Surveys : A series of questions asked to multiple users of your website that help you learn about the people who visit your site.

System Usability Scale (SUS) : SUS is a technology-independent ten-item scale for subjective evaluation of the usability.

Task Analysis : Involves learning about user goals, including what users want to do on your website, and helps you understand the tasks that users will perform on your site.

Usability Testing : Identifies user frustrations and problems with a site through one-on-one sessions where a “real-life” user performs tasks on the site being studied.

Use Cases : Provide a description of how users use a particular feature of your website. They provide a detailed look at how users interact with the site, including the steps users take to accomplish each task.

You can do user research at all stages or whatever stage you are in currently. However, the Nielsen Norman Group advises that most of it be done during the earlier phases when it will have the biggest impact. They also suggest it’s a good idea to save some of your budget for additional research that may become necessary (or helpful) later in the project.

Here is a diagram listing recommended options that can be done as a project moves through the design stages. The process will vary, and may only include a few things on the list during each phase. The most frequently used methods are shown in bold.

Reasons for Doing UX Research

Here are three great reasons for doing user research :

To create a product that is truly relevant to users

• If you don’t have a clear understanding of your users and their mental models, you have no way of knowing whether your design will be relevant. A design that is not relevant to its target audience will never be a success.

To create a product that is easy and pleasurable to use

• A favorite quote from Steve Jobs: “ If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem .” If your user experience is not optimal, chances are that people will move on to another product.

To have the return on investment (ROI) of user experience design validated and be able to show:

• An improvement in performance and credibility
• Increased exposure and sales—growth in customer base
• A reduced burden on resources—more efficient work processes

Aside from the reasons mentioned above, doing user research gives insight into which features to prioritize, and in general, helps develop clarity around a project.

What Results Can I Expect from UX Research?

In the words of Mike Kuniaysky, user research is “ the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience. ”

User research has been essential to the success of behemoths like USAA and Amazon ; Joe Gebbia, CEO of Airbnb is an enthusiastic proponent, testifying that its implementation helped turn things around for the company when it was floundering as an early startup.

Some of the results generated through UX research confirm that improving the usability of a site or app will:

• Increase conversion rates
• Increase sign-ups
• Increase NPS (net promoter score)
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increase purchase rates
• Boost loyalty to the brand
• Reduce customer service calls

Additionally, and aside from benefiting the overall user experience, the integration of UX research into the development process can:

• Minimize development time
• Reduce production costs
• Uncover valuable insights about your audience
• Give an in-depth view into users’ mental models, pain points, and goals

User research is at the core of every exceptional user experience. As the name suggests, UX is subjective—the experience that a person goes through while using a product. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the needs and goals of potential users, the context, and their tasks which are unique for each product. By selecting appropriate UX research methods and applying them rigorously, designers can shape a product’s design and can come up with products that serve both customers and businesses more effectively.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• How to Conduct Effective UX Research: A Guide
• The Value of User Research
• UX Research Methods and the Path to User Empathy
• Design Talks: Research in Action with UX Researcher Caitria O'Neill
• Swipe Right: 3 Ways to Boost Safety in Dating App Design
• How to Avoid 5 Types of Cognitive Bias in User Research

Understanding the basics

How do you do user research in ux.

UX research includes two main types: quantitative (statistical data) and qualitative (insights that can be observed but not computed), done through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. The UX research methods used depend on the type of site, system, or app being developed.

What are UX methods?

There is a long list of methods employed by user research, but at its center is the user and how they think, behave—their needs and motivations. Typically, UX research does this through observation techniques, task analysis, and other UX methodologies.

What is the best research methodology for user experience design?

The type of UX methodology depends on the type of site, system or app being developed, its timeline, and environment. There are 2 main types: quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (insights).

What does a UX researcher do?

A user researcher removes the need for false assumptions and guesswork by using observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies to understand a user’s motivation, behavior, and needs.

Why is UX research important?

UX research will help create a product that is relevant to users and is easy and pleasurable to use while boosting a product’s ROI. Aside from these reasons, user research gives insight into which features to prioritize, and in general, helps develop clarity around a project.

• UserResearch

Miklos Philips

London, United Kingdom

Member since May 20, 2016

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UX Research Process: A Step-By-Step Framework

11 min read

What is the UX research process? Why is it important? What are its stages?

These are only some of the questions that the article tackles. It also outlines a 9-step guide on how to conduct UX research for product managers and UX designers.

Let’s dive in!

• The UX research process is a sequence of steps to collect and analyze data on user interactions with the product to better understand their needs and preferences .
• It’s essential to build user-friendly products that satisfy their needs and offer a positive customer experience . It also helps teams empathize with users and foster customer-centric organizational cultures.
• The UX research process consists of 4 main stages, Discovery , Exploring, Testing, and Listening, which follow the development process and during which it becomes increasingly more specific.
• Each UX research project should start with goal setting and formulating research questions. In other words, decide what problem you want to solve.
• Next, choose the research audience. That’s whose problems you want to solve,
• Based on goals and audience, select a range of research techniques, like surveys , interviews, or user behavior tracking .
• To recruit research participants, reach out to your existing users or tap into the pool of participants that your analytics tool may offer.
• Talking of tools … choosing the right ones for your project is the next step. You may need a solution to collect feedback, track product usage , and create wireframes and prototypes .
• The next step involves data analysis. This includes data from your analytics tools (e.g. trends or funnel analysis ), customer feedback, or session recordings.
• Having extracted insights from the data, share them with other teams and key stakeholders to sync your efforts and ensure alignment with business goals.
• Improving UX may require a major redesign . However, you can achieve a lot with onboarding UI patterns that guide users through the product and help them achieve their goals.
• After implementing changes, test their impact and iterate to further enhance the design.
• Want to see how Userpilot can help UX researchers? Book the demo!

What is the UX research process?

The UX research process is a methodical sequence of steps that helps product teams understand user needs , behaviors, and preferences .

UX research uses different research methods like user behavior analysis and feedback to validate ideas and solutions in real-life conditions.

Why is an effective user research process crucial?

An effective UX research process is essential for several reasons.

First, you can’t build a product that meets user expectations if you don’t understand their needs, behaviors, and motivations.

Second, UX research provides valuable insights that can guide product design, ensuring that the final product is user-friendly and intuitive to use. This often translates into higher user satisfaction and retention .

Moreover, user research can identify potential obstacles and pain points and enables the design team to address these issues proactively.

Finally, it teaches teams to look at the product design process through their eyes, and so it fosters a customer-centric design culture within the organization,

Overall, UX research is the foundation for designing and building a successful and competitive product in the market.

What are the 4 phases of the UX project process?

The 4 main stages of UX research are Discovery, Exploring, Testing, and Listening.

Let’s have a closer look at each of them and the user research methods that you can use for them.

Discovery phase

The aim of the discovery phase is to give you a general understanding of user needs and the context in which you’re building the product. It enables you to find out what you don’t know and provides a focus for the rest of the research process.

Common discovery techniques include:

• Field studies
• Diary studies
• User interviews
• Stakeholder interviews
• Requirements and constraints gathering

Exploring phase

In the exploring phase, you try to gain a better understanding of user problems and the scope of the design process. During this stage, teams brainstorm different design approaches and test early-stage ideas.

Techniques that can help you during the Exploring phase include:

• Competitive analysis
• Design review
• Persona building
• Task analysis
• Journey mapping
• Prototype feedback and testing (clickable or paper prototypes)
• User stories
• Card sorting

Testing phase

The testing phase involves more granular tests and experiments to ensure that the design in development is intuitive and easy to use for users with different needs and expectations.

What research methods can you use during this phase?

• Qualitative usability testing (in-person or remote)
• Benchmark testing
• Accessibility evaluation

Listening phase

The purpose of the listening phase is to collect insights on how well the product is satisfying existing user problems. It also enables teams to discover new opportunities to further enhance the product.

During listening, teams use a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, like:

• Product analytics reviews
• Search-log analysis
• Usability-bug reviews
• Frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) reviews

9 steps for conducting UX research to gain valuable insights

With the theory covered, let’s look at how to conduct user research, step-by-step.

1. Define the objectives for your research project

Start by setting the goals for the research project.

For example, your objective may be to find out why users drop off in the user journey and identify ways to retain them. Or you could look for improvements to the onboarding process to help users adopt the features that are relevant to their goals.

Having clear goals will give the project the necessary focus, help you align your team, choose the right research methods, allocate resources efficiently, and recruit the right users.

2. Identify the target audience to be researched

If you’re in SaaS, your user base is not likely to be homogenous. This means that not all of your users will necessarily face the same challenges or pain points. Consequently, they may not be able to provide the insights you’re after.

How do you choose the right target audience then?

Use your product analytics tools or customer feedback to identify the relevant segments or user cohorts.

For example, if you see users dropping off at a particular stage of the funnel , group them together and look for common characteristics. This could be users from a specific demographic group or with a particular job role. Zero in on those.

3. Select the right UX research methods

We have briefly touched on research methods earlier. Let’s have a closer look at a few common ones that you can use at multiple stages of the project.

User experience surveys

User surveys are one of the most popular research methods.

There are a few good reasons for that.

First, they’re easy to run at scale. You can easily trigger them inside the app or deliver them online to thousands of users at once.

Second, they allow you to collect both quantitative and qualitative data . It’s a common practice to start surveys with a closed-ended question and follow up with an open-ended one.

For example, you could start by asking users to rate how easy it is to perform a task or use a feature on a Likert scale, and then justify their response in the next one.

In this way, you’ll be able to gauge what user sentiment is and understand why they’re feeling like that.

Finally, you can target specific user segments with your surveys to ensure the validity of your research.

User interviews/focus groups

User interviews and focus groups are even more effective for collecting qualitative feedback from your users. That’s because you can follow up on user responses in real time and further explore the ideas that they bring up.

That’s if you have the right interviewing skills. Users are often unable to articulate their reasons clearly or simply don’t know why they act in a particular way.

For example, if you ask users what criteria contribute to a good user experience, they may not be able to say. However, if you ask them to tell you about the last time they had a great user experience and what made it stand out, you may get more actionable insights from them.

To reap the benefits that user interviews offer, prepare carefully, for example using a template like the one below. In this way, you will make sure you use the interview time well.

User behavior data

As all user interactions with SaaS products are digital, they’re easy to track.

You can collect data on literally every user click , tap, scroll, or hover. Apart from individual user actions, you can also bundle them up into custom events, and track them as one.

Such data is invaluable for UX researchers as it is objective and can help you identify patterns in user behavior that you may need to address.

For example, you can analyze feature usage data for particular user segments to identify the features that churned users don’t use. You can then drill down into their usage patterns to understand why they don’t use them.

Usability testing

The aim of usability tests is to determine how easy it is to use the product.

You can do this by giving users a task to complete and watching how they get on with it.

Let’s imagine you’re testing a new onboarding checklist.

You give it to users to complete and offer a reward for completing it as an incentive. Then you could record how they go about finishing the tasks and analyze it for insights.

Popular usability testing techniques are:

• Guerilla testing – you ‘ambush’ users in a public place, like a cafe, and ask them to experiment with the product
• Five-second test – you show the user a part of the product, like a feature, for 5 seconds and then interview them to see if they could understand the purpose of the feature, how they felt about its design or what was their general impression of the product or brand.
• First-click testing – a technique that evaluates how intuitive the product is: do they know where to click first when they need to complete a task?
• Eye tracking – by tracking the visual interactions with the page or product dashboard , you can test different layouts and designs for distractions that prevent users from finding the right features or UI elements.

4. Recruit participants for gathering research findings

If you’ve got an existing product, you can recruit testers from your user base.

Just target the specific user segment with a modal and invite them to take part in an experiment. You can also reach out to users who took part in your fake door tests and give them an opportunity to play around with the feature.

For brand-new products, you can recruit participants via tools like Hotjar. The application gives you access to a pool of 200k+ users from different backgrounds.

5. Choose a tool for conducting user research

Based on the research method you’ve chosen, pick the right tool for your study.

Here are a few options worth considering:

• Miro, Adobe XD, Webflow, and Figma for wireframing and prototyping
• Hotjar, and Userpilot for analytics
• Optimizely and Userpilot for experimentation
• Typeform, Userpilot, and SurveyMonkey for feedback collection

When choosing the tool, consider its own UX design and how easy it is to use. Also, pay attention to their integrations so that you can easily embed them in your workflow.

6. Analyze the research data to gather insights

How you analyze collected data during your research sessions depends on your goals.

Let’s look at a few common types of analysis and the insights they can offer.

Trend analysis

Trend analysis involves visualizing and analyzing changes in a metric over a period of time.

What other insights can trend analysis offer to UX researchers?

• Trend analysis can help you identify shifts or changes in user behavior over time, allowing them to adapt designs and interfaces to better match evolving user preferences.
• You can track adoption rates of specific features to understand what aspects of the product are gaining traction with users.
• By tracking trends in user satisfaction scores or feedback, you can gauge the success of design changes or product updates.
• Trend analysis can reveal if usability metrics like task completion rates are improving or declining so that you can tweak the UI accordingly.

User feedback analysis

As mentioned, customer feedback is invaluable when it comes to understanding user behaviors and their preferences.

How do you do it efficiently?

Quantitative analysis is not a problem. If your tool doesn’t offer a dashboard with key metrics, you can fairly easily analyze and visualize the data for trends in a spreadsheet.

Qualitative analysis is a bit more challenging. Or at least it used to be until recently.

Thanks to AI, you can now analyze huge numbers of open-ended user responses for trends and patterns. Many feedback solutions , like Userpilot, also allow you to tag and group them to facilitate analysis.

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis looks into user conversions at the main touchpoints and milestones in the user journey.

For example, you could track how users progress from signup to conversion to paid customers, or from visiting your e-commerce site to making a purchase.

It’s an intuitive technique that allows even non-technical teams to identify bottlenecks that prevent users from progressing or slow them down.

It’s enough to look at the chart to spot the stages where users experience friction because that’s where they drop off. If you can’t see this straight away, a quick look at how long it takes users to convert will reveal the friction points.

Session recordings

Session recordings are an excellent tool for in-depth analysis of user interactions with UI elements on the page.

As the name suggests, you use software like Truestory, Hotjar, or Heap to record everything that the user does on the screen.

Thanks to that, you can identify usability issues in the design. For example, users may not be able to find a feature that’s relevant to their use case, rage-click on an unclickable element, or don’t scroll far enough to access crucial information.

7. Share research insights with key stakeholders

Sharing your user experience research findings with stakeholders is an important part of the process.

For starters, it improves their ability to make informed decisions about product features, design changes, and the overall product strategy.

Moreover, sharing UX research results helps you bridge the gap between the design team and the key decision-makers and ensure that design decisions are aligned with business goals.

Finally, it creates a shared understanding between all teams involved in the product development process and improves collaboration.

8. Implement findings and optimize the user experience

There’s no point in conducting UX research if you don’t act on the insights!

How do you implement them?

As always, it depends on the nature of the problem.

Let’s imagine your users struggle to find the right features in the menu because it’s too cluttered. A simple solution would be to simplify the menu and personalize it for users with different user cases using data from welcome surveys.

Another example:

If users keep getting stuck on a particular task, you could trigger contextual UI patterns , like tooltips or hotspots, to guide them through.

9. Iterate and improve key performance metrics

When you test the UX design changes before rolling them out for all users, you increase the chances that they will move the needle in the right direction.

However, it doesn’t mean things can’t be better.

As users engage with the design, keep tracking their behavior, collecting feedback, and interviewing to identify further areas for optimization.

Then, implement the changes, and test again.

Rinse and repeat.

UX research process can help you make your product more intuitive and inclusive for users. By responding to their pain points and challenges and catering to their needs, you also boost their satisfaction and loyalty. This translates into better business performance.

If you’d like to see how Userpilot can help you with UX research, book the demo!

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How to Conduct User Experience Research Like a Professional

Whether you’re looking to develop a broad UX design skillset, or you’re exploring UX research as a design specialization , here’s your complete introduction to conducting user research like a pro. 

Hello, I’m Raven, a mentor for aspiring UX designers enrolled in the CareerFoundry UX Design Course . I also work as a UX Research Assistant at IBM and studied behavioral science at the University of Texas. I have 10 years of experience studying and analyzing human behavior—user research is definitely my thing.

During the past few years, I’ve worked with major companies, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations to develop and improve impactful products and applications. I’ve moderated focus groups, designed and administered surveys, carried out usability testing, and conducted user interviews. I also know a thing or two about creating a good persona!

In this guide, we’re going to cover the basics of UX research. We’ll start with exactly what it is, and then move on to discuss the various steps and associated terminology of UX research , as well as its role and value within the broader design process . We’ll then review the most common UX research methods, diving into how they’re conducted and a few best practices.

If you’re particularly interested in one of these topics, simply select it from the list below to jump straight to it. I’ve also added videos throughout the guide for those of you who prefer to learn with both eyes and ears—and I recommend you save this set of free UX research tutorials for later, too. Sound good? Let’s get started!

Introduction To User Experience (UX) Research

• What is UX research?
• What’s the difference between good and bad UX research?
• What are the five steps of UX research?
• What’s the role of research in the UX design process?
• Whats the value of UX research?

Introduction To User Experience Research Methods

• User Groups
• Usability Testing
• User Interviews
• Online Surveys
• User Personas
• What Next? User Research Analysis

1. What is UX research?

You read my bio in the introduction. Using only this information, could you explain why I recently switched from one time management app to another? Probably not. In order to answer this question, you need more context. UX research provides that context.  So, what is UX research and what is its purpose ?

“User research is how you will know your product or service will work in the real world, with real people. It’s where you will uncover or validate the user needs which should form the basis of what you are designing.”

— Chris Mears, UXr

According to Design Modo , UX research is; “The process of understanding user behaviors, needs, and attitudes using different observation and feedback collection methods.” One of the other benefits of user experience research is that it helps us understand how people live their lives so that we can respond to their needs with informed design solutions. Good UX research involves using the right method at the right time during the development of a product.

Maria Arvidsson, Head of Product and UX at Usabilla , describes UX research as:

“The means through which you try to understand your users’ needs, behaviors and motivations and validate your assumptions and solutions.”

2. What’s the difference between good and bad UX research?

The biggest sign of an amateur UX designer is excluding end users from the design process. At the very start of my career I held the attitude that I could test any app, website, or product on myself, replacing the act of speaking with users. Never a good idea. It took time for me to learn a more professional approach, which is to start the design process by listening to the end user. Overall, UX research helps us avoid our biases since we are required to design solutions for people who are not like us.

“Insights that are received directly from user experience research are like muscle memory; the more you do research, the more insights you build up. But just like muscle memory, YOU have to be a part of the hard work in order to enjoy the lasting benefits of it that are specific to you. While it may be tempting to outsource research to a specialized team (and sometimes you can’t avoid it), you should try your utmost best to engage in at least a little bit of the research so that the insights grow under your skin instead of being handed to you from someone else who has sweated it.” 

—UX designer Ali Rushdan Tariq from ARTariq

A quick plug before we continue: If you’re looking to become a professional in this subdomain of UX, be sure to take a look at our guide to becoming a UX researcher

3. What are the five steps of UX research?

Created by Erin Sanders , the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for conducting UX research. The first two steps are about forming questions and hypotheses, and the last three steps are about gathering knowledge through selected UX research methods.

• Objectives: What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
• Hypotheses: What do we think we understand about our users?
• Methods: Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
• Conduct: Gather data through the selected methods.
• Synthesize: Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

4. What’s the role of research in the UX design process?

UX research is the starting point for a project . Research helps us learn about the users and their behavior, goals, motivations, and needs. It also shows us how they currently navigate a system, where they have problems and, most importantly, how they feel when interacting with our product.

UX research comes first in the UX design process because without it, our work can only be based on our own experiences and assumptions, which is not objective. As Neil Turner, founder of UX for the Masses told us, a good foundation is key to successful design:

“Good user research is key to designing a great user experience. Designing without good user research is like building a house without solid foundations—your design will soon start to crumble and eventually fall apart.”

5. What’s the value of UX research?

In the current digital product landscape, the real value of UX research is its ability to reduce uncertainty in terms of what users want and need , which yields benefits for the product, the business, and, of course, the users themselves.

1. Product Benefits

UX research provides data about the end user of the product, how and when the user will use the product, and the main problems the product will solve. UX research is also helpful when UX designers and the rest of the team (and stakeholders) have to decide between multiple design solutions.

2. Business Benefits

UX research brings a lot of a value to businesses. By knowing the end users and incorporating design requirements upfront, businesses can speed up the product development process, eliminate redesign costs, and increase user satisfaction.

3. User Benefits

One of the greatest values of user experience research is that it’s unbiased user feedback. Simply put, UX research speaks the user’s thoughts—without any influence from outside authority. It also serves as a bridge between users and the company.

“User experience research provides powerful insights that allow companies to humanize their customers and insert their needs, intentions, and behaviors into the design and development process. In turn, these insights enable companies to create experiences that meet—and sometimes exceed—customer needs and expectations. User experience research should be conducted well before the first sketch is drawn and integrated throughout the concept, iterative design, and launch phases of a product.”

—Janelle Estes, Director of Research Strategy at UserTesting

UX research is based on observation, understanding,  and analysis.  With the help of various UX research techniques, you will:

• O bserve your users , keeping an eye out for non-verbal clues as to how they are feeling;
• Develop an understanding of the user’s mental model : what does the user anticipate when using a certain product? Based on their previous experience, how do they expect this particular product to work?
• A nalyze  the insights you’ve gathered and try to identify patterns and trends. Eventually, these insights will inform the decisions you make about the product and how it is designed.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the most valuable user research techniques.

1. User Groups

User groups—also called “focus group discussions” or “focus groups”—are structured interviews that quickly and inexpensively reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of a target audience. User groups are a helpful user experience research method when a company needs a lot of insight in a short amount of time. If you are unsure when to use a user experience research method, user groups can be a good one to start with.

Why Do We Conduct User Groups?

