key user research

The Essential Guide to User Research

User research — an essential part of the design process that shouldn’t be overlooked by UX designers. Here’s a guide for UX designers or those who simply want to understand user research better.

To understand how user research is done in a real context, check out the conversation I had with Mo on how he does research as a Product Designer .

What’s covered:

1. introduction.

• What is user research

2. The importance of research

Including the user in the process.

• Empathy in user research

What happens if you don’t do user research?

• Stakeholder and team buy-in

What user research doesn’t do

• No ‘one size fits all’ approach

3. How to approach user research

• Defining your research goal
• Types of research methods
• Organisational research

What is user research?

User research is used to understand the user’s needs, behaviors, experience and motivations through various qualitative and quantitative methods to inform the process of solving for user’s problems.

As Mike Kuniaysky puts it, user research is:

“The process of understanding the impact of design on an audience.”

Why is user research so important?

Great UX Design is grounded in great user research - driven by user insights while balancing priorities and technical feasibility.

User research helps uncover important and useful insights about the user and their needs. Until you know your user and their needs, emotions, feelings, struggles etc, you won’t be able to deliver a great user experience.

‘ It all starts with the user.’

User research is a great opportunity to include the user in the design process. By collaborating with users, you are practicing user-centered design , which is crucial to creating a successful product for your users.

Researching with empathy in mind

It’s no surprise that empathy is the key to user-centered design. Empathy means putting aside your own assumptions to see things from someone else’s perspective.

In other words, empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experiences and feelings from their point of view.

Why is this important to user research? By putting the user first, you can approach it from the angle of what the user needs to make their life much easier or simpler.

‘You are not the user.’

The benefit of this is that it builds an emotional connection between the user and the product. Users feel their needs are being met and are more likely to continue using the product.

To ensure that you doing research with a user-centered approach, you can apply the Golden Circle model, as discussed by Thomas and McDonough in the Australasian Medical Journal by asking three important questions:

• Why are we achieving a certain goal?
• How are we going to achieve this goal?
• What’s the outcome of achieving this goal?

User research helps to remove bias by learning about the user from their perspective, experiences, knowledge and mental models. It examines and proves or disproves assumptions. If done right, user research is evidence that helps to ground design decisions based on an understanding of user needs.

A lot of the times, teams or organisations may bypass or rush the process of user research with reasons like, “We don’t have the time or budget for user research” or, “We know enough about our users already to build the product”.

While user research does require upfront time to plan and execute, and conducting it may mean the design process takes longer, neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.

‘Neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.’

So what might be the price of not doing proper user research?

• The product has great features that don’t solve the user’s problem
• The product isn’t user-friendly as false assumptions are baked into the form and function of the product
• The product causes confusion for the user

Making your team and organization aware of the implications of not doing proper user research means that you will be saving time, money and effort in the long run and building a product that actually serves the needs of users.

Getting stakeholder and team buy-in

Great, you’re doing user research for a project or product. While this step is paramount to great UX, unless the research insights and knowledge is shared with your team and stakeholders, no amount of research will be sufficient.

‘Unless the research is shared with your team, no amount of research will be sufficient.’

It’s important to include or engage your team in the research or it may be difficult to get stakeholder buy-in. You may be working with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Engineers, and other stakeholders. Within your team, there are different viewpoints and priorities.

Design is a team sport, so it’s crucial to have your team understand why they are building a product and what problem they are solving before they jump into development.

Get your team and stakeholders involved in the research. Get your team members to take notes as you are conducting user interviews. Hold a workshop session with your team to analyse and sort through raw data from research. If that’s not possible, engage your team by sharing your research findings with them.

By inviting your team and stakeholders to participate and play a part in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user’s needs, making it much easier to work towards the same goal, which is to create a solution that addresses the user’s needs.

‘By inviting your team to participate in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user’s needs’

When you get your team on your side, it makes the process of building a product together with a smoother one where there is less room for conflicts and misunderstandings further down the line. Chances are your team may start to advocate for the user as much as you do!

The goal of user research is to take the knowledge and insights gained from users to create user-centered solutions.