User groups can help your company better understand:

1) How users perceive a product

2) What users believe are a product’s most important features

3) What problems users experience with the product

4) Where users feel the product fails to meet expectations

User groups can also be used to generate ideas of what users want to see in the future.

What people say and what people do are often very different, therefore user groups do not provide an accurate measurement of behavior . And because user groups are conducted with more than one user at a time, participants may influence each other’s opinions and preferences (aka “groupthink”), thus introducing bias and producing inaccurate data.

Best Practices For User Groups

Getting the most out of your user group is straightforward if you consider the following best practices when conducting this particular user research technique.

• Ask good questions: Make sure your questions are clear, open-ended, and focused on the topics you’re investigating.
• Choose a few topics: On average, plan to discuss 3-5 topics during a 90-minute focus group.
• Include the right amount of people: A good focus group should include 3-6 users—large enough to include a variety of perspectives, but small enough so everyone has a chance to speak.

“Conducting user research allows you to dive deep beneath the surface of what your users say they want, to instead uncover what they actually need. It’s the key to ensuring that your products and features will actually solve the problems that your clients face on a day to day basis. User research is imperative if you want to create a successful, habit forming product.”

— Jennifer Aldrich, UX and Content Strategist at InVisionApp

How To Conduct User Experience Research With User Groups

Conducting user groups can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Create a schedule that provides enough time for recruiting, testing, analyzing, and integrating results.
• Assemble your team, and establish roles: choose a moderator, note-taker, and discussion leader.
• Define the scope of your research: what questions will you ask? And how in-depth do you want to explore the answers? This will determine the number of people and the number of groups that need to be tested.
• Create a discussion guide that includes 3-5 topics for discussion.
• Recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback.
• Conduct user group testing, and record data.
• Analyze and report findings.

“It’s really hard to design products by user groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

—Steve Jobs

2. Usability Testing

According to the usability.gov website, usability testing refers to “evaluating a product or service by testing it with representative users.” During a test, participants will be asked to complete specific tasks while one or more observers watch, listen, and record notes. The main goal of this user experience testing method is to identify usability problems, collect qualitative data, and determine participants’ overall satisfaction with the product.

Why Do We Perform Usability Testing?

Usability testing helps identify problems before they are coded. When development issues are identified early on, it is typically less expensive to fix them. Usability testing also reveals how satisfied users are with the product , as well as what changes are required to improve user satisfaction and performance .

Unfortunately, usability testing is not 100% representative of the real life scenario in which a user will engage with your product. Also, because the data is qualitative, this kind of UX testing method doesn’t provide the large samples of feedback a questionnaire might. The good news it that the qualitative feedback you receive can be far more accurate and insightful.

Best Practices For Usability Testing

• Test with five users: Testing five users is typically enough to identify a design’s most important usability problems.
• Invite your team to the testing sessions: Anyone who is involved with how fast and how well problems are addressed should be invited to the usability testing sessions. These stakeholders may include the executive team, and lead developers or designers.
• Keep the findings brief and to-the-point: When you report the findings of a usability test, limit the comments to the ones that are really important. One good rule of thumb is to include the top three positive comments and the top three problems. The overall report should be no more than approximately 50 comments and 30 pages.

How to Conduct UX Research with Usability Testing

Usability testing can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Identify what needs to be tested and why (e.g. a new product, feature, etc.)
• Identify the target audience (or your desired customers).
• Create a list of tasks for the participants to work through.
• Recruit the right participants for the test.
• Involve the right stakeholders.
• Apply what you learn.

“One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that ‘you are not the user.’ If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.”

– Jakob Nielsen

3. User Interviews

A well-known user experience methodology is an interview. An interview is a user experience research method used to discover the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of users (and potential users) of a product. Interviews are typically conducted by one interviewer speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an hour. Interviews can take place face-to-face, over the phone, or via video streaming.

Why Do We Conduct Interviews?

Of all the user experience design methods, interviews are typically conducted at the beginning of the product development cycle when reviewing product goals. Because of the one-to-one nature of the interview, individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up.

Face-to-face interviews also allow you to capture verbal and nonverbal cues, such as emotions and body language, which may identify enthusiasm for the product or discomfort with the questions.

When thinking about what research methodology to use, bear in mind that interviews are also a good supplement to online surveys: conducting an interview beforehand helps you refine questions for the survey, while conducting an interview afterwards allows you to gain explanations for survey answers.

There are a few drawbacks, however. First, because interviews require a team of people to conduct them, personnel costs are usually difficult to keep low. Sample size is also limited to the size of the interviewing staff.

Best Practices For User Interviews

• Hire a skilled interviewer: A skilled interviewer asks questions in a neutral manner, listens well, makes users feel comfortable, and knows when and how to probe for more details.
• Create a discussion guide: Write up a discussion guide (or an interview protocol) for all interviewers to follow. This guide should include questions and follow-up questions.
• Get informed consent: Before conducting the interview, make sure to get permission or consent to record the session. It’s also good to have one or two note takers on hand.

How To Conduct User Experience Research With User Interviews

Conducting an interview can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Prepare a discussion guide, or a list of questions to ask participants.
• Select a recording method (e.g. written notes, tape recorder, video).
• Conduct at least one trial run of the interview.
• Recruit the right participants for the interview.
• Conduct the interview.
• Analyze and report the results.

“Curiosity is a natural outcome of caring, and it is the single greatest contributor to effective user research … Caring and curiosity engender personal investment, and investment motivates a researcher to develop a deep understanding of users.”

– Demetrius Madrigal

4. Online Surveys

A survey is a research tool that typically includes a set of questions used to find out the preferences, attitudes, and opinions of your users on a given topic. Today, surveys are generally conducted online and in various lengths and formats. Data collected from surveys is received automatically, and the survey tool selected generally provides some level of analysis, the data from which can then be used for user experience studies further down the line to inform your product.

“It is so important to avoid using leading questions when it comes to surveys. It’s a common mistake that many people make. For example phrasing a question like “What do you dislike about Uber?” assumes the user has a negative preference for the service off the bat. A more neutral phrase would be “Tell us about your experience getting around town.” – this elicits more natural user feedback and behavior instead of forcing them down a funnel.”

– Top tip from UXBeginner

Why Do We Conduct Online Surveys?

Unlike traditional surveys, online surveys enable companies to quickly collect data from a broad (and sometimes remote) audience for free—or a low price. Surveys also help you discover who your users are , what your users want to accomplish, and what information your users are looking for.

Unfortunately, what users say versus what they do are two different things and can often yield inaccurate results. Furthermore, poorly worded questions can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue—many people hate taking long surveys. This is why it’s important to create short surveys so users are more likely to complete them and participate in future research efforts.

Best Practices For Online Surveys

• Keep it short: Keep your surveys brief, especially if participants will be compensated little or not at all. Only focus on what is truly important.
• Keep it simple: Make sure questions can be easily understood: ambiguous or complex wording can make questions more difficult to understand, which can bring the data into question.
• Keep it engaging: Include a mix of both multiple choice questions and open-ended questions (or questions in which users complete the answer).

How To Conduct User Experience Research With Online Surveys

Conducting an online survey can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Identify goals and objectives of the survey.
• Create survey questions.

Note: Consider collecting information about how satisfied users are with your product, what users like/dislike, and if they have suggestions for improvement.

• Select an online survey tool (e.g. SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics).
• Recruit participants.
• Conduct the survey.

“We have to arm ourselves with data, research … and a clear understanding of our users so our decisions are not made out of fear but out of real, actionable information. Although our clients may not have articulated reasons for why they want what they want, it is our responsibility to have an ironclad rationale to support our design decisions.”

– Debra Levin Gelman

5. User Personas

A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. A persona is generally based on user research and includes the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of your target audience. You can find out how to create a user persona in this detailed guide .

Why Do We Create User Personas?

Whether you’re developing a smartphone app or a mobile-responsive website, any user experience research job will require you to understand who will be using the product. Knowing your audience will help influence the features and design elements you choose, thus making your product more useful. A persona clarifies who is in your target audience by answering the following questions:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
• What are the needs and goals of my users?

Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful product. Well-defined personas will enable you to efficiently identify and communicate user needs. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product, which is essential to your overall value proposition.

Unfortunately, creating personas can be expensive — it all depends on how deep into user research your organization is willing to go. There is also no real “scientific logic” behind persona building, which makes some people a little more hesitant to accept them.

Best Practices For User Personas

• Create a well-defined user persona: A great persona contains four key pieces of information: header, demographic profile, end goal(s), scenario.
• Keep personas brief: As a rule of thumb, avoid adding extra details that cannot be used to influence the design. If it does not affect the final design or help make any decisions easier: omit it.
• Make personas specific and realistic: Avoid exaggerated caricatures, and include enough detail to help you find real-life representation.

How To Conduct User Experience Research By Creating Personas

Creating user personas can be broken down into these main steps:

• Discuss and identify who your target users are with stakeholders (e.g. UX team, marketing team, product manager).
• Survey and/or interview real users to get their demographic information, pain points, and preferences.
• Condense the research, and look for themes to define your groups.
• Organize your groups into personas.
• Test your personas.

“Be someone else. It takes great empathy to create a good experience. To create relevant experiences, you have to forget everything you know and design for others. Align with the expected patience, level of interest, and depth of knowledge of your users. Talk in the user’s language.”

– Niko Nyman

Which User Experience Research Method Should You Use?

Now that you know more about the various user experience research methods, which one do you choose? Well, it all depends on your overall research goals.

You’ll also need to consider what stage you’re at in the design process. If you’re just starting out, you’ll want to focus on understanding your users and the underlying problem . What are you trying to solve? Who are you trying to solve it for? At this early stage in the design process, you’ll typically use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods such as field studies, diary studies, surveys, and data mining.

Once you’ve established a direction for your design, you’ll start to think about actually building your product. Your UX research will now focus on evaluating your designs and making sure that they adequately address your users’ needs . So, you’ll choose research methods that can help you to optimize your designs and improve usability—such as card sorting and usability testing.

Eventually, you’ll have finalized your design and developed a working product—but this doesn’t mean your research is done! This is the ideal time to investigate how well the product performs in the real world. At this point, you’ll focus mainly on quantitative research methods , such as usability benchmarking, surveys, and A/B testing.

To help you with the task of choosing your research methods, let’s explore some important distinctions between the various techniques.

Behavioral vs. Attitudinal Research

As mentioned before, there is a big difference between “what people do” versus “what people say.” Attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure behaviors. For example, usability testing is a behavioral user research method that focuses on action and performance. By contrast, user research methods like user groups, interviews, and persona creation focus on how people think about a product.

UX designers often conduct task analysis to see not how users say they complete tasks in a user flow, but how they actually do.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

When conducting UX research and choosing a suitable method, it’s important to understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative research   gathers data that is measurable. It gives you clear-cut figures to work with, such as how many users purchased an item via your e-commerce app, or what percentage of visitors added an item to their wishlist. “Quant methods”, as they’re sometimes called in the industry, help you to put a number on the usability of your product. They also allow you to compare different designs and determine if one version performs significantly better than another.

Qualitative research   explores the reasons or motivations behind these actions. Why did the user bounce from your website? What made them “wishlist” an item instead of purchasing it? While quantitative data is fixed, qualitative data is more descriptive and open-ended. You can learn all about qualitative research in the video guide below, in which CareerFoundry graduate and professional UX designer Maureen Herben takes you through the most common qualitative user research processes and tools.

A further distinction to make is between how qualitative and quantitative studies go about collecting data. Studies that are qualitative in nature are based on direct observation. For example, you’ll gather data about the user’s behaviours or attitudes by observing them directly in action. Quantitative studies gather this data indirectly—through an online survey, for example.

Qualitative research methods (e.g. usability testing, user groups, interviews) are better for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem, whereas quantitative methods (e.g. online surveys) are great for answering questions about how many and how much.

Ideally, you’ll use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods throughout your user research, and work hard to ensure that the UX research you conduct is inclusive !

6. What Next? Conducting User Research Analysis

Once you’ve conducted extensive user research, you’ll move on to the analysis phase. This is where you’ll turn the raw data you’ve gathered into valuable insights. The purpose of UX research analysis is to interpret what the data means; what does it tell you about the product you’re designing, and the people you’re designing it for? How can you use the data you’ve gathered to inform the design process?

Watch this video to learn how to conduct user research analysis in five simple steps:

Final thoughts

“User experience research is the work that uncovers and articulates the needs of individuals and/or groups in order to inform the design of products and services in a structured manner.”

—Nick Remis, Adaptive Path

Overall, the purpose of user experience research is simple: to discover patterns and reveal unknown insights and preferences from the people who use your product. It basically provides the context for our design. Research also helps us fight the tendency to design for ourselves (or our stakeholders)—and returns the focus on designing for the user.

If you’d like to learn more about UX research, check out these articles:

• What Does a UX Researcher Actually Do? The Ultimate Career Guide
• The Ultimate Guide to UX Research Bootcamps
• Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your UX Research Portfolio
• Interview Toolkit: Top 5 UX Research Questions to Prepare For

And to get inspired, check out these 15 quotes from influential designers in the industry.

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User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It

User research is an essential part of UX design. Unless we understand who we are designing for and why, how can we even know what to create or where to begin? Depending on your project, requirements and constraints, you can choose different types of research methods, from surveys and tests to interviews and the most common method — usability testing. Here, we’ll look at what user research is, and the three most common reasons for doing user research — namely, to create designs that are truly relevant, to create designs that are easy and pleasurable to use, and to understand the return on investment of your user experience (UX) design .

What is User Research?

User research, or “design research,” as it’s sometimes called, covers a wide range of methods. It can mean anything from doing ethnographic interviews with your target group, to classical usability studies, to quantitative measurements of return on investment (ROI) on your user experience design. What all user research has in common is that it helps place people at the center of your design process and your products . You use user research to inspire your design, to evaluate your solutions, and to measure your impact. User research (and other kinds of research) is often divided into quantitative and qualitative methods.

Surveys and formal experiments such as A/B testing and tree testing are examples of quantitative research tools. Quantitative user research methods seek to measure user behavior in a way that can be quantified and used for statistical analysis.

Interviews and (to some degree) usability tests are examples of qualitative research tools. These are often more exploratory and seek to get an in-depth understanding of the experiences and everyday lives of individual users or user groups.

Each research method has benefits and drawbacks. As such, each can be used for achieving different goals. Which method you choose depends on what you want to achieve as well as a number of practical concerns, such as what type of project you are working on, your budget and your time constraints. With that in mind, let’s look at some different reasons for why you should involve users in your design process.

Three Good Reasons for Doing User Research

“ Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” — Tim Brown, CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO

The type of user research you should do depends on your work process as well as your reason for doing user research in the first place. Here are three excellent reasons for doing user research:

1. To Create Designs That are Truly Relevant

If you understand your users, you can make designs that are relevant for them. If you don’t have a clear understanding of your users, you have no way of knowing whether your design will be relevant. A design that is not relevant to its target audience will never be a success .

The first step and core of the design thinking process is to empathize with your users. User research is one of the best ways to do that. Conducting different types of interviews and observing people in the contexts where they will use your design is a common method of doing this type of user research. We often place this type of research at the very beginning of a project to ensure that the overall direction for the project is relevant to potential customers and users. In order to ensure that your design continues to be relevant as your project progresses, validating your ideas with prospective users on a continuous basis is a vital habit to stick to. Talk to them about how they perceive your design and how they could imagine using it, or involve them directly in your design process, to ensure that you are still on the right track.

Let’s look at an example: In 2005, Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung did a number of ethnographic user studies that completely changed the way it thought about designing TVs. Together with the innovation and strategy consultancy ReD Associates, Samsung representatives visited people in different countries to observe how they live and to talk to them about their homes and the TV’s role in their homes. What they found surprised them. At the time, Samsung and most other TV manufacturers primarily designed their TVs with technical specs such as high-quality picture and sound in mind. The TVs were designed to show off their technical capabilities, but what Samsung found when visiting people was that they viewed a TV more like a piece of furniture . As a TV is turned off most of the time, people do not want it to dominate their living room. So, rather than show off their expensive TV with all its technological capabilities, they tried to hide it away as much as possible.

Following this insight, Samsung changed its design strategy radically, moving the inbuilt speakers to make the TV slimmer and creating a subtler, minimalistic design that would fit more seamlessly into people’s living rooms. Technical capabilities were still important, but they had to be balanced with design choices that made the TVs fit into people’s homes. “Home” was the watchword here, and Samsung got hard to work on the transformation. The challenge involved getting away from treating a living room like a showroom or sports bar, and going for “harmony” instead. By 2007, Samsung had doubled its share in the global TV market because it had proven to understand how to make its TVs relevant to its customers.

User research made Samsung change its TV design strategy to focus on making more minimalistic designs that fit into the customer’s home. Although TVs have not become smaller, everything extraneous has been removed. As we see here, the TV functions as a gallery-sized moving picture — with all the “bells and whistles” discreetly housed — light-years away from the old notion of “peacocking” its technical prowess as if it were a James Bond gadget.

2. To Create Designs That are Easy and Pleasurable to Use

“If the user is having a problem, it’s our problem.” — Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers

All products should have a high level of usability (i.e., be easy to use ), and usability tests can be a big help in achieving that. The days when programmed technology was a tool only to be used by experts are long gone. People expect products to be easy to learn and easy to use. They expect to pick them up and do things with them while only thinking about what they hope to achieve, not having to think about the products themselves. If your user experience is not good, chances are that people will move on to another product . Unless you work in a field with no competitors, a high level of usability (and a matching high-quality user experience) is essential in making any product a commercial success. Not to mention that your users will love you for creating a great user experience. Even if you are designing products for — e.g. — a highly specialized work environment where the users have no alternatives, products with a high level of usability will make work processes faster, safer and more efficient.

Wikiwand is a good example of a company that operates solely on providing a great user experience. Their product is a browser plugin which changes the design of Wikipedia articles to make them more appealing and user-friendly. Wikiwand does not provide different content from the classic Wikipedia webpage, but the company has thousands of users who praise it for the awesome user experience it delivers.

To the left is the classic Wikipedia interface; to the right is the Wikiwand version of the same article. The content is the same, but the experience is different.

When you are designing or developing a product, you become the primary expert on how to use it and what functionalities it has. Because you know your own product so well, however, you can become blind to functionality in your product that is difficult to use. As designers, we need that level of understanding of our products, but it also means that we can all too easily shift far away from the same perspective as our users. The author has personally participated in many projects where the designers know the ideas behind the interface and functionality of a product so well that separating the understandable from the not-so understandable is really difficult for them. This tendency of seeing things from the point of view of one’s profession — what we call “déformation professionnelle” — and not stepping back to catch the reality of what’s going on from a fresh, generalist angle is a natural one, incidentally.

Happily, though, you can avoid a lot of usability issues by following various guidelines and rules of thumb, but there will always be situations that the guidelines don’t cover, or where different guidelines tell you different things. You might also be designing for a target group such as seniors or children where the regular guidelines do not apply. That means testing the user experience of your product is always a good idea. Usability tests work best when they are an integrated part of your work process so that you test your product iteratively and from an early stage of development onward. Early tests are what we can do on primitive prototypes — e.g., using paper; from there, we progress to more refined prototypes until we have something that resembles the final product. If you only start testing when you have an almost-finished product, you run a very serious risk in that your findings might come too late for you to make larger changes to the product. For instance, if all the software is done or if you can’t push your release date, you’ll have your back against the wall. So, stay fluid with your design until the very end of the process — it’s amazing what insights can come from an eleventh-hour test of the ‘last’ version you have planned for rollout.

3. To Understand the Return on Investment of Your UX Design

Although the importance of good design has become widely recognized, UX designers and researchers still experience having to fight for resources to enable them to do their work. Executives and shareholders sometimes fail to see the value in investing in user research and UX design. UX design and user research is not as tangible as new features or fixing software bugs; so, overlooking their value can happen all the more easily. If resources become scarce, UX is also often one of the first areas to experience cuts; the reason is that consequences are not as immediately felt as when you save on development or similar areas. If you make cuts in say, software development, you can immediately see that the consequences involve cutting back on features or having buggy software; however, if you make cuts in UX, you don’t experience the consequences until your product reaches your users, and when your competitors attract your users towards them.

We can easily argue for the value of great UX; it is much more effective if we can show it. This is where studies to show the return on investment (ROI) on UX efforts are worth their weight in gold (or the weight, at least, of the printouts). If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you have a much stronger case for investing in UX. User studies to measure the effect of your design are mostly quantitative and can take different forms. You can do A/B tests during development that compare different versions of your design, or you can do studies after your product is released to measure differences in use patterns. With apps and webpages, you often build in different types of analytics to inform you of different user patterns.

The global online marketplace Etsy is a good example of a company that has built its success on a focus on customer experience throughout the entire customer journey and that continuously measures the user experience. 

For example , Etsy routinely tests different versions of user interfaces to constantly improve the platform’s usability as well as business metrics. Etsy's continued position as one of the largest online marketplaces is a result of its rigorous focus on usability, research and testing.

The world’s most successful companies continually test and iterate their products, as is evident in their A/B tests. Here is one of several that GoodUI has been tracking. You can see more such “leaked” tests from AirBnb, Amazon, Booking, Netflix and others on their website.

The Take Away

Here, we have shown three good reasons for doing user research and we have touched on when in your design process you can integrate user research. Here are the three reasons again:

Do user research to ensure that you create products that are truly relevant to your target group.

Do user research to ensure that your products deliver a great user experience.

Do user research to show the ROI of your design efforts.

You can — and should — do user studies at all stages of the design process. You do studies before you start designing so as to get an understanding of what your target group needs ; you carry out iterative tests during development to ensure that the user experience is on track, and you can measure the effect of your design after your product is released. This “holy trinity” approach can keep you three steps ahead as every dimension of your release will have been considered, analyzed, and tested before you sit down to see the results of the ultimate test (the ROI), more confident that you’ve got a winning design.