While user research informs design, it doesn’t immediately provide solutions to problems. There needs to be an exploration of ideas and design iterations before those solutions are reached.

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach

When it comes to doing user research, there’s ‘no ‘one size fits all’ approach. It all depends on the specific user group and context you are solving for.

These are different for every project and it is your job as the designer to define and understand these for every project.

How to approach user research

The first thing to do before doing any research is to ask the right research questions. What is your research goal? What are you trying to understand?

Here’s a set of criteria to help you hone in on your research questions:

• Be specific
• Be focused and relevant to what you’re trying to understand
• Make them practical with the resources you have
• Make them actionable
• Be flexible and don’t worry about which method to use (yet)

The types of research methods and when to use them

Research is multi-dimensional. There are so many different types of methods and approaches that it can be overwhelming if you don’t focus your research. Here, I’ll cover some important research methods and when you might use them:

Stages of the product life cycle

• Quantitative vs. qualitative
• Attitudinal vs. behavioral

During the early stages of the design process, the key goal is to do exploratory research. Each project has its own context and specific user group that research should explore. Questions to ask:

• What do users need?
• What is already working and what isn’t?

Appropriate methods to be used at this stage include 1:1 user interviews, focus groups, competitive analysis, benchmark studies, ethnographic research.

Development

Now that you have developed your ideas and built wireframes and prototypes, you need to evaluate and validate whether your designs actually help users solve their problems.

• Do users understand how it works?
• How do users interact with your prototype?
• Can users find what they are looking for?
• Do the features look and feel right?

Methods to use include: moderated and unmoderated usability testing, prototype testing, card sorting, preference testing, A/B testing.

As the design goes live, the goal is to measure how well the product meets user’s needs. The goal here is to measure the performance and aim to optimise the experience.

At this stage, feedback from users is really useful. Things may have changed and the product you created to solve user’s problems in the first place may no longer be the best solution anymore. The key is to proactively adapt and iterate if needed.

Methods include surveys, data analytics, bug reports.

In a nutshell, user research can be done at any stage of the product life cycle.

Quantitative

Quantitative research is used to understand the ‘what’. This type of research can be measured numerically. For example, “How many people visited a store over a week” or “What percentage of users clicked this button”. This type of research explores large sample sizes of data to identify trends and patterns.

Examples include surveys, analytics, and A/B testing.

What quantitative research doesn’t tell you is why particular trends or patterns occur.

Qualitative

Qualitative research uncovers the ‘why’. “ Why do users have a particular attitude towards a product?” and “What else do people see on the page?”

Qualitative research explores user’s attitudes, behaviors, and opinions. It provides key insights into understanding the context behind why trends and patterns arise.

Examples include user interviews, field studies, usability testing, and customer calls.

It’s important to use a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative methods to come to a holistic understanding of the user and problems to be solved. Both methods are useful for answering different research questions and cannot substitute one for the other.

Attitudinal

Attitudinal research seeks to assess why users have particular attitudes and feelings towards an experience. For instance, whether users enjoy using your product or not.

Examples include: focus groups, card sorting, surveys, questionnaires and participatory design.

Behavioral research focuses on what users do with the product in question. This could be to find out how users navigate through a site.

Examples include A/B testing, eye-tracking, click-stream analysis and usability studies.

It’s important to know that what users say and do are often different, which is why you should aim to do a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral research.

A note on organizational research

There’s value in understanding the organization, stakeholders in the organization and the business context the product exists within before conducting user research.

Learn about the product and users through existing research your team has conducted. That way, you’ll get a better idea of how to focus your research.

There’s a huge overlap in the different types of research that can be done. Selecting which method(s) to use depends on the research questions you want to answer and the research goals you have.

User research is an integral part of UX design. When it’s done right, user research contributes to great UX.

Remember, it’s all about meeting the user’s needs. As Hoa Loranger, Vice President of the Nielsen Norman Group says:

“UX without users isn’t UX.”