References and Where to Learn More

For an in-depth coverage of different user research methods, take the following courses:

User Research – Methods and Best Practices

Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX

In this interview, founder of Wikiwand, Lior Grossman explains the company’s approach to designing a more usable encyclopedia.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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What is UX Research? Methods, Process, Tools, Examples

Appinio Research · 15.02.2024 · 40min read

Ever wondered how successful products and services are meticulously crafted to cater to your needs and preferences? User Experience (UX) research is the key that unlocks the secrets behind creating user-centered designs. In this guide, we will delve deep into UX research, uncovering its methods, strategies, and practical applications. Whether you're a designer, developer, product manager, or simply curious about the science of user satisfaction, this guide will empower you with the knowledge and tools to understand, implement, and benefit from UX research principles.

What is UX Research?

User Experience (UX) Research is a systematic process of understanding and evaluating how users interact with a product, service, or system. It encompasses a wide range of research methods and techniques to gain insights into user behaviors, preferences, needs, and pain points. The ultimate goal of UX research is to inform and improve the design and functionality of products and services to enhance user satisfaction and usability.

Importance of UX Research

Effective UX research plays a pivotal role in shaping user-centered design and development processes. Its significance can be understood through several key points:

• User-Centered Design : UX research places users at the forefront of design decisions, ensuring that products and services are tailored to meet their needs and preferences.
• Enhanced Usability : Research findings lead to improvements that enhance the overall usability of products, reducing user frustration and increasing engagement.
• Cost Reduction : Identifying and addressing usability issues early in the design process can save time and resources by avoiding costly redesigns or post-launch fixes.
• Competitive Advantage : Organizations prioritizing UX research gain a competitive edge by delivering superior user experiences that attract and retain customers.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction : User satisfaction is closely linked to loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, making UX research an investment in long-term customer relationships.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making : Research data provides valuable insights that inform strategic decisions, reducing the guesswork and subjectivity in design choices.

UX Research Goals and Objectives

The primary goals and objectives of UX research revolve around understanding user needs, improving usability, and driving user-centered design. Here are the key objectives that guide UX research efforts:

• User Understanding : Gain a deep understanding of the target audience, including their demographics, behaviors, motivations, and pain points.
• Usability Evaluation : Identify usability issues and challenges users encounter during interactions with a product or service.
• Task Efficiency : Determine how efficiently users can accomplish tasks within a system, with a focus on minimizing friction and errors.
• User Satisfaction : Measure user satisfaction and gather feedback to uncover areas where improvements can enhance overall user experience.
• Feature Prioritization : Assess which features or functionalities are most valuable to users, guiding feature prioritization in development.
• Validation and Iteration : Validate design decisions through testing and iteration, ensuring that changes align with user expectations and preferences.
• Benchmarking : Establish benchmarks to track improvements over time and compare performance to industry standards.
• Evidence-Based Design : Base design decisions on empirical data and user insights, fostering a user-centered and data-driven design culture.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity : Ensure that products and services are accessible to a diverse range of users, including those with disabilities.
• Risk Mitigation : Identify and mitigate potential risks and challenges early in the design process, reducing the likelihood of post-launch issues.
• Continuous Improvement : Embrace a culture of constant improvement, where UX research is an ongoing process that informs product enhancements and updates.

By aligning research efforts with these objectives, organizations can create products and services that resonate with users, leading to increased user satisfaction and business success.

How to Plan UX Research?

Planning is the foundation of any successful UX research project. It sets the direction, defines your objectives, and ensures that your efforts are focused on achieving meaningful outcomes.

Setting Clear Objectives

Setting clear objectives is the first and most crucial step in planning UX research. Your objectives guide the entire research process, helping you stay on track and measure success effectively. When defining objectives, consider the following:

• Specificity : Objectives should be clear and specific. Vague goals can lead to ambiguous research outcomes.
• Relevance : Ensure that your objectives align with the overall goals of your product or project. How will the research contribute to the success of the endeavor?
• Measurability : Define objectives that are measurable. You should be able to determine whether you've achieved them or not.
• Timeframe : Consider the timeline for your research. Are your objectives achievable within the given time frame?

A well-defined objective might look something like this: "To identify pain points in our mobile app's onboarding process by conducting usability testing with 15 participants, with the aim of reducing drop-off rates by 20% within the next quarter."

Identifying Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is fundamental to effective UX research. Your product or service is designed for specific users, and knowing them intimately is essential. When identifying your target audience, keep the following in mind:

• Demographics : Who are your users? What are their age, gender, location, and other relevant demographics?
• Psychographics : Dig deeper into their lifestyles, values, interests, and behaviors. What motivates them, and what are their pain points?
• User Personas : Create user personas to visualize your target audience. Personas help in humanizing and empathizing with your users.
• User Journeys : Map out the typical user journeys to understand the various touchpoints and interactions users have with your product.

Defining Research Questions

Research questions act as the compass that guides your journey through the UX research landscape. They should be well-crafted and directly tied to your objectives. When defining research questions, consider the following:

• Open-Endedness : Craft questions that allow for open-ended responses . Closed-ended questions with yes/no answers can limit the depth of insights.
• Unbiased Language : Ensure that your questions are phrased in a neutral and impartial manner. Biased questions can lead to skewed results.
• Relevance : Are your research questions directly related to your objectives? Avoid asking questions that do not contribute to your research goals.
• User-Centered : Frame questions from the user's perspective. What would users want to know or share about their experience?

For instance, if your objective is to improve the checkout process of an e-commerce website, a research question could be: "What challenges do users encounter during the checkout process, and how can we simplify it to enhance their experience?"

Budgeting and Resource Allocation

Effective UX research requires proper allocation of resources, both in terms of budget and personnel. Before embarking on your research journey:

• Financial Resources : Determine the budget available for your research project. This budget should cover participant incentives, research tools, and any other associated costs.
• Time Allocation : Allocate time appropriately for each phase of the research process, including recruitment, data collection, analysis, and reporting.
• Human Resources : Identify the team members or researchers responsible for conducting the research. Ensure they have the necessary skills and expertise.
• Tools and Software : Assess whether you have access to the required research tools, such as usability testing software, survey platforms, or analytics tools.

Proper budgeting and resource allocation prevent unexpected obstacles and ensure a seamless research process. Remember that investing in UX research is an investment in the overall success of your product or service.

Types of UX Research

When it comes to User Experience (UX) research, understanding the different types of research methodologies is crucial. Each type has its own strengths and applications, allowing you to gather specific insights into user behavior, preferences, and interactions. These are the three primary types of UX research.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research focuses on collecting numerical data to quantify user behaviors, preferences, or attitudes. It involves systematic data collection and statistical analysis. Here's a deeper look into quantitative research:

• Data Collection : Quantitative research relies on structured data collection methods, such as surveys, questionnaires, or data analytics tools. These methods yield data in numerical form.
• Objective Measurement : It aims to provide objective and measurable data. This is particularly useful for answering questions like "How many users performed a specific action?" or "What percentage of users prefer feature A over feature B?"
• Large Sample Sizes : Quantitative research often involves larger sample sizes to ensure statistical significance. This allows for generalizable findings.
• Statistical Analysis : Statistical analysis plays a central role in quantitative research. It helps identify trends, correlations, and patterns within the data.
• A/B Testing : A common application of quantitative research is A/B testing, where two versions of a design or feature are compared to determine which performs better based on quantifiable metrics.

Quantitative research provides valuable insights when you need to make data-driven decisions and understand the broader user trends and preferences within your target audience.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research dives deep into the subjective aspects of the user experience. It seeks to understand the "why" behind user behaviors and motivations. Here's a closer look at qualitative research:

• Data Collection : Qualitative research relies on methods such as user interviews, usability testing, focus groups , and ethnographic studies. These methods capture rich, non-numerical data.
• Subjective Insights : Qualitative research aims to uncover subjective insights. It helps answer questions like "Why do users find a particular feature frustrating?" or "What emotions do users experience during a specific interaction?"
• Small Sample Sizes : Qualitative research typically involves smaller sample sizes but offers in-depth insights into individual experiences.
• Contextual Understanding : Researchers often engage with users in their natural environment or within the context of product use. This provides a holistic understanding of user behaviors.
• Thematic Analysis : Qualitative data is analyzed through techniques like thematic coding, where common themes and patterns in user feedback are identified.

Qualitative research is particularly valuable when you want to gain a deeper understanding of user needs, pain points, and the emotional aspects of their interactions with your product or service.

Mixed-Methods Research

Mixed-methods research combines elements of both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. It offers a comprehensive view of the user experience by leveraging the strengths of both methodologies. Here's what you need to know about mixed-methods research:

• Data Variety : Mixed-methods research involves collecting both numerical and non-numerical data. This includes quantitative data from surveys and qualitative data from interviews or observations.
• Holistic Insights : By combining quantitative and qualitative data, researchers can gain a more complete and nuanced understanding of user behavior and preferences.
• Sequential or Concurrent : Mixed-methods research can be conducted sequentially (first quantitative, then qualitative) or concurrently (simultaneously collecting both types of data).
• Data Integration : Researchers must carefully integrate and analyze the data from both sources to draw comprehensive conclusions.
• Complementary Insights : The aim is to complement the strengths of one method with the weaknesses of the other, providing a more well-rounded perspective.

Mixed-methods research is valuable when you want to explore complex user experiences, understand the reasons behind quantitative trends, or validate findings from one method with the other. It offers a holistic approach to UX research that can lead to more informed design decisions.

How to Conduct UX Research?

Now that you've laid the groundwork and explored the types of UX research, it's time to delve into the practical aspects of conducting UX research.

Recruitment: Finding the Right Participants

Recruiting participants is a crucial step in UX research. The quality of your research outcomes depends on selecting the right participants who represent your target audience. Here's how to do it effectively:

• Define Participant Criteria : Begin by defining specific criteria for your participants. These criteria should align with your research objectives. For instance, if you're testing a healthcare app, you might require participants who have experience with healthcare services.
• Recruitment Channels : Determine where and how you will find participants. Common recruitment channels include online platforms, user testing services, or in-house databases.
• Incentives : Consider offering incentives to motivate participants. This could be monetary compensation, gift cards, or access to your product or service.
• Screening : Screen potential participants to ensure they meet your criteria. Conducting a screening interview or questionnaire can help filter out inappropriate candidates.

Sampling: Choosing the Right Sample Size

Sampling involves selecting a subset of your target audience for research. The size and representativeness of your sample are critical for obtaining reliable results:

• Sample Size : Determine the appropriate sample size based on your research goals and statistical requirements. Larger samples enhance the reliability of your findings.
• Random Sampling : Whenever possible, aim for random sampling to reduce bias. Randomly selecting participants from your target population increases the likelihood of obtaining a representative sample.
• Stratified Sampling : In cases where certain user segments are essential, consider stratified sampling. This ensures that each segment is adequately represented in your sample.

Recruitment and sampling are foundational elements of UX research, ensuring that the data collected accurately reflects the perspectives of your intended user base.

Choosing the Right Data Collection Methods

Selecting the most suitable data collection methods is vital for gathering relevant and meaningful information. Depending on your research objectives, you can utilize various methods:

• Usability Testing : Usability testing involves observing users as they interact with your product or prototype. It provides direct insights into how users navigate and use your design.
• Surveys and Questionnaires : Surveys are useful for gathering structured, quantitative data. They allow you to collect responses from a large number of participants quickly.
• Interviews : Interviews offer a deeper understanding of user experiences by engaging participants in open-ended conversations. They are particularly effective for uncovering motivations and pain points.
• Observations : Observational studies involve watching users in their natural context, providing insights into real-world behavior.
• Eye-Tracking : Eye-tracking technology can reveal where users focus their attention within your design, helping to optimize layouts and content placement.
• Heatmaps : Heatmaps display aggregated user interactions, highlighting areas of interest and interaction intensity within your design.
• Card Sorting : Card sorting exercises help organize information and navigation structures based on how users group and label items.

Choosing the proper data collection methods depends on your research goals, the type of insights you seek, and the available resources. When it comes to data collection, Appinio offers a streamlined solution that simplifies the process and ensures actionable results.

With Appinio , you can effortlessly design surveys, target specific demographics, and gather insights from a diverse pool of respondents. Whether you're conducting usability testing, administering surveys, or conducting interviews, Appinio provides the tools you need to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.

Ready to elevate your UX research? Book a demo with Appinio today and experience the power of real-time consumer insights firsthand!

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Making Sense of Collected Data

Once data is collected, the next step is to analyze it effectively. Proper data analysis is critical for drawing meaningful insights and conclusions:

• Quantitative Analysis : For quantitative data collected through surveys or analytics, use statistical analysis techniques to identify patterns, correlations, and statistically significant findings.
• Qualitative Analysis : Qualitative data, such as interview transcripts or open-ended survey responses, requires thematic coding and content analysis to uncover themes, trends, and user sentiments.
• Mixed-Methods Integration : In mixed-methods research, integrate both quantitative and qualitative data to provide a comprehensive understanding of the user experience.
• Usability Metrics : When conducting usability testing, use established usability metrics such as task completion rates, time on task, and error rates to evaluate user performance.
• Data Visualization : Visualize your data using charts, graphs, and diagrams to make complex information more accessible and understandable.

Data analysis transforms raw data into actionable insights that inform design improvements and decision-making.

Improving User Experience Through Testing

Usability testing is a fundamental UX research method that involves observing users as they interact with your product or prototype. It helps identify usability issues and gather direct feedback for improvement:

• Test Planning : Begin by creating test scenarios and tasks that align with your research objectives. Determine what you want participants to accomplish during the test.
• Recruitment : Recruit participants who match your target audience and meet your criteria. Ensure they represent the diversity of your user base.
• Moderated vs. Unmoderated Testing : Choose between moderated (where a facilitator guides participants) and unmoderated (participants complete tasks independently) usability testing, depending on your needs and resources.
• Task Observation : Observe participants as they navigate your design, paying attention to their interactions, struggles, and feedback.
• Think-Aloud Protocol : Encourage participants to vocalize their thoughts and feelings during the test. This provides insights into their cognitive processes.
• Post-Test Interviews : Conduct post-test interviews to gather deeper insights. Ask participants about their overall experience, pain points, and suggestions for improvement.
• Iterative Testing : Usability testing is often an iterative process. After making design changes based on feedback, conduct additional tests to validate improvements.

Usability testing helps uncover issues that may not be apparent through other research methods, leading to improved user satisfaction and product usability.

Collecting Quantitative Insights

Surveys and questionnaires are valuable tools for collecting structured, quantitative data from a large number of participants. They can provide insights into user preferences, satisfaction, and demographics:

• Survey Design : Carefully design your survey or questionnaire , ensuring questions are clear, concise, and relevant to your research objectives.
• Sampling : Distribute your survey to a representative sample of your target audience to obtain meaningful results.
• Response Scale : Choose an appropriate response scale, such as Likert scales or multiple-choice questions, depending on the type of data you want to collect.
• Pre-Testing : Before launching your survey, conduct pre-testing to identify and address any potential issues with question wording or survey flow.
• Data Analysis : Once survey responses are collected, perform statistical analysis to uncover patterns and correlations within the data.

Surveys and questionnaires are efficient tools for gathering quantitative data, making them ideal for measuring user satisfaction, preferences, and trends.

Interviews and Observations

Interviews and observations provide qualitative insights that can help you understand the "why" behind user behaviors and motivations:

• Interview Types : Choose between structured, semi-structured, or unstructured interviews, depending on your research goals. Structured interviews use predefined questions, while unstructured interviews allow for open-ended conversations.
• Participant Selection : Select participants who represent your target audience and can provide diverse perspectives.
• Interview Moderation : During interviews, create a comfortable environment for participants to share their thoughts openly. Encourage them to expand on their responses.
• Observations : When conducting observational research, carefully observe users in their natural context or during product use. Take notes on their actions, gestures, and expressions.
• Contextual Inquiry : Contextual inquiries involve observing users while they perform specific tasks related to your product or service. This approach provides insights into real-world behavior.
• Data Interpretation : Analyze interview transcripts and observational notes using thematic coding or content analysis to identify recurring themes and patterns.

Interviews and observations allow you to gain a deep understanding of user experiences, uncover pain points, and inform design decisions from a user-centered perspective.

With these data collection methods at your disposal, you can tailor your approach to gather the most relevant insights for your specific UX research objectives. Whether you choose to observe user interactions, administer surveys, conduct interviews, or run usability tests , each method offers unique advantages for understanding and improving the user experience.

How to Interpret UX Research Data?

As you gather data through various UX research methods, the next critical step is to analyze and interpret this data effectively. This process involves transforming raw information into actionable insights that can drive design improvements and strategic decisions.

Visualizing Insights for Clarity

Data visualization is a powerful technique for making complex data more accessible and understandable. It involves representing data graphically through charts, graphs, and diagrams. Here's why data visualization matters and how to use it effectively:

• Simplify Complex Data : Data visualization simplifies large datasets and helps users quickly grasp trends and patterns.
• Enhance Communication : Visual representations of data are often more effective in conveying information than raw numbers or text.
• Choose the Right Visualization : Select the appropriate type of visualization based on the data and the story you want to tell. Common types include bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, and heatmaps.
• Labels and Legends : Ensure that your visualizations have clear labels, legends, and scales. This makes it easier for viewers to understand and interpret the data.
• Interactivity : In digital formats, consider adding interactivity to allow users to explore data further by hovering, clicking, or filtering.
• Data Storytelling : Use data visualizations to tell a compelling story. Explain the context, highlight key findings, and guide viewers through the insights.

Data visualization aids in identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies within your data, helping you make informed decisions based on a visual representation of your research findings.

Identifying Patterns and Trends

Identifying patterns and trends within your data is essential for understanding user behavior and preferences. Here's how to effectively uncover these insights:

• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) : Begin with an exploratory analysis of your data. Visualizations, such as histograms, box plots, and scatterplots, can reveal patterns and outliers.
• Segmentation : Segment your data by relevant variables (e.g., demographics , psychographic , user behaviors) to identify patterns within specific groups.
• Statistical Analysis : Use statistical methods to analyze your data quantitatively. Techniques like regression analysis, correlation, and hypothesis testing can uncover relationships and trends.
• Time Series Analysis : If your data includes time-based information, such as user interactions over time, use time series analysis to identify temporal trends and seasonality.
• Qualitative Data : For qualitative data from interviews or open-ended survey responses, use thematic coding to identify recurring themes and insights.
• Comparative Analysis : Compare data before and after design changes or between different user groups to assess the impact of interventions.

Identifying patterns and trends in your data allows you to deeply understand user behaviors, preferences, and pain points, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Turning Data into Actionable Knowledge

Drawing insights and conclusions from your data is the ultimate goal of UX research. It's the stage where you transform data into actionable knowledge that informs design improvements and strategic decisions:

• Hypothesis Validation : Determine whether your research findings align with your initial hypotheses and objectives.
• Prioritization : Prioritize the most significant insights and findings. Focus on those that have the most substantial impact on the user experience.
• User-Centered Recommendations : Frame your insights in a user-centered manner. Consider how the findings can benefit users and enhance their interactions with your product or service.
• Iterative Design : Use insights to inform iterative design improvements. Test and validate changes based on research findings to ensure they address identified issues.
• Communicate Effectively : Communicate your insights and conclusions clearly to stakeholders, designers, and developers. Use data-driven evidence to support your recommendations.
• Continuous Learning : UX research is an ongoing process. Continue to learn and adapt based on user feedback and new research findings.

Ultimately, the ability to draw meaningful insights and conclusions from your UX research data is what drives the improvement of user experiences and the success of your products and services. It's the bridge between data collection and impactful action.

Examples of UX Research

To gain a deeper understanding of how UX research is applied in real-world scenarios, let's explore some concrete examples that illustrate its importance and impact.

E-Commerce Website Optimization

Scenario : An e-commerce company notices a high cart abandonment rate on their website, with users frequently leaving before completing their purchases.

UX Research Approach : The company conducts usability testing with a group of participants. They observe users as they navigate the website, add products to their carts, and attempt to complete the checkout process.

Findings : Through usability testing, the research team identifies several issues contributing to cart abandonment. Users struggle with unclear product descriptions, a complex checkout process, and a lack of payment options. Additionally, users express concerns about data security during the payment phase.

Impact : Armed with these insights, the company makes a series of improvements. They streamline the checkout process, improve product descriptions, add multiple payment options, and prominently display security certifications. As a result, cart abandonment rates decrease significantly, leading to a notable increase in completed purchases and revenue.

Mobile App Redesign

Scenario : A mobile app development company receives user feedback indicating that their app is challenging to navigate and lacks key features.

UX Research Approach : The company initiates a comprehensive research effort that includes user interviews, surveys, and competitor analysis. They aim to understand user expectations, pain points, and the strengths of competing apps.

Findings : User interviews reveal that users desire a more intuitive navigation structure and specific features that rival apps offer. Surveys confirm these preferences and competitor analysis uncovers successful design patterns.

Impact : The company embarks on a redesign project based on user feedback and industry best practices. They restructure the app's interface, add requested features, and enhance the overall user experience. As a result, user satisfaction increases, app ratings improve, and user engagement metrics rise.

Healthcare Information Portal Enhancement

Scenario : A healthcare organization operates an online portal where patients access medical records and communicate with healthcare providers. Users report difficulties in finding information and engaging with the portal.

UX Research Approach : The organization employs a mixed-methods research approach, combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative research. They analyze user interactions and survey responses while also conducting in-depth interviews with patients.

Findings : Quantitative data analysis reveals that users frequently abandon tasks without completion, such as accessing test results. Surveys and interviews uncover confusion related to navigation, terminology, and information layout.

Impact : Armed with a comprehensive understanding of user challenges, the organization revamps the portal's navigation, rewrites content in plain language, and introduces user-friendly features such as task wizards. User engagement with the portal increases, and patients report improved satisfaction with the online experience, leading to enhanced patient-provider interactions.

Social Media Platform Feature Expansion

Scenario : A popular social media platform aims to expand its feature set to stay competitive and retain users. However, the platform's leadership wants to ensure that any new features align with user preferences.

UX Research Approach : The social media platform initiates a series of surveys and user feedback sessions. They present users with potential feature concepts and gather their opinions, expectations, and concerns.

Findings : Through surveys and user feedback sessions, the platform discovers that users desire enhanced privacy controls, a more user-friendly post creation process, and better content filtering options. Additionally, users express concerns about the potential impact of new features on their data privacy.

Impact : Armed with user insights, the platform introduces new features while addressing user concerns. They implement robust privacy settings, simplify post creation, and provide users with customizable content filters. User engagement increases as users appreciate the platform's responsiveness to their needs, and user satisfaction remains high.

These examples highlight how UX research methods, such as usability testing, interviews, surveys, and data analysis, can identify specific issues, inform design improvements, and ultimately enhance the user experience. By investing in UX research, organizations can address user pain points, improve product offerings, and stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

How to Report UX Research Findings?

After conducting UX research and drawing valuable insights, the next crucial step is effectively communicating your findings to stakeholders and team members.

Creating Research Reports

Research reports are comprehensive documents that encapsulate your entire UX research process and findings. They serve as a valuable reference for team members and stakeholders. Here's how to create effective research reports:

• Structured Format : Organize your report in a structured format that includes sections such as an executive summary, methodology, key findings, and recommendations.
• Visual Aids : Use visuals such as charts, graphs, and screenshots to illustrate your findings. Visual aids make complex data more accessible.
• Clear Language : Write in clear, concise language that is easily understandable by both technical and non-technical readers.
• Methodology Details : Provide a detailed account of your research methodology, including participant recruitment, data collection methods, and analysis techniques.
• Key Insights : Summarize the most critical findings and insights that emerged from your research. Highlight what these findings mean for the user experience.
• Actionable Recommendations : Include actionable recommendations for improving the product or service based on your research insights.

Creating a well-structured research report ensures that your findings are documented comprehensively and can be referred to as a reference for future decision-making.

Presenting to Stakeholders

Presenting your research findings to stakeholders is essential in the UX research process. It's an opportunity to convey the significance of your insights and garner support for implementing changes.

• Know Your Audience : Understand the background and interests of your audience. Tailor your presentation to their level of expertise and concerns.
• Storytelling : Craft a compelling narrative around your research. Use storytelling techniques to engage your audience and convey the user experience effectively.
• Visuals : Incorporate visuals, such as charts, graphs, and user personas, to illustrate key points and findings.
• Interactive Demonstrations : If possible, demonstrate user interactions or showcase usability improvements through interactive prototypes.
• Key Takeaways : Summarize the main takeaways and actionable recommendations. Highlight how implementing these changes can benefit the organization and users.
• Address Questions : Be prepared to answer questions and provide additional context during the presentation.

Effective presentations not only convey the value of your research but also foster collaboration and support for user-centered improvements.

Making Recommendations

One of the most critical aspects of UX research is translating findings into actionable recommendations that drive improvements in the user experience. Here's how to make recommendations effectively:

• Prioritize Recommendations : Identify and prioritize recommendations based on their potential impact and feasibility. Consider short-term and long-term goals.
• User-Centered Focus : Frame recommendations in a user-centered manner. Explain how implementing each recommendation will directly benefit users.
• Specificity : Make recommendations specific and actionable. Avoid vague suggestions. For example, instead of saying "improve navigation," specify "simplify the main menu structure."
• Data-Backed Evidence : Support recommendations with data-backed evidence from your research. Reference specific findings or user feedback that led to each recommendation.
• Collaboration : Collaborate with designers, developers, and other stakeholders to implement recommendations effectively. Provide guidance and support during the implementation phase.
• Iterative Approach : Recognize that UX research is an ongoing process. Encourage an iterative approach where recommendations are tested, refined, and re-evaluated over time.

Effective recommendations bridge the gap between research findings and meaningful changes that enhance the user experience. They guide product development efforts toward user-centered design and improved satisfaction.

Iterative UX Research

Iterative UX research is a fundamental practice that involves continuous feedback and improvement throughout the product development lifecycle. It emphasizes the importance of ongoing research, testing, and refinement to create user-centered designs.

Here's how it works:

• Feedback Loops : Establish feedback loops where user feedback and insights are collected continuously, not just at specific project phases.
• Regular Testing : Conduct regular usability testing, user interviews, or surveys to gather insights and validate design decisions.
• A/B Testing : Implement A/B testing to compare different design variations and make data-driven decisions on feature implementations.
• Prototyping : Create prototypes and gather user feedback early in the design process. Use this feedback to refine and iterate on designs.
• Monitoring Metrics : Continuously monitor key performance metrics, such as user engagement and conversion rates, to identify areas for improvement.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Promote collaboration between UX researchers, designers, developers, and product managers to ensure that research findings inform design and development decisions.

Iterative UX research ensures that user feedback is integrated into the design and development process, leading to products and services that continually evolve to meet user needs and preferences.

Ethical Considerations in UX Research

Ethical considerations in UX research are paramount to protect the rights and well-being of participants and ensure the integrity of the research process. Here are some ethical principles to adhere to:

• Informed Consent : Obtain informed consent from participants, clearly explaining the research purpose, procedures, and any potential risks involved.
• Privacy and Data Security : Safeguard participant privacy by anonymizing and securely storing sensitive data. Follow data protection regulations, such as GDPR.
• Transparency : Be transparent about the research objectives, methodologies, and the use of collected data. Avoid misleading or deceptive practices.
• Avoiding Harm : Ensure that research activities do not harm participants physically or emotionally. Minimize any potential discomfort or stress.
• Respect and Dignity : Treat participants with respect and dignity. Avoid any form of discrimination, bias, or exploitation.
• Bias Awareness : Be aware of potential biases in research design and analysis . Strive for inclusivity and fairness in participant selection and interpretation of findings.
• Debriefing : Provide participants with a debriefing session after their involvement in research, explaining the purpose of the study and addressing any questions or concerns.

Ethical UX research practices uphold the principles of integrity, transparency, and respect, fostering trust between researchers and participants and ensuring the ethical integrity of the research process.

Conclusion for UX Research

UX research is the compass that guides the creation of products and services with you, the user, at the center. By understanding your needs, preferences, and challenges, organizations can craft experiences that truly resonate with you. From setting clear objectives and conducting research to analyzing data and making improvements, the journey of UX research is a continuous cycle of enhancement, ensuring that the digital world becomes more user-friendly with each iteration. Remember, UX research is a powerful tool that empowers teams to create products that delight users and drive success. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just beginning your journey into UX, the principles and practices outlined in this guide can help you make a positive impact in the ever-evolving landscape of user experience.

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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The UX researcher’s toolkit: 11 UX research methods and when to use them

After defining your objectives and planning your research framework, it’s time to choose the research technique that will best serve your project's goals and yield the right insights. While user research is often treated as an afterthought, it should inform every design decision. In this chapter, we walk you through the most common research methods and help you choose the right one for you.

What are UX research methods?

A UX research method is a way of generating insights about your users, their behavior, motivations, and needs.

These methods help:

• Learn about user behavior and attitudes
• Identify key pain points and challenges in the user interface
• Develop user personas to identify user needs and drive solutions
• Test user interface designs to see what works and what doesn’t

You can use research methodologies like user interviews, surveys, focus groups, card sorting, usability testing to identify user challenges and turn them into opportunities to improve the user experience.

More of a visual learner? Check out this video for a speedy rundown. If you’re ready to get stuck in, jump straight to our full breakdown .

The most common types of user research

First, let’s talk about the types of UX research. Every individual research method falls under these types, which reflect different goals and objectives for conducting research.

Here’s a quick overview:

Qualitative vs. quantitative

All research methods are either quantitative or qualitative . Qualitative research focuses on capturing subjective insights into users' experiences. It aims to understand the underlying reasons, motivations, and behaviors of individuals.

Quantitative research, on the other hand, involves collecting and analyzing numerical data to identify patterns, trends, and significance. It aims to quantify user behaviors, preferences, and attitudes, allowing for generalizations and statistical insights.

Qualitative research also typically involves a smaller sample size than quantitative research. Nielsen Norman Group recommends 40 participants—see our full rundown of how many user testers you need for different research methods .

Attitudinal vs. behavioral

Attitudinal research is about understanding users' attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs. It delves into the 'why' behind user decisions and actions. It often involves surveys or interviews where users are asked about their feelings, preferences, or perceptions towards a product or service. It's subjective in nature, aiming to capture people's emotions and opinions.

Behavioral research is about what users do rather than what they say they do or would do. This kind of research is often based on observation methods like usability testing, eye-tracking, or heat maps to understand user behavior.

Generative vs. evaluative

Generative research is all about generating new ideas, concepts, and insights to fuel the design process. You might run brainstorming sessions with groups of users, card sorting, and co-design sessions to inspire creativity and guide the development of user-centered solutions.

On the other hand, evaluative research focuses on assessing the usability, effectiveness, and overall quality of existing designs or prototypes. Once you’ve developed a prototype of your product, it's time to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. You can compare different versions of a product design or feature through A/B testing—ensuring your UX design meets user needs and expectations.

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11 Best UX research methods and when to use them

There are various UX research techniques—each method serves a specific purpose and can provide unique insights into user behaviors and preferences. In this section, we’ll highlight the most common research techniques you need to know.

Read on for an at-a-glance table, and full breakdown of each method.

1. User interviews

Tl;dr: user interviews.

Directly ask users about their experiences with a product to understand their thoughts, feelings, and problems

✅ Provides detailed insights that survey may miss ❌ May not represent the wider user base; depends on user’s memory and honesty

User interviews are a qualitative research method that involves having open-ended and guided discussions with users to gather in-depth insights about their experiences, needs, motivations, and behaviors.

Typically, you would ask a few questions on a specific topic during a user interview and analyze participants' answers. The results you get will depend on how well you form and ask questions, as well as follow up on participants’ answers.

“As a researcher, it's our responsibility to drive the user to their actual problems,” says Yuliya Martinavichene , User Experience Researcher at Zinio. She adds, “The narration of incidents can help you analyze a lot of hidden details with regard to user behavior.”

That’s why you should:

• Start with a wide context : Make sure that your questions don’t start with your product
• Ask questions: Always ask questions that focus on the tasks that users are trying to complete
• Invest in analysis : Get transcripts done and share the findings with your team

Tanya Nativ , Design Researcher at Sketch recommends defining the goals and assumptions internally. “Our beliefs about our users’ behavior really help to structure good questions and get to the root of the problem and its solution,” she explains.

It's easy to be misunderstood if you don't have experience writing interview questions. You can get someone to review them for you or use our Question Bank of 350+ research questions .

When to conduct user interviews

This method is typically used at the start and end of your project. At the start of a project, you can establish a strong understanding of your target users, their perspectives, and the context in which they’ll interact with your product. By the end of your project, new user interviews—often with a different set of individuals—offer a litmus test for your product's usability and appeal, providing firsthand accounts of experiences, perceived strengths, and potential areas for refinement.

2. Field studies

Tl;dr: field studies.

Observe users in their natural environment to inform design decisions with real-world context

✅ Provides contextual insights into user behavior in real-world situations ✅ Helps identify external factors and conditions that influence user experience ❌ Can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to conduct ❌ Participants may behave differently when they know they are being observed (Hawthorne effect)

Field studies—also known as ethnographic research—are research activities that take place in the user’s environment rather than in your lab or office. They’re a great method for uncovering context, unknown motivations, or constraints that affect the user experience.

An advantage of field studies is observing people in their natural environment, giving you a glimpse at the context in which your product is used. It’s useful to understand the context in which users complete tasks, learn about their needs, and collect in-depth user stories.

When to conduct field studies

This method can be used at all stages of your project—two key times you may want to conduct field studies are:

• As part of the discovery and exploration stage to define direction and understand the context around when and how users interact with the product
• During usability testing, once you have a prototype, to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution or validate design assumptions in real-world contexts

3. Focus groups

Tl;dr: focus groups.

Gather qualitative data from a group of users discussing their experiences and opinions about a product

✅ Allows for diverse perspectives to be shared and discussed ❌ Group dynamics may influence individual opinions

A focus group is a qualitative research method that includes the study of a group of people, their beliefs, and opinions. It’s typically used for market research or gathering feedback on products and messaging.

Focus groups can help you better grasp:

• How users perceive your product
• What users believe are a product’s most important features
• What problems do users experience with the product

As with any qualitative research method, the quality of the data collected through focus groups is only as robust as the preparation. So, it’s important to prepare a UX research plan you can refer to during the discussion.

Here’s some things to consider:

• Write a script to guide the conversation
• Ask clear, open-ended questions focused on the topics you’re trying to learn about
• Include around five to ten participants to keep the sessions focused and organized

When to conduct focus groups

It’s easier to use this research technique when you're still formulating your concept, product, or service—to explore user preferences, gather initial reactions, and generate ideas. This is because, in the early stages, you have flexibility and can make significant changes without incurring high costs.

Another way some researchers employ focus groups is post-launch to gather feedback and identify potential improvements. However, you can also use other methods here which may be more effective for identifying usability issues. For example, a platform like Maze can provide detailed, actionable data about how users interact with your product. These quantitative results are a great accompaniment to the qualitative data gathered from your focus group.

4. Diary studies

Tl;dr: diary studies.

Get deep insights into user thoughts and feelings by having them keep a product-related diary over a set period of time, typically a couple of weeks

✅ Gives you a peak into how users interact with your product in their day-to-day ❌ Depends on how motivated and dedicated the users are

Diary studies involve asking users to track their usage and thoughts on your product by keeping logs or diaries, taking photos, explaining their activities, and highlighting things that stood out to them.

“Diary studies are one of the few ways you can get a peek into how users interact with our product in a real-world scenario,” says Tanya.

A diary study helps you tell the story of how products and services fit into people’s daily lives, and the touch-points and channels they choose to complete their tasks.

There’s several key questions to consider before conducting diary research, from what kind of diary you want—freeform or structured, and digital or paper—to how often you want participants to log their thoughts.

• Open, ‘freeform’ diary: Users have more freedom to record what and when they like, but can also lead to missed opportunities to capture data users might overlook
• Closed, ‘structured; diary: Users follow a stricter entry-logging process and answer pre-set questions

Remember to determine the trigger: a signal that lets the participants know when they should log their feedback. Tanya breaks these triggers down into the following:

• Interval-contingent trigger : Participants fill out the diary at specific intervals such as one entry per day, or one entry per week
• Signal-contingent trigger : You tell the participant when to make an entry and how you would prefer them to communicate it to you as well as your preferred type of communication
• Event-contingent trigger : The participant makes an entry whenever a defined event occurs

When to conduct diary studies

Diary studies are often valuable when you need to deeply understand users' behaviors, routines, and pain points in real-life contexts. This could be when you're:

• Conceptualizing a new product or feature: Gain insights into user habits, needs, and frustrations to inspire your design
• Trying to enhance an existing product: Identify areas where users are having difficulties or where there are opportunities for better user engagement

TL;DR: Surveys

Collect quantitative data from a large sample of users about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction with a product

✅ Provides a broad overview of user opinions and trends ❌ May lack in-depth insights and context behind user responses

Although surveys are primarily used for quantitative research, they can also provided qualitative data, depending on whether you use closed or open-ended questions:

• Closed-ended questions come with a predefined set of answers to choose from using formats like rating scales, rankings, or multiple choice. This results in quantitative data.
• Open-ended question s are typically open-text questions where test participants give their responses in a free-form style. This results in qualitative data.

Matthieu Dixte , Product Researcher at Maze, explains the benefit of surveys: “With open-ended questions, researchers get insight into respondents' opinions, experiences, and explanations in their own words. This helps explore nuances that quantitative data alone may not capture.”

So, how do you make sure you’re asking the right survey questions? Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal, says that when planning online surveys, it’s best to avoid questions that begin with “How likely are you to…?” Instead, Gregg says asking questions that start with “Have you ever… ?” will prompt users to give more specific and measurable answers.

Make sure your questions:

• Are easy to understand
• Don't guide participants towards a particular answer
• Include both closed-ended and open-ended questions
• Respect users and their privacy
• Are consistent in terms of format

To learn more about survey design, check out this guide .

When to conduct surveys

While surveys can be used at all stages of project development, and are ideal for continuous product discovery , the specific timing and purpose may vary depending on the research goals. For example, you can run surveys at:

• Conceptualization phase to gather preliminary data, and identify patterns, trends, or potential user segments
• Post-launch or during iterative design cycles to gather feedback on user satisfaction, feature usage, or suggestions for improvements

6. Card sorting

Tl;dr: card sorting.

Understand how users categorize and prioritize information within a product or service to structure your information in line with user expectations

✅ Helps create intuitive information architecture and navigation ❌ May not accurately reflect real-world user behavior and decision-making

Card sorting is an important step in creating an intuitive information architecture (IA) and user experience. It’s also a great technique to generate ideas, naming conventions, or simply see how users understand topics.

In this UX research method, participants are presented with cards featuring different topics or information, and tasked with grouping the cards into categories that make sense to them.

There are three types of card sorting:

• Open card sorting: Participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and name those categories, thus generating new ideas and names
• Hybrid card sorting: Participants can sort cards into predefined categories, but also have the option to create their own categories
• Closed card sorting: Participants are given predefined categories and asked to sort the items into the available groups

Card sorting type comparison table

You can run a card sorting session using physical index cards or digitally with a UX research tool like Maze to simulate the drag-and-drop activity of dividing cards into groups. Running digital card sorting is ideal for any type of card sort, and moderated or unmoderated sessions .

Read more about card sorting and learn how to run a card sorting session here .

When to conduct card sorting

Card sorting isn’t limited to a single stage of design or development—it can be employed anytime you need to explore how users categorize or perceive information. For example, you may want to use card sorting if you need to:

• Understand how users perceive ideas
• Evaluate and prioritize potential solutions
• Generate name ideas and understand naming conventions
• Learn how users expect navigation to work
• Decide how to group content on a new or existing site
• Restructure information architecture

7. Tree testing

Tl;dr: tree testing.

Evaluate the findability of existing information within a product's hierarchical structure or navigation

✅ Identifies potential issues in the information architecture ❌ Focuses on navigation structure, not visual design or content

During tree testing a text-only version of the site is given to your participants, who are asked to complete a series of tasks requiring them to locate items on the app or website.

The data collected from a tree test helps you understand where users intuitively navigate first, and is an effective way to assess the findability, labeling, and information architecture of a product.

We recommend keeping these sessions short, ranging from 15 to 20 minutes, and asking participants to complete no more than ten tasks. This helps ensure participants remain focused and engaged, leading to more reliable and accurate data, and avoiding fatigue.

If you’re using a platform like Maze to run remote testing, you can easily recruit participants based on various demographic filters, including industry and country. This way, you can uncover a broader range of user preferences, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of your target audience.

To learn more about tree testing, check out this chapter .

When to conduct tree testing

Tree testing is often done at an early stage in the design or redesign process. That’s because it’s more cost-effective to address errors at the start of a project—rather than making changes later in the development process or after launch.

However, it can be helpful to employ tree testing as a method when adding new features, particularly alongside card sorting.

While tree testing and card sorting can both help you with categorizing the content on a website, it’s important to note that they each approach this from a different angle and are used at different stages during the research process. Ideally, you should use the two in tandem: card sorting is recommended when defining and testing a new website architecture, while tree testing is meant to help you test how the navigation performs with users.

8. Usability testing

Tl;dr: usability testing.

Observe users completing specific tasks with a product to identify usability issues and potential improvements

✅ Provides direct insights into user behavior and reveals pain points ❌ Conducted in a controlled environment, may not fully represent real-world usage

Usability testing evaluates your product with people by getting them to complete tasks while you observe and note their interactions (either during or after the test). The goal of conducting usability testing is to understand if your design is intuitive and easy to use. A sign of success is if users can easily accomplish their goals and complete tasks with your product.

There are various usability testing methods that you can use, such as moderated vs. unmoderated or qualitative vs. quantitative —and selecting the right one depends on your research goals, resources, and timeline.

Usability testing is usually performed with functional mid or hi-fi prototypes . If you have a Figma, InVision, Sketch, or prototype ready, you can import it into a platform like Maze and start testing your design with users immediately.

The tasks you create for usability tests should be:

• Realistic, and describe a scenario
• Actionable, and use action verbs (create, sign up, buy, etc)

Be mindful of using leading words such as ‘click here’ or ‘go to that page’ in your tasks. These instructions bias the results by helping users complete their tasks—something that doesn’t happen in real life.

✨ Product tip

With Maze, you can test your prototype and live website with real users to filter out cognitive biases, and gather actionable insights that fuel product decisions.

When to conduct usability testing

To inform your design decisions, you should do usability testing early and often in the process . Here are some guidelines to help you decide when to do usability testing:

• Before you start designing
• Once you have a wireframe or prototype
• Prior to the launch of the product
• At regular intervals after launch

To learn more about usability testing, check out our complete guide to usability testing .

9. Five-second testing

Tl;dr: five-second testing.

Gauge users' first impressions and understanding of a design or layout

✅ Provides insights into the instant clarity and effectiveness of visual communication ❌ Limited to first impressions, does not assess full user experience or interaction

In five-second testing , participants are (unsurprisingly) given five seconds to view an image like a design or web page, and then they’re asked questions about the design to gauge their first impressions.

Why five seconds? According to data , 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website, so it;s essential to grab someone’s attention in the first few seconds of their visit. With a five-second test, you can quickly determine what information users perceive and their impressions during the first five seconds of viewing a design.

Product tip 💡

And if you’re using Maze, you can simply upload an image of the screen you want to test, or browse your prototype and select a screen. Plus, you can star individual comments and automatically add them to your report to share with stakeholders.

When to conduct five-second testing

Five-second testing is typically conducted in the early stages of the design process, specifically during initial concept testing or prototype development. This way, you can evaluate your design's initial impact and make early refinements or adjustments to ensure its effectiveness, before putting design to development.

To learn more, check out our chapter on five-second testing .

10. A/B testing

Tl;dr: a/b testing.

Compare two versions of a design or feature to determine which performs better based on user engagement

✅ Provides data-driven insights to guide design decisions and optimize user experience ❌ Requires a large sample size and may not account for long-term effects or complex interactions

A/B testing , also known as split testing, compares two or more versions of a webpage, interface, or feature to determine which performs better regarding engagement, conversions, or other predefined metrics.