Empathic design: The most difficult simple approach to successful design

Empathic design: Research strategies

When to use which user-experience research methods

The biggest mistakes in user research and how to avoid them

10 User research myths and misconceptions

Skip user research unless you’re doing it right seriously

Further Resources

The Nielsen Norman Group has some fantastic articles on user research and UX Design more generally

UK Government’s Service Manual on User research

Thank you for reading! Hope this article has been insightful to you.

Check out the latest article I’ve written:

• Builders and Creators, Effective Entrepreneurship, Small Bets and the Resonance Test

Connect with me on Twitter!

Written by Mona Yang

Product, tech, startups. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/monajyang

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6 User Research Methods & When To Use Them

Learn more about 6 common user research methods and how they can be used to strengthen your UX design process.

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User research is the process of understanding user needs and desires through observation and feedback. 

It's one of the most important aspects of UX design, and it's used to inform all aspects of the design process, from initial sketches to the final product. Through user research, we can answer important questions about our design, such as Who are our users? and What do they need?

In this blog post, we will discuss six common user research methods, what they are, when to use them, and some common challenges associated with each one.

Let’s get started …

What is User Research?

Why is user research integral to the ux process, 6 common user research methods, how to get started with user research in ux design projects, key takeaways.

User research is a process of gathering data about users in order to design better products that meet their needs . 

It's used in every part of the design process, from the initial market research and concepting stages, through the final interface design testing and iteration stages.

The goal: to gather data that will allow you to make informed decisions as you create design solutions.

Term Check: User Research vs. UX Research

Depending on what you read, you might come across the terms user research , UX research , or simply design research —all used interchangeably. 

While they all tend to refer to the process of collecting user-centric data, there is some distinction that can be applied:

The term user research is often used when you want to learn more about the target audience for a product or service; who they are, how they think, what their goals are, etc.

UX research , on the other hand, tends to be used when you’re conducting research that focuses on how users interact with a product or service. 

In this article, we’ll be looking at user research holistically, whether specifically talking about the users themselves, or learning more about how they interact with and experience your design work.

User research is an integral part of the design process: it ensures you have enough data and insights to make informed decisions about the design work you produce, reducing the risk of making assumptions and creating something no one truly wants.

Successful UX design requires a deep understanding of the people who will be using your product and how they interact with it. No matter how experienced you are as a designer, there is no way to validate your assumptions about design solutions without data. And the only way to acquire this understanding is by collecting data from the users themselves.

There are a variety of user research methods, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Here are 6 common methodologies that are easy to incorporate into your UX design process.

1. User Interviews

Interviews are a type of user research method in which the researcher talks with participants to collect data. This method is used to gather insights about people's attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and experiences. Interviews are a great way to gather in-depth, qualitative data from users. 

Interviews are best conducted in a live conversation, whether that takes place in person, on a video call, or even on the phone. They can be structured or unstructured, depending on what best fits your research needs:

• Structured interviews follow a set list of questions
• Unstructured interviews are intended for more open-ended conversation

Challenges:

When deciding whether to use interviews as a user research method, it is important to consider the goals of the research, the target audience, and the availability of resources. Interviews are extremely time-consuming, both for the interviewer and the interviewee. However, if the goal of the research is to observe behavior in a natural setting, or if the target audience is not available to participate in interviews, then another user research method may be more appropriate.

Surveys are a user research method in which participants are asked to answer a series of questions, usually about a specific topic. Surveys are well suited for collecting data that can be quantified, but they are not as well suited for collecting qualitative data, since answers are often nuanced and lack appropriate context.

Surveys are best used when …

Since surveys can be easily distributed to a large number of people, they’re often a good choice for gathering information from people who might not be able—or willing—to participate in other types of user research (such as usability testing). 

Since surveys rely on self-reported data, it’s important to avoid phrases or words that might influence the users’ answers. Furthermore, this type of user research often provides data without context, since you aren’t able to follow up and understand some of the nuances of the responses.

3. Focus Groups

Focus groups are a type of user research method in which a group of people are brought together to discuss a product, service, or experience. Focus groups provide an opportunity for users to discuss their experiences and opinions with each other in a guided setting. When done correctly, focus groups can provide valuable insights that can help shape both product design and marketing strategies.

Focus groups are best used when … 

Focus groups can help uncover user needs and perspectives that may not be apparent through individual interviews or surveys.