It involves randomly dividing users into different groups and giving each group a different version of the design element being tested. For example, let's say the primary call-to-action on the page is a button that says ‘buy now’.

You're considering making changes to its design to see if it can lead to higher conversions, so you create two versions:

• Version A : The original design with the ‘buy now’ button positioned below the product description—shown to group A
• Version B : A variation with the ‘buy now’ button now prominently displayed above the product description—shown to group B

Over a planned period, you measure metrics like click-through rates, add-to-cart rates, and actual purchases to assess the performance of each variation. You find that Group B had significantly higher click-through and conversion rates than Group A. This indicates that showing the button above the product description drove higher user engagement and conversions.

Check out our A/B testing guide for more in-depth examples and guidance on how to run these tests.

When to conduct A/B testing

A/B testing can be used at all stages of the design and development process—whenever you want to collect direct, quantitative data and confirm a suspicion, or settle a design debate. This iterative testing approach allows you to continually improve your website's performance and user experience based on data-driven insights.

11. Concept testing

Tl;dr: concept testing.

Evaluate users' reception and understanding of a new product, feature, or design idea before moving on to development

✅ Helps validate and refine concepts based on user feedback ❌ Relies on users' perception and imagination, may not reflect actual use

Concept testing is a type of research that evaluates the feasibility, appeal, and potential success of a new product before you build it. It centers the user in the ideation process, using UX research methods like A/B testing, surveys, and customer interviews.

There’s no one way to run a concept test—you can opt for concept testing surveys, interviews, focus groups, or any other method that gets qualitative data on your concept.

*Dive into our complete guide to concept testing for more tips and tricks on getting started. *

When to conduct concept testing

Concept testing helps gauge your audience’s interest, understanding, and likelihood-to-purchase, before committing time and resources to a concept. However, it can also be useful further down the product development line—such as when defining marketing messaging or just before launching.

Which is the best UX research type?

The best research type varies depending on your project; what your objectives are, and what stage you’re in. Ultimately, the ideal type of research is one which provides the insights required, using the available resources.

For example, if you're at the early ideation or product discovery stage, generative research methods can help you generate new ideas, understand user needs, and explore possibilities. As you move to the design and development phase, evaluative research methods and quantitative data become crucial.

Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods.

How to choose the right user experience research method

In an ideal world, a combination of all the insights you gain from multiple types of user research methods would guide every design decision. In practice, this can be hard to execute due to resources.

Sometimes the right methodology is the one you can get buy-in, budget, and time for.

Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal

UX research tools can help streamline the research process, making regular testing and application of diverse methods more accessible—so you always keep the user at the center of your design process. Some other key tips to remember when choosing your method are:

Define the goals and problems

A good way to inform your choice of user experience research method is to start by considering your goals. You might want to browse UX research templates or read about examples of research.

Michael Margolis , UX Research Partner at Google Ventures, recommends answering questions like:

• “What do your users need?”
• “What are your users struggling with?”
• “How can you help your users?”

Understand the design process stage

If your team is very early in product development, generative research —like field studies—make sense. If you need to test design mockups or a prototype, evaluative research methods—such as usability testing—will work best.

This is something they’re big on at Sketch, as we heard from Design Researcher, Tanya Nativ. She says, “In the discovery phase, we focus on user interviews and contextual inquiries. The testing phase is more about dogfooding, concept testing, and usability testing. Once a feature has been launched, it’s about ongoing listening.”

Consider the type of insights required

If you're looking for rich, qualitative data that delves into user behaviors, motivations, and emotions, then methods like user interviews or field studies are ideal. They’ll help you uncover the ‘why’ behind user actions.

On the other hand, if you need to gather quantitative data to measure user satisfaction or compare different design variations, methods like surveys or A/B testing are more suitable. These methods will help you get hard numbers and concrete data on preferences and behavior.

*Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods. *

Build a deeper understanding of your users with UX research

Think of UX research methods as building blocks that work together to create a well-rounded understanding of your users. Each method brings its own unique strengths, whether it's human empathy from user interviews or the vast data from surveys.

But it's not just about choosing the right UX research methods; the research platform you use is equally important. You need a platform that empowers your team to collect data, analyze, and collaborate seamlessly.

Simplifying product research is simple with Maze. From tree testing to card sorting, prototype testing to user interview analysis—Maze makes getting actionable insights easy, whatever method you opt for.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about testing methods, head on to the next chapter all about tree testing .

Get valuable insights from real users

Conduct impactful UX research with Maze and improve your product experience and customer satisfaction.

Frequently asked questions

How do you choose the right UX research method?

Choosing the right research method depends on your goals. Some key things to consider are:

• The feature/product you’re testing
• The type of data you’re looking for
• The design stage
• The time and resources you have available

What is the best UX research method?

The best research method is the one you have the time, resources, and budget for that meets your specific needs and goals. Most research tools, like Maze, will accommodate a variety of UX research and testing techniques.

When to use which user experience research method?

Selecting which user research method to use—if budget and resources aren’t a factor—depends on your goals. UX research methods provide different types of data:

• Qualitative vs quantitative
• Attitudinal vs behavioral
• Generative vs evaluative

Identify your goals, then choose a research method that gathers the user data you need.

What results can I expect from UX research?

Here are some of the key results you can expect from actioning the insights uncovered during UX research:

• Improved user satisfaction
• Increased usability
• Better product fit
• Informed design decisions
• Reduced development costs
• Higher conversion rates
• Increased customer loyalty and retention

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How to conduct user research: A step-by-step guide

This is part one of a guide to User research.

Continue with part two: How to conduct user research: A Step-by-step guide

Continue with part three: What is exploratory research and why is it so exciting?

What user research did you conduct to reveal your ideal user?

Uh-oh. Not this question again. We both know the most common answer and it’s not great.

“Uhm, we talked to some users and had a brainstorming session with our team. It’s not much, but we don’t have time to do anything more right now. It’s better than nothing.”

Let’s be brutally honest about the meaning of that answer and rephrase it:

“ We don’t have time to get to know our actual user and maximize our chances of success. We’ll just assume that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.”

If that sounds super bad, it’s because IT IS. You don’t want to end up in this situation. And you won’t.

After reading this guide, you’ll know exactly how to carry out the user research that will become your guiding star during product development.

On this page

Why is user research so important?

Step #1: define research objectives.

Go ahead – create that fake persona

Step #2: Pick your methods

Qualitative methods – the why, quantitative methods – the what, behavioral and attitudinal methods, step #3: find your participants, how to recruit participants, how many participants, step #4: conduct user research.

Focus groups

Competitive analysis

Field studies

What’s next?

User research can be a scary word. It may sound like money you don’t have, time you can’t spare, and expertise you need to find. That’s why some people convince themselves that it’s not that important.

Which is a HUGE mistake.

User research is crucial – without it, you’ll spend your energy, time and money on a product that is based around false assumptions that won’t work in the real world.

Let’s take a look at Segway, a technologically brilliant product with incredible introductory publicity. Although it’s still around, it simply didn’t reach initial expectations. Here are some of the reasons why:

• It brought mockery, not admiration. The user was always “that guy”, who often felt fat or lazy.
• Cities were not prepared for it. Neither users nor policemen knew if it should be used on the road or on the sidewalk.
• A large segment of the target market comprised of postal and security workers. However, postal workers need both hands while walking, and security workers prefer bikes that don’t have a limited range.

Segway mainly fell short because of issues that could’ve been foreseen and solved by better user research.

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, sums it up nicely:

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

? Bonus material Download User research checklist and a comparison table

Never forget – you are not your user.

You require proper user research to understand your user’s problems, pain points, needs, desires, feelings and behaviours.

Let’s start with the process!

Before you get in touch with your target users, you need to define why you are doing the research in the first place. 

Establish clear objectives and agree with your team on your exact goals – this will make it much easier to gain valuable insights. Otherwise, your findings will be all over the place.

Here are some sample questions that will help you to define your objectives:

• What do you want to uncover?
• What are the knowledge gaps that you need to fill?
• What is already working and what isn’t?
• Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? What is that problem?
• What will the research bring to the business and/or your customers?

Once you start answering questions like these, it’s time to make a list of objectives. These should be specific and concise .

Let’s say you are making a travel recommendation app. Your research goals could be:

• Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions.
• Uncover the different tools that participants are using to make travel decisions.
• Identify problems or barriers that they encounter when making travel decisions.

I suggest that you prioritize your objectives and create an Excel table. It will come in handy later.

Go ahead, create that fake persona

A useful exercise for you to do at this stage is to write down some hypotheses about your target users.

Ask yourself:

What do we think we understand about our users that is relevant to our business or product?

Yes, brainstorm the heck out of this persona, but keep it relevant to the topic at hand.

Here’s my empathy map and empathy map canvas to really help you flesh out your imaginary user.

Once you’re finished, research any and every statement , need and desire with real people.

It’s a simple yet effective way to create questions for some of the research methods that you’ll be using.

However, you need to be prepared to throw some of your assumptions out of the window. If you think this persona may affect your bias, don’t bother with hypotheses and dive straight into research with a completely open mind.

Alright, you have your research goals. Now let’s see how you can reach them.

Here’s the main question you should be asking yourself at this step in the process:

Based on our time and manpower, what methods should we select?

It’s essential to pick the right method at the right time . I’ll delve into more details on specific methods in Step #4. For now, let’s take a quick look at what categories you can choose from.

Qualitative research tells you ‘why’ something occurs. It tells you the reasons behind the behavior, the problem or the desire. It answers questions like: “ Why do you prefer using app X instead of other similar apps?” or “What’s the hardest part about being a sales manager? Why?” .

Qualitative data comes in the form of actual insights and it’s fairly easy to understand.

Most of the methods we’ll look at in Step #4 are qualitative methods.

Quantitative research helps you to understand what is happening by providing different metrics.

It answers questions such as “What percentage of users left their shopping cart without completing the purchase?” or “Is it better to have a big or small subscription button?”.

Most quantitative methods come in handy when testing your product, but not so much when you’re researching your users. This is because they don’t tell you why particular trends or patterns occur.

There is a big difference between “what people do” and “what people say”.

As their names imply, attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure and observe behaviors.

Here’s a practical landscape that will help you choose the best methods for you. If it doesn’t make sense now, return to it once you’ve finished the guide and you’ll have a much better understanding.

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

I’ll give you my own suggestions and tips about the most common and useful methods in Step #4 – Conducting research.

In general, if your objectives are specific enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to see which methods will help you achieve them.

Remember that Excel table? Choose a method or two that will fulfill each objective and type it in the column beside it.

It won’t always be possible to carry out everything you’ve written down. If this is the case, go with the method(s) that will give you most of the answers. With your table, it will be easy to pick and choose the most effective options for you.

Onto the next step!

This stage is all about channeling your inner Sherlock and finding the people with the secret intel for your product’s success.

Consider your niche, your objectives and your methods – this should give you a general idea of the group or groups you want to talk to and research further.

Here’s my advice for most cases.

If you’re building something from the ground up, the best participants might be:

• People you assume face the problem that your product aims to solve
• Your competitors’ customers

If you are developing something or solving a problem for an existing product, you should also take a look at:

• Advocates and super-users
• Customers who have recently churned
• Users who tried to sign up or buy but decided not to commit

There are plenty of ways to bring on participants, and you can get creative so long as you keep your desired target group in mind.

You can recruit them online – via social media, online forums or niche community sites.

You can publish an ad with requirements and offer some kind of incentive.

You can always use a recruitment agency, too. This can be costly, but it’s also efficient.

If you have a user database and are changing or improving your product, you can find your participants in there. Make sure that you contact plenty of your existing users, as most of them won’t respond.

You can even ask your friends to recommend the right kind of people who you wouldn’t otherwise know.

With that said, you should always be wary of including friends in your research . Sure, they’re the easiest people to reach, but your friendship can (and probably will) get in the way of obtaining honest answers. There are plenty of horror stories about people validating their “brilliant” ideas with their friends, only to lose a fortune in the future. Only consider them if you are 100% sure that they will speak their mind no matter what.

That depends on the method. If you’re not holding a massive online survey, you can usually start with 5 people in each segment . That’s enough to get the most important unique insights. You can then assess the situation and decide whether or not you need to expand your research.

Finally! Let’s go through some of the more common methods you’ll be using, including their pros and cons, some pro tips, and when you should use them.

Engaging in one-on-one discussions with users enables you to acquire detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences. Individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up on the spot.

Interviews are time-consuming, especially on a per participant basis. You have to prepare for them, conduct them, analyze them and sometimes even transcribe them. They also limit your sample size, which can be problematic. The quality of your data will depend on the ability of your interviewer, and hiring an expert can be expensive.

• Prepare questions that stick to your main topics. Include follow-up questions for when you want to dig deeper into certain areas.
• Record the interview . Don’t rely on your notes. You don’t want to interrupt the flow of the interview by furiously scribbling down your answers, and you’ll need the recording for any potential in-depth analysis later on.
• Conduct at least one trial run of the interview to see if everything flows and feels right. Create a “playbook” on how the interview should move along and update it with your findings.
• If you are not comfortable with interviewing people, let someone else do it or hire an expert interviewer. You want to make people feel like they are talking to someone they know, rather than actually being interviewed. In my experience, psychologists are a great choice for an interviewer.

Interviews are not really time-sensitive, as long as you do them before the development process.

However, they can be a great supplement to online surveys and vice-versa. Conducting an interview beforehand helps you to create a more focused and relevant survey, while conducting an interview afterwards helps you to explain the survey answers.

Surveys are generally conducted online, which means that it’s possible to gather a lot of data in a very short time for a very low price . Surveys are usually anonymous, so users are often more honest in their responses.

It’s more difficult to get a representative sample because it’s tough to control who takes part in the survey – especially if you post it across social media channels or general forums. Surveys are quite rigid and if you don’t account for all possible answers, you might be missing out on valuable data. You have to be very careful when choosing your questions – poorly worded or leading ones can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue, as many people hate taking long surveys.

• Keep your surveys brief , particularly if participants won’t be compensated for their time. Only focus on what is truly important.
• Make sure that the questions can be easily understood. Unclear or ambiguous questions result in data on which you can’t depend. Keep the wording as simple as possible.
• Avoid using leading questions. Don’t ask questions that assume something, such as “What do you dislike about X?”. Replace this with “What’s your experience with X?”.
• Find engaged, niche online communities that fit your user profile. You’ll get more relevant data from these.

Similar to interviews. It depends on whether you want to use the survey as a preliminary method, or if you want a lot of answers to a few, very focused questions.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are moderated discussions with around 5 to 10 participants, the intention of which is to gain insight into the individuals’ attitudes, ideas and desires.

As focus groups include multiple people, they can quickly reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of your target audience . They are helpful when you require a lot of specific information in a short amount of time. When conducted correctly, they can act like interviews on steroids.

Focus groups can be tough to schedule and manage. If the moderator isn’t experienced, the discussion can quickly go off-topic. There might be an alpha participant that dictates the general opinion, and because it’s not one-on-one, people won’t always speak their mind.

• Find an experienced moderator who will lead the discussion. Having another person observing and taking notes is also highly recommended, as he or she can emphasize actionable insights and catch non-verbal clues that would otherwise be missed.
• Define the scope of your research . What questions will you ask? How in-depth do you want to go with the answers? How long do you want each discussion to last? This will determine how many people and groups should be tested.
• If possible, recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback, yet will still allow others to speak their mind. You won’t know the participants most of the time, so having an experienced moderator is crucial.

Focus groups work best when you have a few clear topics that you want to focus on.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis highlights the strengths and weaknesses of existing products . It explores how successful competitors act on the market. It gives you a solid basis for other user research methods and can also uncover business opportunities. It helps you to define your competitive advantage , as well as identify different user types.

A competitive analysis can tell you what exists, but not why it exists. You may collect a long feature list, but you won’t know which features are valued most by users and which they don’t use at all. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell how well a product is doing, which makes the data less useful. It also has limited use if you’re creating something that’s relatively new to the market.

• Create a list or table of information that you want to gather – market share, prices, features, visual design language, content, etc.
• Don’t let it go stale. Update it as the market changes so that you include new competitors.
• If you find something really interesting but don’t know the reason behind it, conduct research among your competitor’s users .
• After concluding your initial user research, go over the findings of your competitive analysis to see if you’ve discovered anything that’s missing on the market .

It can be a great first method, especially if you’re likely to talk to users of your competitors’ products

Field Studies

Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context, rather than at your company or office. Some are purely observational (the researcher is a “fly on the wall”), others are field interviews, and some act as a demonstration of pain points in existing systems.

You really get to see the big picture –  field studies allow you to gain insights that will fundamentally change your product design . You see what people actually do instead of what they say they do. A field study can explain problems and behaviours that you don’t understand better than any other method.

It’s the most time-consuming and expensive method. The results rely on the observer more than any of the other options. It’s not appropriate for products that are used in rare and specific situations.

• Establish clear objectives. Always remember why you are doing the research. Field studies can provide a variety of insights and sometimes it can be hard to stay focused. This is especially true if you are participating in the observed activity.
• Be patient. Observation might take some time. If you rush, you might end up with biased results.
• Keep an open mind and don’t ask leading questions. Be prepared to abandon your preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs. When interviewing people, try to leave any predispositions or biases at the door.
• Be warm but professional. If you conduct interviews or participate in an activity, you won’t want people around you to feel awkward or tense. Instead, you’ll want to observe how they act naturally.

Use a field study when no other method will do or if it becomes clear that you don’t really understand your user. If needed, you should conduct this as soon as possible – it can lead to monumental changes.

We started with a user persona and we’ll finish on this topic, too. But yours will be backed by research 😉

A persona outlines your ideal user in a concise and understandable way. It includes the most important insights that you’ve discovered. It makes it easier to design products around your actual users and speak their language. It’s a great way to familiarize new people on your team with your target market.

A persona is only as good as the user research behind it. Many companies create a “should be” persona instead of an actual one. Not only can such a persona be useless, it can also be misleading.

• Keep personas brief. Avoid adding unnecessary details and omit information that does not aid your decision making. If a persona document is too long, it simply won’t be used.
• Make personas specific and realistic. Avoid exaggerating and include enough detail to help you find real people that represent your ideal user.

Create these after you’ve carried out all of the initial user research. Compile your findings and create a persona that will guide your development process.

Now you know who you are creating your product for – you’ve identified their problems, needs and desires. You’ve laid the groundwork, so now it’s time to design a product that will blow your target user away! But that’s a topic for a whole separate guide, one that will take you through the process of product development and testing 😉

PS. Don’t forget -> Here is your ? User Research Checklist and comparison table

About the author

Oh hey, I’m Romina Kavcic

I am a Design Strategist who holds a Master of Business Administration. I have 14+ years of career experience in design work and consulting across both tech startups and several marquee tech unicorns such as Stellar.org, Outfit7, Databox, Xamarin, Chipolo, Singularity.NET, etc. I currently advise, coach and consult with companies on design strategy & management, visual design and user experience. My work has been published on Forbes, Hackernoon, Blockgeeks, Newsbtc, Bizjournals, and featured on Apple iTunes Store.

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User experience (ux) research: definition and methodology.

17 min read To build outstanding products and services for your customers, you need a thorough understanding of who they are, what they need and where their pain points and priorities lie. UX research helps you fully step into your customers’ shoes.

What do we mean by user experience?

User experience (UX) is a customer’s-eye view of your business as it relates to completing tasks and using interactive platforms and services.

It’s closely tied to the idea of customer experience (CX) , but rather than being a holistic view of your brand, it’s more focused on utility and usability testing – the hands-on side of things. You can think of UX as a sub-discipline of CX .

For example, CX research might consider how customers perceive a company’s customer service levels and how confident they feel in having their issues resolved. Meanwhile, UX research would focus on how successfully those customers navigate a self-service website, whether the language on that site is clear and how easy it is to use.

Free eBook: The essential website experience & UX playbook

What is user experience (UX) research?

User experience (UX) research is about diving deep into how customers interact with your brand on a practical, functional level, and observing how easily they can complete their tasks and meet their goals.

User research is the process of discovering the behaviors , motivations, and needs of your customers through observation, task analysis, and other types of user feedback . It can involve working directly with members of your target audience through UX testing sessions, remote session observation using digital tools, surveys to collect user feedback, and many more UX research methods and techniques.

Why is UX research important?

So what exactly is the value of user experience research? After all, you understand your business and its workings better than anyone. How can uninformed external users help you learn more?

The fresh perspective of your end-users is exactly why UX research is so valuable. Because they’re not already immersed in your language, processes, and systems, user testing participants are in the best position to help you see where things might be confusing to a newcomer who isn’t involved with your business.

Better yet, they can show you where confusion or frustration might lead a new or potential customer to miss out on product benefits, fail to convert, or even give up and look toward your competitors instead.

In areas like new product design and development , user research allows you to head off potential issues with products and services before they even hit the shelves. You can design the product correctly the first time, instead of having to fix it later when customers are unhappy.

Simply put, UX research is critical because it keeps you from wasting time, money, and effort designing the wrong product or solution. It’s valuable for all areas of your business and yields clear benefits for your product, your users, and your bottom line.

• Product benefits By asking your customers for direct feedback about a potential product, you can discover how and when customers prefer to use a product, what pain points your product will solve, and how to improve your product design .
• User benefits UX research is unbiased feedback, straight from the most valuable source: your customers. Because this type of research is not biased by investors, company leaders, or outside influences, it is the best resource for getting actionable product feedback.
• Business benefits Knowing what your users value helps you spend less time and money fixing flawed designs, speeds up the product development process , and increases customer satisfaction.

UX research helps brands and organizations to:

• Understand how users experience products, websites, mobile apps, and prototypes
• Evaluate and optimize prototypes and ideas based on UX research discoveries – and nail the design and experience early in a product’s life cycle
• Unearth new customer needs and business opportunities
• Find and fix hidden problems with products and services that arise in real-world use cases
• Make informed decisions through the product development process by testing various aspects of product designs
• Provide user experiences that outperform other businesses in your sector ( UX competitor research )
• Understand each user interaction across complete customer journeys
• Build a richer, more useful picture of your target audiences for better marketing and advertising

What’s the ROI of performing UX research?

The ROI of UX research is tricky to pin down because there often isn’t a direct, easy-to-spot correlation between time spent on it and resulting revenue. UX research can and does drive revenue, but it more directly influences metrics that show customer satisfaction, customer retention, and behavioral goals like user signups.

A simple way to draw a straight (if basic) line between UX research and its associated ROI is to calculate your conversion rate, where ‘conversion’ simply means completing the action you had in mind:

Number of people who took your desired action

—————————————————————       x 100

Total visitors/users

That percentage can be calculated and revisited over time to see how UX changes resulting from your research are having an effect.

Generally, when we talk about ROI, we’re talking about the highest possible rates of return you can attribute to an investment. But – while PWC research suggests that ROI on UX research can rise to as high as 301% – it’s better not to get caught up in absolutes with operational data like revenue.

Instead, it’s worth thinking more about the benefits that come out of tracking human behavior associated with improving your UX in general.

For example, IBM research states that 3 out of 5 users think that a positive user experience is more influential than strong advertising, while Forrester Research estimates that as many as 50% of potential sales fall through because users can’t find the information they need.

Thorough UX research can also cut a project’s development time by up to 50% .

Ultimately, when trying to track the ROI of your time spent doing quantitative and qualitative research on UX, you want to look at behavior and sentiment. If your main goal is website use, you should notice a decline in bounce rate as a sign of positive ROI. If you sell services, run regular CSAT surveys to determine how satisfied customers are with everything.

You might also find that data in unusual places. For example, if you spot a decline in chatbot requests around how to do or perform certain actions, or for information, then you know your new UX implementations are working as desired.

Those kinds of behavioral data points will shine a light on how worthwhile your UX research has been more readily than changes in revenue.

User experience research methods

The type of UX research techniques you choose will depend on the type of research question you’re tackling, your deadline, the size of your UX research team, and your environment.

There are three research dimensions to consider as you decide which methods are best for your project:

Attitudinal and behavioral

“Attitudinal” refers to what people say, while “ behavioral ” refers to what people actually do – and these are often very different. Attitudinal research is often used in marketing because it measures people’s stated beliefs and needs. However, in product design and user experience research, what people do tends to be more relevant.

For example, A/B testing shows visitors different versions of a site at random to track the effect of site design on conversion and behavior.

Another behavioral method is eye tracking, which helps researchers understand how users interact and visually engage with the design of an interface by following their gaze.

Qualitative and quantitative methods

Quantitative UX research studies collect and analyze results, then generalize findings from a sample to a population. They typically require large numbers of representative cases to work with and are structured in their approach.

Quantitative research uses measurement tools like surveys or analytics to gather data about how subjects use a product and are generally more mathematical in nature. This type of inquiry aims to answer questions like ‘what,’ ‘where’ and ‘when’.

Qualitative research methods, on the other hand, gather information about users by observing them directly, as in focus groups or field studies.

Qualitative research aims to understand the human side of data by gaining a sense of the underlying reasons and motivations surrounding consumer behavior. It tends to use small numbers of diverse (rather than representative) cases, and the data collection approach is less structured. Qualitative methods are best suited to address the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of consumer behavior.

Qualitative UX research methods

Several UX research methodologies can help UX researchers answer those big ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, and influence the design process of any product or service you’ve got cooking. Here are just a few …

1. Participatory design

In participatory design, people are asked to draw or design their own best-case version of the tool, product, or service in question. This gives UX researchers the ability to ask qualitative questions about why specific choices have been made. If multiple participants make similar choices, it’s easy to spot patterns that should be adopted.

You might ask participants how they would redesign your website. While their responses will naturally vary, you might spot that several of them have moved your site’s navigation to a more prominent spot, or have moved the checkout from the left of the screen to the right.

2. Card sorting

Card sorting involves giving participants a range of cards that represent business-specific topics and asking them how they would sort them into groups. UX researchers are then able to probe into why their audience might group certain things, and make changes to existing offerings as a result.

If you have a wide range of products and solutions, card sorting would be a useful way to gauge how your target audience would naturally bucket them on your website. A furniture seller, for example, might use this technique to find that people are naturally inclined to group items by room, rather than by furniture type.

3. Diary studies

If you’d like to know how the UX of your product or service varies over time or throughout the length of its use, a diary study can help. Here, participants are given a way to record their thoughts as they set about using the product or service in question, noting things that occur to them as they go. This is useful as it provides real-world insight over a longer period than a one-off focus group.

Giving people access to an early build of an app and asking them to keep usability testing notes can highlight pain points in the user interface. In a one-off focus group, having to tap three times to get to an oft-used screen might seem fine – whereas participants are more likely to find it annoying in the day-to-day. This kind of longer-term usability test can provide really valuable insights.

Both quantitative and qualitative UX research methodologies can be useful when planning the design and development of your brand presence, as well as for usability testing when it comes to product and service design.

Context-of-use

By collecting and analyzing information about users, the intended use of the application, the tasks they perform with the application, and the technical constraints presented by the application, context-of-use analysis allow UX researchers to better understand the overall experience.

Typically, context-of-use analysis data is collected through research surveys, focus groups, interviews, site visits, and observational studies.

Context-of use-analysis is one method for identifying the most important elements of an application or product in the context of using that application or product. This type of UX research is typically done early in the product lifecycle and continued as data identifies which components of the product and UX are most critical.

Types of user research tools

There are many types of user research methods for discovering data useful for product design and development. Below are some common examples of tools user experience researchers may use to gather information and draw insights into mental models, or users’ thought processes.

UX research surveys or questionnaires can discover data at scale through in-person or remote polling, with specific questions designed to collate useful information about user experience.

User groups or focus groups are a form of a structured interview that consults members of a target audience on their experience, views, and attitudes towards the product or solution. They usually involve neutral parties, such as a moderator and note-taker, and are led by a researcher who asks open-ended questions focused on specific aspects of an investigation.

User interviews are one-on-one structured interviews with a target audience member, led by a UX researcher to understand more about personal experiences with the product. These user interviews can be directed to compare and contrast answers between users, or non-directed, where users lead the conversation.

Ethnographic interviews take place within the target users’ typical environment to get a better context-of-use view. Field studies and site visits are similarly observational in nature, and take place in situ where the product or service is used, but may involve larger groups.

This is not a comprehensive list of research techniques but represents some of the main ways UX researchers might perform usability testing or trial UX design.

When to conduct user experience research

Before launching a new product or service, understanding user preferences that could impact your design or development is key to success. The earlier user experience research is performed, the more effective the end product or service will be, as it should encompass the insights learned about your target audience.

As a product and service’s use and value evolve over its lifecycle, the user experience will change over time. User research should be undertaken on an ongoing basis to determine how to adapt to users’ new needs and preferences.

Five basic steps to conducting UX research

If you’re new to UX research, here’s a step-by-step list of what to consider before you begin your UX testing program:

• Objectives What do you need to find out about your users and their needs?
• Hypothesis What do you think you already know about your users?
• Methods Based on your deadline, project type, and the size of your research team, what UX research methods should you use?
• Process Using your selected UX research method(s), begin collecting data about your users, their preferences, and their needs.
• Synthesis Analyze the data you collected to fill in your knowledge gaps, address your hypothesis and create a plan to improve your product based on user feedback.

Qualtrics makes UX research simple and easy

User experience research and user testing are multifaceted and can involve a lot of both quantitative and qualitative data. To ease the process and make sure it is efficient and scalable, it’s best conducted using a highly responsive platform that allows you to collect data, analyze trends and draw conclusions all in one place.

Whether you need attitudinal or behavioral insights, Qualtrics is your go-to solution for collecting all kinds of UX data and making use of it in the context of your wider CX program .

Conduct in-person studies or send beautifully designed surveys easily and quickly, and view your results via custom dashboards and reports using the most sophisticated research platform on the planet.

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User Experience Research: Definition, Types, Steps, + Uses

Have you ever noticed how your favorite applications and websites appear to read your mind? How do they smoothly anticipate your wants and make you feel like a tech-savvy superhero? It isn’t magic; it is the result of User Experience Research!

UX research is a dynamic and ongoing process that is essential in developing effective and user-friendly products or services. It fills the gap between user expectations and design decisions, resulting in higher product satisfaction and better business-related results.

Continue reading to learn more about user experience research, how to do it, and how researchers may use it.

What is User Experience research?

User Experience research or UX research is defined as users’ systematic study to discover behaviors, needs, motivations, and trends through observations, analysis, and other user feedback.

UX researchers use different methods to understand problems and draw opportunities to stand out amongst their competition. Organizations conduct UX research to precisely understand how real customers react to the products or services in the real world.

Types of UX research methods

We can divide UX research into two dimensions depending on the product type, its environment, the research size, and your timelines. Let’s look at both measurements.

Quantitative vs. qualitative research

Quantitative research is the study of a population through the use of surveys and questionnaires. Quantitative research helps to generalize findings and understand what a specific population likes and dislikes. This data collection technique is generally mathematical in nature.

Qualitative research helps researchers gather information by observing users in field studies or focus groups. Qualitative research brings sense to the motivations and reasons for consumer behavior. The users are generally in small numbers belonging to diverse backgrounds and help answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about consumer behavior.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Research Questions and Questionnaires

Attitudinal vs. behavioral research

“Attitudinal research” applies to what users say, while “behavioral” applies to what they really do. What users and customers usually say and what they do are sometimes pretty different. Researchers often conduct attitudinal research to measure customers’ needs and beliefs.

However, researchers lean towards behavioral research for insights as data on what users tend to do is more relevant. Website A/B testing is an excellent example of behavioral research because it gives researchers critical insights into how users perceive and act on different versions of the same site.

Steps to conduct user experience research

Conducting user experience research is a structured procedure that helps discover significant insights for improving the user experience. Here are the five steps to conducting user experience research:

Step 1: Define objectives

Always define the goals of your research before you act. Understand what you want to discover about your customers and their requirements.

By defining the objectives of your study, you can set the foundation for targeted and purposeful studies. Your goals should include a thorough understanding of your clients and their individual needs. This first stage acts as a compass to ensure that your research efforts are focused on measurable outcomes.

Step 2: Set a hypothesis

Set a hypothesis on what you feel you know about the users. This hypothesis serves as a preliminary assumption, a starting point that you will test and modify during the study process. A well-crafted hypothesis helps guide your research efforts and serves as the foundation for structured inquiry.

Step 3: Choose a suitable method(s)

Choosing the best research techniques is similar to choosing the right tools for a job. The method you’ll adopt is heavily influenced by factors such as project kind, available resources, research team size, and deadlines.

Whether you use surveys, interviews, usability testing, or a combination of methodologies, the goal is to customize your options to the specific context of your research, assuring effective data collecting and insight development.

Step 4: Apply the research method(s)

Conduct research using the research method(s) you chose and start collecting user data about their preferences, likes, dislikes, and needs. Conducting user experience research involves actively engaging with your target users and collecting valuable data.

This step entails creating surveys, setting up usability testing, conducting user interviews, or deploying any other chosen methodologies. UX researchers use a number of user research methods to conduct UX research. By directly interacting with users, you gain firsthand insights into user behaviors, preferences, and pain points.

Step 5: Synthesize feedback

Compiling and synthesizing the feedback is critical as data from your research activity comes in. This involves thoroughly examining user data and discovering trends, patterns, and variations. Collect and analyze the user-feedback data to fill in your knowledge gaps. Use this knowledge to improve and enhance your offering.

You can develop and improve your offers based on actual consumer demands by using synthesized feedback as a source of insights to direct your decision-making.

Uses of User Experience Research

UX research is a comprehensive toolkit for researchers. It allows them to navigate different stages of design and development while uncovering a variety of user insights. Researchers use UX research for the following:

Discovery means understanding what the users find relevant. Researchers either interview the user in their environment or ask them to maintain a record of their daily interaction with a design. Researchers look for insights into user habits, needs, and preferences during this phase.

UX researchers may conduct interviews with users in their natural surroundings or ask them to keep a record of their everyday experiences with a specific design to do this. Researchers can better empathize with users’ experiences and discover insights that help drive the design process by immersing themselves in their reality.

Exploration involves investigating many options and solutions to meet the different requirements of customers. During this phase, researchers look at possibilities to address the needs of all users. Card sorting is one of the interactive UX research methods to understand precisely what people like and dislike.

This interaction method helps researchers better understand users’ mental models and how they expect information to be organized. By investigating these preferences, UX designers may create interfaces and structures that fit customers’ needs, resulting in more intuitive and user-friendly designs.

Usability Testing

Usability Testing is an important stage in the UX research process because it allows designs and prototypes to be thoroughly tested. Testing helps you evaluate the design process thoroughly. UX researchers evaluate the product’s usability, functionality, and overall experience.

Usability testing involves observing real users interact with a prototype, product, or service. A UX researcher can modify the design and make informed decisions to produce a more seamless user experience by identifying pain points, problems, and places of misunderstanding. Companies test products to ensure they’re easy to use and accessible to everyone.

Listening to user feedback and viewpoints is essential for getting insights and putting design issues into context. Listening assists UX researchers in putting issues in perspective. It helps them find unseen problems to fix quickly.

Surveys and Questionnaires are useful tools that help researchers track user feelings. UX researchers can frequently seek user feedback via surveys, questionnaires, and feedback sessions. This method enables researchers to measure user sentiments, identify potential problems that may not be obvious at first, and fix them as soon as possible.

Benefits of UX research

The benefits of conducting UX research are numerous, contributing to both product quality and business success. Here’s a closer look at the main benefits of incorporating UX research into your design and development processes:

Better products

Involving your potential customers directly helps you gain a lot of knowledge on what the customers prefer, what their pain points are, and what will help the overall improvement of the product.

Happy users

UX research helps you collect unbiased feedback directly from your customers – your most reliable feedback source. It is the best actionable feedback source because it is not influenced by company leaders, investors, or other outsiders.

Business growth

Understanding what your customers seek helps organizations spend less money and time correcting flawed designs. It helps to speed up the product development process and boosts customer satisfaction.

User Experience research is an ongoing process. It connects user expectations and design decisions to create seamless product experiences. It discovers user behaviors and preferences using approaches such as quantitative and qualitative research, as well as attitudinal and behavioral insights.

QuestionPro research enables you to effectively develop, distribute, and analyze surveys, acquire useful insights, and make data-driven decisions across a wide range of research areas. It speeds up the research process, increases user interaction, and ultimately helps you better understand your target audience and improve your products or services.

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The Ultimate Guide to Designing for the User Experience

Learn about the key design principles and tools used by the pros and how great user experience can positively impact your business.

FREE UX RESEARCH KIT + TEMPLATES

3 templates for conducting user tests, summarizing your UX research, and presenting your findings.

Updated: 01/11/22

Published: 09/21/20

Think about a website or app you love. What do you love about it? The ease of gathering relevant information? How you can buy something in one click (and have it delivered tomorrow)? Or how quickly it answers your questions?

Now think about the people who created that website . What was their goal?

They were trying to create a site that had the features you love about it — a site that is easy to use, effectively delivers the information you need, and allows you to make smart decisions tailored to your challenges or concerns.

UX, or user experience, focuses on the end user’s overall experience, including their perceptions, emotions, and responses to a company’s product, system, or service. UX is defined by criteria including: ease of use , accessibility , and convenience . Together, these individual factors contribute to the customer's overall experience .

The concept of UX is most often talked about in terms of tech, such as smartphones, computers, software, and websites. This is why UX is not only a fairly new field, but also a variable one — it changes quickly due to technology advancements, new types of interactions, and user preferences.

It’s no secret that customers today want quick and simple ways to meet their needs and solve their pain points. That’s why UX matters so much.

Whether or not you’re in tech, the company you own or work for most likely has a website. Well, customers could write you off in a matter of seconds if they don’t find your website useful and easy to use. In fact, most website visitors determine whether or not they want to leave within a minute of opening a page.

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UX Design Principles

Ux design process, how to enhance user experience, what is user interface design, how to become a ux designer, ux design ideas, what is user experience (ux) design.

UX design, or user experience design, is the process of increasing a user’s level of satisfaction with a product or service by improving its functionality, ease of use and convenience.

UX design is about creating products "that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users," according to the Interaction Design Foundation . Within UX design, there are a few different categories.

1. Interaction Design

A subset of UX design is interaction design (IxD). It is defined as ... yup, you guessed it... the interaction between a user and a product — the goal of that interaction is for it to be pleasant for the user.

2. Visual Design

In visual design, creators use  illustrations, photography, typography, space, layouts, and color to enhance user experience. To have successful visual design, artistic design principles including balance, space, and contrast are crucial. Color, shape, size, and other elements also impact visual design.

3. User Research 

User research is the last major element of UX design. User research is how companies determine what their customers and users want and need. At its core, your website should solve a problem, and so this is an important step in determining what exactly your users require. Without it, your designs are simply guesses.

4. Information Architecture

Designers use information architecture to structure and label content so that users can find information easily. Information architecture is used on websites, smartphones, apps, and even in the physical places we go to. Ease of use and discoverability are two important factors of information architecture, which is why it is so closely related to UX design.

Think about the New York City Subway map. This is a great example of information architecture that helps people understand how to get from one place to the next. According to the Information Architecture Institute , "If you’re making things for others, you’re practicing information architecture."

Source:  NYC Subway Guide

UX is an ever-changing field, but the fundamental UX design principles remain the same. Designers also have to determine what they want in terms of visual balance. Being clear and concise is crucial … less is more! You want your design to be intuitive, and most importantly, your design should meet the user’s needs.

While UX is subject to trends and new technology, there are a few core principles that stay the same. These help designers look at various problems through a methodology that's consistent and focused.

• Be contextual: You want individuals to know exactly where they are in their user journey. They should never feel lost or overwhelmed. Your design is there to guide them along their journey.
• Be human: No user enjoys feeling like they are interacting with a machine. You’ll gain the trust of the end-user if you show them your brand’s personality and approachability.
• Be findable: Users don’t want to waste time. With a successful UX design, your work will be easy to find and navigate.
• Be easy: Being consistent and straightforward will go a long way with your users. You build relationships with your users by providing them with enjoyable and easy experiences.
• Be simple: No fluff, tangents, or unnecessary descriptions. Get to the point. Let’s be honest here … these days, everyone has a short attention span.

These principles will guide you at every stage of the UX design process. Let's walk through what each of those stages entails below. 

There are typically several stages of the UX design process to consider. UX design takes a human-centered design approach during all these stages. This is about considering the needs of the people you are designing for, coming up with a wide range of solutions to resolve the issue they are facing, designing prototypes for the users to test, and then finally putting the best solution in place for the user. If you look at the issue from the perspective of the user, and design with them in mind, you will create solutions they will want to adopt.

Let's take a closer look at each stage of the design process below.

1. Understand your user’s pain points.

Since UX design is about improving the user experience, your first step is finding out what the challenges and expectations of users are. Once you understand what the problems are, you can solve for them.

In an article for Career Foundry , Rosie Allabarton stresses the role of empathy at this stage of the UX design process. She said, “You’ll be working with groups of users who come from a variety of backgrounds and are bringing different experiences with them. Your job is to try to understand why they are behaving the way they are, not to try to change that behavior or influence it, but accommodate it within the product.”

There are a few approaches you can take to gather this important user research.

One of the best ways to understand your audience is to be in the same room as them. User interviews typically entail a group of users browsing through an existing site or product or even a competitor’s while members of your team observe. That way, your team can watch how people interact with a website or product and gather feedback in real time. This can help uncover areas of improvement that you and your team hadn’t noticed. Like maybe users are overlooking the CTA button on your homepage, or maybe they want a search box to navigate a website. You can then incorporate this feedback into your design process.

If in-person interviews isn’t an option, then you can always hold remote user testing sessions.

Online Surveys

While interviews are ideal for getting rich insights from a small group of users, online surveys are a great way to gather feedback from a larger audience. Surveys consist of a series of targeted questions sent to a sample of your audience. These questions can take on a variety of forms, including yes/no, multiple choice, checkbox, dropdown, ranking, ranking scale, and textbox. Online surveys are typically distributed via forms, and then compiled in a database so you and other stakeholders can review them.

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2. Create user personas.

Now that you have all this user research, you’ll want to summarize it. Creating user personas is a great way to do so. Also known as buyer personas , these personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. Buyer personas help you better understand your existing and prospective customers, so you can tailor your products as well as your services, content, and messaging to meet their specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.

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These personas help ensure that everyone on your team understands, remembers, and centers the end user throughout the design process. 

To learn how to research and create personas, check out the post How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Persona Template] .

3. Map out user journeys.

While you can categories users into different types of personas, every user is unique. That means different users will interact with your site in different ways — even if they have the same goal. Say they’re looking to apply to a job at your company. Some might navigate to your homepage, click Careers from your navigation bar, and then browse your job openings. Others might search your company name plus “careers” in Google.

Your goal is to identify the primary goals of your users and ensure they can complete their goals. So an ecommerce site, for example, will need to identify all the different ways a customer might want to complete a purchase and make sure their site enables them at every step. Providing functionality to ensure a customer can complete a purchase on a desktop, tablet, and mobile device are just a few scenarios you’d have to plan for. You’ll likely need a lot of colorful post-it notes for this stage.

4. Create website wireframes.

Now that you’ve mapped out user journeys on paper, it’s time to map them out in your actual product with website wireframes and prototypes. You can think of a wireframe as a sketch of your product or website.

When creating a wireframe for your website or product, you can plot out how you want to display your main features, allocate space, and present images and content and how this layout helps (or hinders) the user from achieving their goals before introducing design elements like color schemes.

Evaluating your product’s functionality and intended user behavior at this stage can help you find potential problems or missing features that might get in the way of conversions or sales later on — before you’re too far along in the design process. That way, you can easily make changes, get approval from other stakeholders, and confidently move to the next stage of the design process.

Wireframes range in complexity. Some are hand-drawn with a pencil, others are created with free software tools like Inkscape and GIMP while other use paid software tools like Sketch and Canva . Here’s an illustrated example.

5. Start prototyping.

Think of a prototype as the final draft of your product or website before the coding begins. It’s not the final version, but it’s close enough that you can fully test the product before it launches and demonstrate it to management and other stakeholders.

Unlike a wireframe, a prototype will include font, images, icons, and colors. This phase is focused less on aesthetics and more on user flow, however. Prototypes will be interactive, allowing you, users, and other stakeholders to experience how the product works in real life.

You’ll run more user testing at this phase to uncover issues like whether your checkout process requires too many clicks or your homepage is difficult to navigate.You’ll likely experiment with navigation and other functionality at this stage, and produce lots of iterations.

To create a prototype and subsequent iterations, you’ll need to use a dedicated tool like Adobe XD, InVision, or the free Justinmind. Here’s an example of a prototype built with Justinmind.

At this point, the coding can begin so you’ll pass your prototype to designers and developers who will build a user interface. More on what a UI is and how it differs from UX later .

UX Deliverables

UX deliverables are the various outputs of a UX design process. The designer and team will have to produce and present these deliverables to an internal team and external clients for review — either during the design process or once the project is complete. 

As tangible records of the work that has occurred, UX deliverables are a critical part of the design process. These deliverables help UX designers to effectively communicate their design ideas and findings, and make it clear to stakeholders why recommendations for changes and improvements are made. They also help designers get buy-in for their ideas.

1. User Research

User needs, tendencies, and motivations can be determined through different types of user research . This might include quantitative and qualitative data from user testing sessions and focus groups. It could detail feedback on sign up flows, the onboarding process, and customer service inquiries.

The goal is to have a detailed analysis of what's both working on the site and what could be improved — and to have this all backed by information gathered from users. Researchers may create  buyer personas  based off of real user data to help them accurately determine who will be using their device, website, or app. Through user research, designers understand and empathize with the user.

2. Competitor Assessment

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is a way to enhance your own UX strategy. A great way to do this is by creating a competitive analysis report that details the interaction design of your competitors and provides an analysis of where you see pitfalls and missed opportunities — things your business can take advantage of.

3. Interaction Design

An interaction design deliverable could come in the form of a prototype so that people can review how interactions with the site would occur — showing how people would complete key tasks, get information, use a product, the flow of finding information, and how easy the product is to use. You want your prototype to be as similar to the final product as possible, so you can get sign off on the design before you begin building it.

IA is the process of taking information and organizing it in a way that is easy to understand. For large websites, this is especially important, as you need to understand what content exists and how to organize it in a way that makes sense for your visitors. The result might be a content inventory, sitemap with suggested navigation, or sample user flows that reveal how visitors move through a site.

Source:  Adobe Blog

Now that we understand the different deliverables a client or manager might ask from a UX designer, let's take a closer look at arguably the most important: UX research. 

User Experience Research

Without research, all of this focus on what the user needs and wants would be impossible. UX research is the investigation of users and what they need , which informs the UX design process. Companies and designers use this research to come to specific conclusions about what is working for users and what needs to be changed. There are several ways companies and designers perform UX research.

Usability Testing

Usability testing evaluates how successful a product is by testing it on actual users. It gives companies real input on how individuals are using a product or system and how that product or system works for that user. There are two primary testing methods. 

Hallway usability testing is a quick and cheap way for companies and researchers to get information from users who may not know of your company or products. Random individuals use the products and give feedback on their experience.

Remote usability testing allows companies to research with users in their natural environment (such as in their home or office). These tests can be moderated in any way the company chooses.

Usability Testing Tools

Usability testing tools allow researchers and designers to compile accurate feedback from users and then analyze that feedback to make data-driven changes. If you’re looking for a tool that can help you test how easy-to-use your site or product is, check out these options:

• Crazy Egg : This tool allows companies to see exactly what users are clicking on while on their website. Crazy Egg also records exactly where site visitors are coming from, including geographic location, and if they were referred from another site.
• Hotjar : This tool combines analytics and feedback to give an overview on ways to improve user experience. They do this through the use of heatmaps, visitor rates, conversion funnels, and more.

For more usability testing tools to consider, check out this post .

Through the research and testing mentioned above, user experiences can always be improved. Some of the most common ways to improve user experience include: Taking a consultative approach to improving the experience, determining calls to action, implementing responsive web design, considering Fitt's Law (more on this next), avoiding overwhelming data entry, and more.

Using Fitt’s Law to Enhance UX

Fitt’s law is a predictive model that determines the amount of time it takes for a specific user to move their mouse or cursor to a target area on a website. There are multiple versions of Fitt’s law that exist but they all revolve around the general idea that, “The time required to move to a target depends on the distance to it, yet relates inversely to its size.” Fitt’s law is widely used in UX design to improve ergonomics in addition to usability for users.

Here’s an example of this at work: Have you seen the new Touch Bar on Apple’s MacBook Pro? This is a touchscreen above the keyboard that speeds up a user’s experience when using Google, bookmarking a page, changing screen brightness, volume, and more. Touch Bar options change depending on what page you are browsing while on your laptop, whether that be an app, a site you are visiting, or even just your personal settings.

With the Touch Bar, the user’s experience is simplified because many commonly used settings are in one compact location. Fitt’s law states the further away and smaller an object or button is for a user, the harder it is for that user to click on it. That’s why the Touch Bar is such a great example of taking Fitt’s Law and successfully applying it to your device to enhance user experience.

UX Design Tools

Whether you are researching, prototyping, wireframing , storyboarding, or creating graphics, there are multiple UX tools available to assist you during the design process. In fact, there are so many tools on the market, some free and some that require a subscription fee, that it may be overwhelming for designers who are unsure of exactly what they need. To get you started, here’s a list of some popular and valuable tools to use in your UX design work:

1. Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks CS6 gives web designers a way to create graphics for their web pages without getting into the code or design details. There are a few reasons why UX designers use Adobe Fireworks: The tool has impressive pixel accuracy, has image compression abilities (JPEG, GIF, etc.), allows users to create functional websites, and build vectors. This is a great option especially if you are already familiar with other programs in the Creative Cloud.

2. Adobe XD

With Adobe XD, you can design websites and mobile apps, as well as create prototypes, wireframes, and vector designs. Users can share interactive prototypes on multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, so it’s perfect for team collaboration.

Axure RP Pro is another great UX design tool — that’s also free. Axure has several capabilities including wireframing, prototyping, and documenting. It can even help you create user flows and sitemaps. Axure is perfect for creating web and desktop applications, and it gives users the ability to easily export to PDF or HTML for review.

4. Adobe Illustrator and a Free Alternative

If you’re looking for an affordable alternative to Adobe software, such as Adobe Illustrator (which is primarily used to create vector graphics), we’ve got you.  Inkscape  is known for doing most of what Illustrator does, but for free. This software is open source and can be used to create impressive vector graphics. The only issue you could run into is lag, as  some users have reported  that the program is slow. If you’re partial to Illustrator, that’s OK too.

Sketch is an end-to-end software with specific features including non-destructive editing (meaning Sketch won’t change the pixels in the photo you are working with), code export, pixel precision, prototyping, vector editing, and more. With Sketch, you can reuse and update your designs easily.

6. Storyboard Software

You might be wondering why you would need to storyboard in UX design. It’s a great way to visually predict and review the way a user would interact with and experience a product in a broader context. There are several storyboard tools available, with varying levels of features and complexity.

Storyboarder  is a free storyboard software option, which has basic features made for designers of all levels. This software allows users to quickly create drawings and stick figures to lay out a plot or idea.

Another storyboard software option is Toon Boom Storyboard Pro . It combines drawing, animation, camera controls, and numerous other features, all for an annual or monthly fee. It has a wider range of features for more complex storytelling and detailed prep work. Both options are great for designers looking to visually tell the story of their persona or users.

Storyboards are also a great way to bring in all stakeholders, including researchers, developers, and UI designers. Before we discuss how to become a UX designer, let’s make sure we understand the difference between two similar roles: UX and UI designers.

Remember when Apple unveiled its click wheel for the iPod? When it was introduced, the feature was intuitive and highly functional — not to mention cool-looking.

This is a great example of a successful user interface (UI). UI refers to how people interact with computers, machines, websites, apps, wearables, and other programs or devices. User interface design is the process of making these things as easy to use and efficient as possible.

UI vs. UX Design

UX refers to the user’s journey through an application or process. UX designers focus on the overall form and function of a product or technology. UI focuses on how a product’s surfaces look and function. UI designers work with the tangible and visible elements of the process.

Common UI Elements

Although UX and UI have similar definitions, it’s important to note the key differences that separate the two topics. Again, UI focuses on a product’s appearances and surfaces, while UX is more concerned with how people interact with a site. Here are some common UI terms you should know to better understand how the two differentiate:

• Informational Components: UI designers use informational components to enhance the reading experience or give more information. Examples of informational components are progress bars, notifications, and message boxes. Designers use these when they want to make it clear to the user that they have completed a task, or if they want to notify the user that action on their part is necessary.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: This is a design tool often used by UI designers to visually increase the usability of a website. It allows users to see their location on a site in a hierarchical structure. It doesn’t need to have special visual features or over-the-top design — it should just clearly state where a person is located on a site. You may have noticed these links along the top of a webpage while online shopping or on another site.
• Input Controls: Input Controls give individuals multiple options in response to a question you are asking. These are things like checkboxes, drop-down lists, and toggles. Keep the information you are asking in your input controls simple and to-the-point so it’s easy to find what the user needs.

Source: UX Planet

• Do your research
• Take a UX design course
• Apply for a UX design internship
• Build your UX design portfolio

If you love designing, researching, working with other people in a fast-paced environment, and listening to others’ experiences, a career in UX design may be right for you. As a UX designer, you’d focus on the conceptual aspects of design and create better experiences for users.

Here are the steps to follow to become a UX designer.

1. Do your research.

This step may seem like a given, but pursuing a career path (or changing yours altogether) is a big move. Do plenty of research to ensure that you want to be a UX designer. Guides like this one will help give you an idea of what UX design entails. You can also lookup "day-in-the-life" articles , podcasts, and books to better understand how other UX designers spend their workdays.

2. Take a UX design course.

There are plenty of higher education courses available around the world, though they typically require a four-year undergraduate design curriculum as a prerequisite.

However, some programs allow for more flexibility, such as the online Quinnipiac University Graduate Program in User Experience Design. There are also UX certification programs for professionals. These vary in commitment length and level of expertise upon receipt of the certificate.

3. Apply for a UX design internship.

A UX design internship is valuable for a few reasons. First, UX design internships bridge the gap between education and real-life experience. Internships allow you to put what you've learned in the classroom (or online) to work while receiving helpful feedback from your peers and coworkers.

Secondly, UX design internships allow you to build a live portfolio of design work done on behalf of a real company. While demo work is valuable for demonstrating skill and process, you can report on the impact and results of the work you complete during your internship.

Lastly, UX design internships introduce valuable mentor relationships. Design mentors are critical to developing your skills, receiving constructive criticism, and expanding your network — three things that can help you land your dream UX design job.

To find a UX design internship, start with sites like LinkedIn , The Muse , Glassdoor , and AngelList , as well as simply searching on Google. You can also target the companies themselves: Apple , Google , Microsoft , Reddit , Adobe , Amazon , and Salesforce all offer UX design internship programs.

4. Build your UX design portfolio.

Once you’re ready to start applying for your dream UX job, you’ll need a stand-out resume and a flashy portfolio. Use a site like Dribble or Behance to showcase your work, or create your own website using a tool like SquareSpace .

When building your portfolio site, keep these tips in mind:

Make it visually stunning.

Presentation is everything. Your work should speak for itself ... show don’t tell! Your choice in color, typography, and layout all play a factor here.

Include an “about” page.

Hiring managers and recruiters want to get to know you, how you think about design, what inspires you, and what makes you unique. Why should they hire you? What value can you add to your new potential company and team?

Have clear navigation and links throughout your portfolio site.

Can you imagine the hiring manager at your dream company having a hard time navigating the portfolio site of a UX designer? Awkward. In your navigation bar, include options such as: “portfolio,” “about,” “contact,” and “resume” to avoid any confusion.

Explain your personal UX process.

Your future employer wants to know how you think. Include information that lets the hiring manager in on your UX researching, brainstorming, wireframing, designing, and prototyping processes.

Create additional portfolios to expand your network.

Use other tools to make your work available on sites where designers and those looking to hire designers to spend their time. Behance and Dribble are great portfolio sites for people looking for inspiration, networking, and new career opportunities.

If you're interested in this career path, we've gathered some ideas for UX projects that can help get you started and built out your portfolio. Let's take a look.

Are you interested in UX design but don’t know where to get started? We’ve compiled a list of ideas for people who need inspiration just like you. Completing these projects will not only provide you with valuable experience, it will also provide valuable additions to your portfolio. Let’s take a look at some of these ideas and the real-life examples that go with them.

Redesign the digital menu of your favorite local restaurant.

Redesigning a restaurant’s menu is a great exercise in anticipating user needs. To find the right balance of information and images, you’ll have to decide what readers need to know and see to make informed decisions, and what will simply overwhelm them. You might experiment with the categorization, descriptions, and ratings of the food items, and more.

Below is a drink menu by Panji Arafat on Dribble.

Sketch a better interface for your toaster oven.

This will help you practice analyzing an existing product and identifying where you can add value in terms of functionality and design. The best part is you can complete this project without leaving your kitchen!

Below is an example by designer Sarah Kerbleski.

Redesign the homepage of your personal site.

You can redesign the homepage of any website, but using your own personal site or a site that you have access to analytics to is ideal. That way, you can practice accumulating and analyzing user research and using those insights to inform your design process.

When HubSpot redesigned its homepage back in 2016, UX Designer Austin Knight analyzed massive amounts of data and discovered three important trends: a significant number of users were moving from the homepage to the pricing page, FAQ page, and the search bar. All of these trends supported the conclusion that the homepage was lacking critical information that was affecting its conversions. You can read more about this redesign in the UXPin case study .

Redesign a feature in an application that frustrates you.

This can help you practice redesigning some functionality in an existing app, rather than starting from scratch. Product designer Jo Zhouzheng did exactly this for Doordash. Frustrated by the restaurant and menu browsing experience in this popular food delivery app, Zhouzheng redesigned the interface. Here’s a before and after look of the interfaces.

Design an app for checking in at your primary care doctor or specialist.

Designing any health app will be a great exercise in UX. Focusing on the check-in process specifically will help you practice identifying and solving for user pain points. You can focus on an in-person or virtual check-in, like Digital Product Designer Divan Raj did below.

Create personas for an app you want to design (or redesign).

Creating personas is an important part of the UX design process. You can get some experience by creating personas for a hypothetical app, or an existing one. Maybe you like an app or website, but know the functionality or design could be better. In that case, you could define new personas for that product. Or you could create personas for a product that you’ve thought of.

Daorong Fang, for example, created a prototype of a mobile app for in-person social networking events. To illustrate her key audience and help potential stakeholders sympathize with her target issues (ie. how awkward and time-consuming networking can be), she built two personas. One of them — Techy Sarah — is shown below.

Map out a voter’s journey in a local, state, or federal election office .  

This can help you understand how UX design can contribute to larger phenomena, like low voter turnout, and flex your analytic and critical thinking muscles. By plotting out the path from registration to the point where voters have a ballot in their hands, you’ll uncover regulations, time constraints, a lack of transparency, poor design choices, and other pain points.

Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell founded The Center for Civic Design  with this exact goal in mind: they wanted to understand where people fall off the voter journey, and how to get them back on. Below is one of their Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, which helps local officials create well designed ballots.

These are just a few ideas. For more inspiration, check out websites like Dribble and Awwwards .

UX Design Helps You Grow Better

Whether you’re a graphic designer, blogger, developer, or someone in an entirely different field, UX design can help you and your company grow. A happy end-user is the key to success, and without well-crafted UX design, this would be impossible to achieve.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in our lives, successful UX design will continue to create seamless transitions between individuals and their devices and apps. UX design has never been more important, making it an exciting time to join the field and consider the benefits for your own business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. 

Don't forget to share this post!

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3 templates for conducting user tests, summarizing UX research, and presenting findings.

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Home » What Is User Experience Research & Its Value to My Product?

What Is User Experience Research & Its Value to My Product?

This article covers:

• What Is User Experience Research?
• 5 Key Steps for User Experience (UX) Research
• 2021 User Experience (UX) Best Practices

What Is User Experience (UX) Research?

User experience (UX) research is defined as the process used to survey, study, and identify user needs and preferences. The end goal of such a study is facilitate the design of better user-friendly digital products and features. 

The underlying principle that fuels investment into user experience studies is that products that are more user centric and simple to use, despite the sophistication of ever-evolving technology and features, will have a greater market adoption edge than competitors. 

Various tools and techniques are used to come up with different types of conclusions through different methodologies.

However, the goal remains the same – to arrive at facts that can be used to solve user experience design problems and ultimately lead to valuable insights that can lead to better user experience by enriching the design process. 

User experience (UX) research is used to gather both qualitative and quantitative information by using various methods like interviews, usability testing , contextual inquiries, and persona studies. 

The underlying principle in user experience research is to have a detailed understanding of how the end-users of a product or service think and behave and what their needs and emotions are while using the product. 

All efforts made through user experience (UX) research are directed towards aligning the product design process to the perspective of actual end-users rather than designing just for assuming what is best.

User experience research helps in the creation of user-centric design keeping in mind the end-users, their needs and motivations in the context of using the product, and streamlining the process for achieving a great user experience.

User Experience (UX) Research Process: 5 Key Steps

The user experience (UX) research process can be broken down into five steps, in which the first three steps are concerning the formulation and answering of questions that help the product designers know what kind of information they need in their user experience research.

The last two steps relate to knowledge gathering and application of the acquired knowledge in the design process for making a great product.

The five steps in the user experience research process are framing the objectives, arriving at the hypotheses, selection of the method, conducting the process of data accumulation and synthesizing the data gathered and understanding its implications in the design process. Let us explore each of these five steps in detail.

Step 1: Framing The Objectives

In the beginning, you need to be specific and clear about the objectives that you need to fulfill by conducting user experience research.

To achieve this, you need to fix the user segment for whom you are designing the product and determine their demographics and psychographics along with your baseline criteria on which you will select people for your research.

You also need to know what the current situation of the end-users are and their line of action in fulfilling their particular needs that you are aiming to fulfill through your product.

After this, you need to explore when your product may be used by the users and if there are any fixed routines or behaviors of the users that you need to know. 

Beyond this, you need to establish the context in which users may be using your product.

For instance, do they use a particular technology or perform certain tasks for fulfilling their needs.

Moreover, you need to be clear about why people may use your product and the underlying emotional and rational causes that lead them to your product.

From there, zero in on the reasons why people may choose your product.

In the end, you need to figure out how people will use your product and what the user journey may look like while they use your product. 

It’s imperative that you ensure that you are clear about the above-mentioned aspects for framing your objectives to make your user experience research effective.

Make sure to formulate a mix of tightly-scoped research objectives that are focused on specific tasks and goals while including a number of open-ended research objectives that can give insights about the user behavior, attitudes, and emotions.

Step 2: Arriving at the Hypothesis

Once the objectives of your user experience research have been established, you should now start thinking about your potential design process and their solutions as well as testing your assumptions that you may have framed about the problem at hand.

These may be in the form of your feelings and thinking regarding how the product needs to be designed. You must validate these ideas and assumptions by testing the hypotheses correctly in the initial stages of product design .

To validate these hypotheses, you need to externalize them to eliminate any bias that designers or clients may have regarding the product design.

Arriving at the hypothesis is an important step in the design process, as it helps you to select the right methods for fulfilling your research objectives. 

The hypothesis that you have arrived at can be described as attitude-related hypotheses, behavior-related hypotheses, or feature-related hypotheses.

By generating these hypotheses, you are able to lay a solid foundation for the product design process by making the user experience research process methodical and structured.

Step 3: Select The Appropriate Method

Once the research objectives have been finalized and the hypothesis is finalized, you can now select the appropriate research methods that are most suited to fulfill your objectives.

A combination of two or more methods can be chosen for effective user experience research consisting of interviews, surveys , and exploration of market trends.

These methods are effective in letting you gain knowledge about your user base. You should also consider including methods like card sorting, paper prototyping, and other participatory design activities for getting deep insights regarding the user requirements.

By collaborating with your research participants and incorporating their feedback in the early stages of the product design process, you can validate your hypothesis and also generate potential design solutions that can be effective in enhancing user experience. 

You should also include methods like usability testing , cognitive walkthroughs, and heuristic environments among others for refining your product design processes.

Through such methods, you get specific information about how users want to use a particular product and their preferences.

By constantly refining the methods that you choose for your user experience research through various iterations , you are able to visualize the best possible way to enhance the user experience by incorporating their preferences and needs.

Step 4: Accumulating Data

This is the stage in which you start implementing your user experience research by gathering the data through the methods selected.

You need to ensure that you conduct the research process methodically, capturing and analyzing each detail properly. While doing this, it is ok to deviate a bit by changing course or improvising for better implementation of the research process.

You need to realize that the main purpose of your user experience research exercise is to gain new insights about the end-users and the way their experience can be streamlined.

In addition, besides collecting user data, you need to analyze the data simultaneously so that you are sure that the kind of data you are collecting is going to be effective in helping you to refine the product design process.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have user survey tools included in the product management software?

Chisel is a primary app for product managers that they use not just to conduct user experience research but also to build team alignment, along with many other things.

Step 5: Synthesis and Refining The Design Process

In the final stage of the user experience research process, you capture the knowledge that will help you to advance the product design process.

Through a rigorous analysis of the data gathered, you can find different patterns, meanings, and trends that will help you to fulfill the research objectives you had set at the beginning of this process.

By extracting the insights from the gathered data, you can synthesize the learnings by refining the product design, validating your hypotheses all whilst considering their impact on product design.

Such insights should also be used to guide your next course of action and for changing your process as needed.

5 Best Practices for User Experience (UX) Research in 2021

By understanding, in detail, the needs and wants of your end-users through user experience research, you can improve the usability of your product and make it easy and fun to use, thereby delivering great user experience.

This will also ensure the commercial viability of your product as well as help you to gain the confidence of all the stakeholders involved. 

1. Achieve Objectivity By Eliminating Bias In Your Research

While conducting user experience research, we should be open-minded and unbiased, as this ensures that the perspective of end-users is considered and incorporated in the product design process.

While it is impossible to start any user experience research project without having any preset ideas and expectations, we need to recognize them and ensure that such thoughts don’t cloud our approach while conducting the research, as this may lead to various biases controlling the process.

To eliminate such a bias, we need to be systematic and analytical in comprehending the results of the user experience research and not view them through the prism of our preconceived ideas and notions. 

Hence, we should be open-minded while conducting surveys and interviews of the targeted user groups and encouraging them to state their point of view instead of making them confirm their beliefs.

The same practice should be followed while conducting usability tests and you should not try to confirm the problems you think you have already identified in the user interface.

By encouraging the end-users to explore your product or questions without any limitations, you surely can get a different perspective leading to valuable feedback for improving your product.

2. Attach Maximum Importance To Research Done In Early Stages

You need to give maximum importance to the findings that are derived in the earliest stage of your user experience research as they tend to have the maximum impact on the product design.

Therefore, you should allot a majority of your budget and time to the early stages of user experience research, as it is better to gather valuable insights before the product is designed and further investments are committed.

However, it may be difficult to find the users and the challenges they face in such early stages, and this problem can be overcome by conducting ethnographic research which gives valuable insights about the people and their activities related to your research area.

This information helps you in confirming that you are on the right track and lets you design your product accordingly.

This kind of research, when conducted in the early stages of your product development , helps you save considerable time and resources in designing your product as per the expectations of the users.

3. Find The Right Interview Participants For Valuable Research Insights

You need to select the right participants for interviews you are conducting as a part of the user experience research.

This is important for getting the right kind of user feedback that will add value to their experience while using your product.

You should devote ample time and effort to find the interview participants and screen them properly and also offer them attractive incentives.

The screening process becomes more expensive and time-consuming if you limit the pool of your interview participants on the basis of their demography, profession, or geography.

Also, instead of studying your interview participants in person, you should focus on an online medium, like surveys, as it is more flexible and efficient for finding participants with particular attributes. 

For screening interviewees participating in your interviews, you should select individuals that share the pain points your product is attempting to solve.

This can be done by asking them relevant questions and you should also communicate any technical requirements that you may have before interviewing them.

In addition, you should look for participants who are more detail-oriented and expressive while answering your interview questions, as it helps to get valuable feedback.

4. Choose Your User Experience Research Methods Wisely

You should choose the most appropriate methods for your user experience research as it is essential for getting the most valuable insights.

Hence, you should consider attitudinal research that explores the mindset of the users and how they think their behavior may be in a particular context.

On the other hand, you should also consider behavioral research, which documents the actual behavior of the users and thus clearly distinguish between what people say and what they actually do.

These types of qualitative research methods will give you deep insights into user behavior, and you can reinforce these findings.

On top of this, by employing quantitative research methods, you will collect an ample amount of required numbers and statistics to validate your findings.

You should also consider whether your research participants are using your product in a natural or near-natural manner, whether the use of the product is scripted, or if it’s a mixture of both.

Therefore, it is advisable not to rush your user experience research process and consider the methods you are using carefully so that they are most effective in delivering valuable insights.

5. Share Your Research Findings Effectively

While it is important to conduct user experience research for knowing your target audience, it is equally important to effectively communicate your research findings to the key stakeholders , which also includes designers, developers, and product managers in order to derive the maximum value from your findings.

The analysis and conclusions that are derived by conducting user experience research should be properly presented to the stakeholders involved in the product design so that they have a proper understanding of the findings, based on which future course of action is determined.

Also, the type of presentation and the way you communicate your findings may differ as per the type of stakeholders.

High-level executives may just require a summary of the research findings, but designers or developers may require a detailed presentation.

In addition, you should be ready to support your findings with facts and figures derived from your research so that your findings are justified and convincing for others.

You may also be interested in:

• Understand the Purpose of a Product Manager
• Improve Your Digital Product Management
• What is product?
• UX Writing: Definition, Examples and Best Practices
• What is a prototype?
• Customer Feedback Loop: How to Create & Close it ?
• Customer Feedback Management: Best Practices and Platforms

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• Vitaly Friedman
• May 7, 2024

How To Run UX Research Without Access To Users

• UX Research , User Experience , Design
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About The Author

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

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UX research without users isn’t research . We can shape design ideas with bias, assumptions, guesstimates, and even synthetic users , but it’s anything but UX research. Yet some of us might find ourselves in situations where we literally don’t have access to users — because of legal constraints, high costs, or perhaps users just don’t exist yet. What do we do then?

Luckily, there are some workarounds that help us better understand pain points and issues that users might have when using our products. This holds true even when stakeholders can’t give us time or resources to run actual research, or strict NDAs or privacy regulations prevent us from speaking to users.

Let’s explore how we can make UX research work when there is no or only limited access to users — and what we can do to make a strong case for UX research .

This article is part of our ongoing series on design patterns . It’s also an upcoming part of the 10h-video library on Smart Interface Design Patterns  🍣 and the upcoming live UX training as well. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

Find Colleagues Who Are The Closest To Your Customers

When you don’t have access to users, I always try to establish a connection with colleagues who are the closest to our customers . Connect with people in the organization who speak with customers regularly, especially people in sales, customer success , support, and QA. Ultimately, you could convey your questions indirectly via them.

As Paul Adams noted , there has never been more overlap between designers and salespeople than today. Since many products are subscription-based, sales teams need to maintain relationships with customers over time. This requires a profound understanding of user needs — and meeting these needs well over time to keep retention and increase loyalty.

That’s where research comes in — and that’s exactly where the overlap between UX and sales comes in. In fact, it’s not surprising to find UX researchers sitting within marketing teams under the disguise of Customer Success teams, so whenever you can befriend colleagues from sales and Customer Success teams.

Gaining Insights Without Direct Access To Users

If you can’t get users to come to you, perhaps you could go where they are. You could ask to silently observe and shadow them at their workplace. You could listen in to customer calls and interview call center staff to uncover pain points that users have when interacting with your product. Analytics , CRM reports, and call center logs are also a great opportunity to gain valuable insights, and Google Trends can help you find product-related search queries .

To learn more about potential issues and user frustrations, also turn to search logs, Jira backlogs, and support tickets. Study reviews, discussions, and comments for your or your competitor’s product, and take a look at TrustPilot and app stores to map key themes and user sentiment. Or get active yourself and recruit users via tools like UserTesting, Maze, or UserInterviews.

These techniques won’t always work, but they can help you get off the ground. Beware of drawing big conclusions from very little research, though. You need multiple sources to reduce the impact of assumptions and biases — at a very minimum, you need five users to discover patterns .

Making A Strong Case For UX Research

Ironically, as H Locke noted , the stakeholders who can’t give you time or resources to talk to users often are the first to demand evidence to support your design work. Tap into it and explain what you need. Research doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive; ask for a small but steady commitment to gather evidence. Explain that you don’t need much to get started: 5 users × 30 minutes once a month might already be enough to make a positive change.

Sometimes, the reason why companies are reluctant to grant access to users is simply the lack of trust . They don’t want to disturb relationships with big clients, which are carefully maintained by the customer success team. They might feel that research is merely a technical detail that clients shouldn’t be bothered with.

Typically, if you work in B2B or enterprise, you won’t have direct access to users. This might be due to strict NDAs or privacy regulations , or perhaps the user group is very difficult to recruit (e.g., lawyers or doctors).

Show that you care about that relationship. Show the value that your work brings. Explain that design without research is merely guesswork and that designing without enough research is inherently flawed.

Once your impact becomes visible, it will be so much easier to gain access to users that seemed almost impossible initially.

Key Takeaways

• Ask for reasons for no access to users: there might be none.
• Find colleagues who are the closest to your customers.
• Make friends with sales , customer success, support, QA.
• Convey your questions indirectly via your colleagues.
• If you can’t get users to come to you, go where they are.
• Ask to observe or shadow customers at their workplace.
• Listen in to customer calls and interview call center staff .
• Gather insights from search logs, Jira backlog, and support tickets .
• Map key themes and user sentiment on TrustPilot, AppStore, etc.
• Recruit users via UserTesting, Maze, UserInterviews , etc.
• Ask for small but steady commitments: 5 users × 30 mins, 1× month .
• Avoid ad-hoc research: set up regular check-ins and timelines .

Useful Resources

• The End Of Navel Gazing , by Paul Adams
• UX Research Cheat Sheet , by Susan Farrell
• Overcoming Limited Access To Users in UX Research , by Debbie Levitt
• What Can You Do When You Have No Access To Users? , by H Locke
• UX Research When You Can’t Talk To Users , by Chris Myhill
• How To Conduct UX Research Without Users , by Mariia Kasym
• User Research When You Can’t Talk to Your Users , by Jon Peterson

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Video - Stuart Wright - Open Research Conference 2024 (Subtitled)

MANC-RISK-SCREEN: Development of an open and transparent model to evaluate risk-based breast cancer screening in the UK

The MANC-RISK-SCREEN model is a simulation model which evaluates the clinical and economic outcomes of different risk-based breast cancer screening strategies in the UK. Through the past 2 years, my co-authors and I have been through a process aiming to update and improve the openness and accessibility of the model. This presentation will detail the steps we have taken to address these aims.

To improve the openness of the MANC-RISK-SCREEN model four steps were taken. The model code was made openly available on GitHub for re-use or adaptation by other research groups. To improve the transparency of the model and its assumptions, a full validation of the model was undertaken and published as a pre-print, with a full journal article under review. To allow non-technical users to access the model, the researcher worked with Research IT to develop an app to allow users to change the input parameters and observe the impact on the results of the model. Finally, the research team are now working with developers of other models of risk-based screening to evaluate screening and compare results to improve evidence for decision making.

These steps have proved beneficial for the research The model is now being adapted by a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen to evaluate the use of artificial intelligence in breast cancer screening. The student highlighted several minor errors in the model, which were corrected. Feedback from decision makers suggests that the validation of the model has improved their trust in its results. Based on the experience of developing the app, the research team have developed grant applications including this approach with more user input. Based on the experience of working with other researchers, the lead model developer has established a national network to improve the quality of evidence generated by economic models.

Additional information can be found here: • https://github.com/stuwrighthealthecon/MANC-RISK-SCREEN • Validation of a decision-analytic model for the cost-effectiveness analysis of a risk- stratified National Breast Screening Programme in the United Kingdom • MANC-RISK-SCREEN - 0.12.2.0 • UK National Screening Committee Blog – Experts discuss models for personalised breast screening based on risk

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Promptframes: evolving the wireframe for the age of ai.

May 17, 2024 2024-05-17

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In This Article:

The need for quality placeholder content, introducing promptframes, benefits of using promptframes, how to use promptframes in the design process, the potential of promptframes, a few precautions to consider, a good tactic for the 1-person ux team.

Using placeholder text or images early in your design workflow can help you explore possibilities and cope with evolving requirements.

However, placeholder content (especially the notorious lorem ipsum) can be a barrier to gathering insightful feedback from users and stakeholders. I have personally experienced derailed usability testing sessions because of my placeholders provoked unintentional confusion and doubt in my participants. (And folks like Anna Kaley have previously highlighted the benefits of taking a content-focused approach in early design work.) In UX, remember that the content inspires feedback , not the container .

To enable a more efficient feedback loop, I propose a new design deliverable: the promptframe . Use promptframes to create realistic placeholder content faster using AI.

Promptframes unite the classic UX wireframe with prompt writing for generative AI.

A promptframe is a design deliverable that documents content goals and requirements for generative-AI prompts based on a wireframe’s layout and functionality.

Promptframes organize and document prompts locationally within an existing wireframe. UX designers can create promptframes early in the design process as they begin crafting interfaces to address requirements. Promptframes describe the goals, purpose, requirements, and other details of the content that goes within various design elements, so that AI can readily assist with content ideation and generation.

Wireframes can sometimes create problems for UX designers:

• Reduced ideation . When designers rush ahead to make prototypes with high visual and interactive fidelity, they may spend less time exploring content. Most ideas are poor, and it's usually through evaluating many ideas (or combining several mediocre) that good designs emerge.
• Obscured requirements . Allowing placeholders to linger within designs can hurt the UX designer in the long run. Unknown requirements or technical constraints that the UX designer discovers too late may result in infeasible or misaligned designs that cannot be easily corrected in due time.
• Diminished feedback. Designs with poor content fidelity are too abstract for users to understand. For example, a data-intensive app with nonsensical charts and tables will be incomprehensible to a data-analyst user accustomed to evaluating realistic data. Users may ignore these areas or ask questions about them in testing, consuming precious session time on what you (mistakenly) felt were unimportant details.

Promptframes address these issues in several ways:

• Efficient ideation . One of the superpowers of generative AI is providing multiple variations of an idea with minimal effort. Promptframes integrate this idea engine into the UX design workflow.
• Improved content fidelity . Specific, focused AI prompts can result in helpful content that, while not necessarily ideal for release, may be good enough for user testing and gathering feedback.
• Faster iteration . Writing prompts may initially require some upfront effort, but that effort is repaid with the ease of incorporating insights from testing and feedback. Content can be pivoted and improved rapidly by sharing those details in subsequent prompts.
• Better collaboration . Visuals are a great help when collaborating, as they build common ground with your team. Yet squiggly lines and lorem ipsum are often too abstract for nondesigners. AI-generated content, as well as the prompts generating it, can stimulate dialog and feedback from colleagues and may surface obscure requirements earlier in the design process.
• Greater focus on objectives . Promptframes ask UX designers go beyond interface components and describe business and user goals. If the UX designer struggles to explain these goals to a generative AI tool, it calls into question the content's purpose.

Conduct your early-stage UX design process normally using sketches and simple wireframes . This work will serve as the foundation for your promptframes once it is digitized in your design tool.

To illustrate promptframes in the design process, we will use hypothetical examples based on a page from Blue Apron's website describing a special promotional offer for people in community-service roles.

1. Establish Context and Describe Users

Documenting and sharing context with the generative AI will improve its ability to assist with content creation. ChatGPT is particularly well suited for promptframes due to its support for various output types.

Consider including these important high-level details in your prompts.

Generative AI also needs user insights to be effective. Share written content from high-quality personas or archetypes that mention user needs, behaviors, goals, pain points, as well as motivations for the product, service, or feature being designed.

All this specificity will give you better results than just using off-the-shelf AI agents that proclaim to fulfill similar content-generation roles. Although this looks like a lot of effort to write or compile, you need to do this only once and can reuse them throughout this project or others.

Remember to leverage AI-tool features that maintain this context. For example, ChatGPT offers a custom - GPT feature that conveniently persists these details. Other AI tools like Gemini or Claude currently don’t support easy reuse of context; for those tools, you will need to capture these details (perhaps in a text document) and feed them into your prompt before discussing project specifics.

2. Write and Document Prompts

With the context and users established with our AI tool, the next step is to document prompts that will direct the AI in content creation. Start by writing down the purpose of the various areas and elements in your design that will contain content.

Always include these details in your prompts:

• Objectives : Why is this piece of content present in the design? How does it benefit the business and the users? User stories and other requirements from a product-manager colleague can be an excellent reference here.
• Desired outcomes : What do you hope users will do or think because of this content?
• Examples : If available, include examples that could serve as inspiration when generating the content.

Here are additional aspects to consider for specific types of content:

• Message : What core message are you trying to convey in this copy? What facts and details must be included?
• Container : Where will the copy be seen (landing page, call-to-action button, error message, etc.)?
• Constraints : Are there word-count limits or other limitations required by the container?
• Tone of voice (conditional) : Should the default tone of voice be adjusted for this copy? For example, softening a typically humorous tone of voice for an error message likely to disappoint the user.
• Subject : Who or what elements should be depicted in the image?
• Actions : Are any actions happening with the subjects in the image?
• Background : Is the background relevant, or should it be plain for easy removal?
• Dimensions : What size should the image be to fit the interface? For example, if real images will be coming from another system, then this would be an excellent opportunity to start asking colleagues about expected dimensions of those real images and documenting that constraint in the prompt.
• Style : How should the image be presented? What illustrative techniques are being used, or should it be a photo?

Some generative AI systems are capable of photorealistic content, but some vendors prohibit its creation as a precaution against abuse and misinformation. Don't waste time trying to work around these prohibitions if your current AI tool won't comply. You may need to use a different AI tool or settle for less than true-to-life images.

Data Visualizations

• Type : Describe the specific visualization desired, such as a bar chart, line chart, or table.
• Data and outliers : Provide a spreadsheet of data or request AI to create synthetic data to illustrate a desirable visualization. For example, instead of handcrafting data, just describe that a specific product line should trend downward over time on a line chart if a downward trend would support a task in future usability testing.
• Columns and totals : Where applicable, describe table-column labels, desired totals, and reasonable upper and lower values. Again, consider what might be helpful to represent in future usability-testing tasks.
• Sorting : For tables, describe any default sorting of the data.
• Axes : Describe the components of chart axes, such as minimum and maximum values, data type, and label formatting.
• Style : Provide a color palette for charting elements, if relevant.
• Background : Describe the background fill and any usage of reference lines.
• Legend : Describe the content and placement of a legend, if relevant and desired.
• Labels : Consider data labels for specific data points or the label of the overall chart.
• Dimensions : For charts, describe what size and image format should be used.

3. Run Prompts in AI Tool and Populate Your Designs with Content

Copy and paste the prompts into your AI tool. Then integrate the generated content in the wireframe to start evolving it into a prototype. To keep your work organized, document links to separate AI-tool chats in the promptframe, as you will likely revisit them in future revisions.

When performing this step:

• Guard against perfectionism . Don’t be tempted to create production-ready content. You can inadvertently waste a lot of time trying to refine the AI tool’s output to be “just right” for only marginal improvements.
• Chunk your prompts . AI tools have token limits for prompts and the AI tool’s input and resulting output. For ChatGPT, that limit currently translates to about 2,000-2,500 words. You still need detailed prompts to be successful, though, so break very long prompts into chunks and run them separately so the AI tool can still provide a detailed response.

4. Refine Through Collaboration and Testing

As you conduct design critiques with your collaborators, review the AI-generated content or the prompts that were used. Parts may be added, revised, or dropped — which is normal — but you should always be progressing towards greater content fidelity in all aspects of the design.

Think of the AI-generated content as a provocation for your colleagues — is this content aligned with our project and user's goals? Why or why not? Capture that feedback by revising the prompts. If there's considerable disagreement, consider splitting the design into 2 prototypes for testing.

Remember, promptframing aims to quickly construct a testable design with meaningful content . Consider the tasks you want participants to perform with the proposed design and use them to influence your prompt writing and content-creation strategy.

5. Iterate Quickly

Following this process should buy you more time, and skilled UX professionals know to reinvest those time dividends into iteration. Revise your prompts with your research insights and regenerate new content for future testing. Weaker parts should be scrapped or have their prompt revised before rerunning it in the generative AI tool.

6. Craft Quality Content

Once you have finished iteration, give your successful prototype the "human white-glove treatment" and elevate it more content, visual, or interactive fidelity. Human effort will still be required to create the final design! However, you should have received a higher volume of richer feedback covering more design ideas, resulting in an overall more effective design. You can even share your prompts with other human collaborators to give them additional context on the prototype.

UX-design tools are currently exploring generative AI. Some vendors make bold claims, but their practical utility to UX professionals is not so bold (see our review of the current state of AI tools for UX design .) These tools may someday output robust experiences with basic prompting, but what's likely to happen currently is a mishmash of incoherent material derived from commonplace design patterns needing an excessive amount of rework to be useful.  Whether machine or human — garbage in is garbage out.

Promptframes acknowledge that current generative-AI technology can be practical and helpful in the UX-design workflow. But they nudge us to chunk content challenges into well-documented pieces and don't excuse us from thinking and deciding what is needed and why from a user perspective. Instead, they accelerate our ability to check our assumptions with content that users can meaningfully evaluate and give us feedback on.

Perhaps future UX-design tools will offer better support for documenting prompt inputs and their associated generated outputs to help designers create and refine promptframes efficiently within their project's context. Passing a designer’s prompt via an API call to a generative AI platform is simply not enough.

No single UX deliverable can do it all. There are a few precautions to consider specifically with promptframes.

Not for Executive Consumption

Promptframes, like their wireframe cousins, are not suitable for reviews with executives. People cognitively distant from a project typically need high visual and content fidelity to understand design deliverables. At a minimum, promptframes can convey some forward progress (you've been hard at work making something for this project) but don't expect early-stage promptframes to be particularly helpful in a design review with stakeholders deciding the project's direction or future investment.

Content Will Require Revision

Depending on the details provided in the prompts and the generative AI's robustness, the resulting AI-generated content will vary wildly in quality. Images may be inconsistently styled, and copy will undoubtedly need editing. Remember, the goal is not pixel-perfect, launch-ready content but to have sensible content faster so colleagues or testing participants might reasonably understand and share insightful feedback.

Respect Organizational AI Policies

Some organizations regulate the use of generative AI tools to protect their data. Be aware of and adhere to these before using promptframes.

Many UX professionals are a 1-person UX team or work in environments with low UX maturity , with few resources or specialized collaborators. These folks benefit from augmenting their workflow to accommodate an AI content assistant, particularly if writing or graphic design are not strong skills.

However, what if you can collaborate with a content strategist or UX writer? That’s wonderful! Think of promptframes as a collaborative deliverable with these roles, which are (unfortunately) often included very late in the design process. Use the same general workflow described above to get their feedback and suggestions into the design early so their contributions can be tested along with yours.

Promptframes combine our thinking of content containers with a greater emphasis on the content itself in a way that enables generative AI to accelerate our workflow for user testing and feedback. Lorem ipsum as a placeholder practice is as dead as Latin is as a spoken language. Leave Cicero to the philosophers and use promptframes to rapidly create content your users can understand.

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