Tips to make it work:

To get the most out of a focus group, it is important to carefully select participants that are representative of the target audience, as well as those who represent various accessibility needs, which might otherwise be overlooked or receive less consideration. The moderator should also be skilled in leading discussions and facilitating group dynamics to avoid participants from influencing each other.

4. A/B Testing

A/B testing is a user research method in which two versions of a design are created, then tested against each other to determine which is more effective. 

These versions can be identical except for one small change, or they can be completely different. Once the two versions have been created, they are then assigned to users at random. The results of the test are then analyzed to see which version was more successful. 

A/B testing is best used when …

You can incorporate A/B testing at any stage of the design process, but you might find you get the most helpful insights when you’re in a state of refinement, or are at a crossroads and need some data to help you decide which route to take. 

Once you have your design variations ready to test, it’s up to the developers (or an A/B testing software program) to make the test live to users. It’s important to let the test run long enough so that any statistical significance is steady and repeatable. (If the test does not provide statistically significant results, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try out a different variation.)

5. Card Sorting

Card sorting is a user research method that can be used to help understand how people think about the items in a given category. Card sorting involves providing users with a set of cards, each of which contains an item from the category, and asking them to sort the cards into groups. The groups can be based on any criteria that the users choose, and the sorted cards can then be analyzed to identify patterns in the way that the users think about the items. Card sorting can be used with both small and large sets of items, making it a versatile tool for user research.

Card sorting is best used when …

You are looking for insight into categorical questions like how to structure the information architecture of a website.

For example, if you were designing a website for a library, you might use card sorting to understand how users would expect the website's content to be organized.

Like the other research methods mentioned so far, a successful card sorting exercise requires a significant amount of thought and setup ahead of time. You might use an open sorting session , where the users create their own categories, if you want insight into the grouping logic of your users. In a closed sorting session , the categories are already defined, but it’s up to the participants to decide where to file each card. 

6. Tree Test

Tree testing is a user research method that helps evaluate the findability and usability of website content. It is often used as a follow-up to card sorting, or when there are large amounts of website content, multiple website navigation structures, or changes to an existing website.

To conduct a tree test, participants are asked to find specific items on a website, starting from the home page. They are not told what the navigation options are, but are given hints if they get stuck. This helps researchers understand how users find and interact with the website content.

Tree testing is best used when ...

This method is most effective when combined with other user research methods, such as interviews, surveys, and focus groups. This is because it’s really a way to finesse the user’s experience at the end of the design process, rather than a method of collecting the preliminary data that’s needed to arrive at this point.

Tree testing can be a challenging method to conduct, as it requires specific instructions and data collection methods for each test. In addition, participants may not use the same navigation paths that you intended, making it difficult to analyze the results. To account for this, it’s important to have a large enough sample size to be able to differentiate between outliers and general trends.

User research is a critical part of any project or product development process. It helps you to understand the needs and expectations of your target users, and ensures that your final product meets their requirements. 

There are many different ways to conduct user research, but the most important thing is to start early and to continually iterate throughout the development process.

For this, you’ll need to make sure that you have enough resources to incorporate the research successfully, which includes:

• A budget that accounts for the various expenses incurred during the research process, whether that’s subscribing to a user research tool or compensating participants for their time.
• An awareness of your own personal biases, and how they might affect the data you collect and the interpretation of results.
• Time for research and analysis , since you might need to adjust the research method, or number of participants, that you were initially planning on including.
• Buy-in from stakeholders , since the results might be jarring and contradict some of the assumptions that the project was built on.

Finally, it is important to be aware of your own personal biases. Despite these challenges, user research is an essential tool for designers, as it provides insights into how people interact with products and what their needs and wants are. 

• User research is essential for designing products that meet the needs of your target audience.
• By understanding your users, you can design better products that meet user needs and improve the overall user experience.
• Getting started with user research can be daunting, but there are a few common methods that are easy to learn and incorporate into your design process.
• By being aware of the challenges involved in conducting user research, you can create a research plan that minimizes potential problems and maximizes the chances of obtaining valuable insights.
• Once you have collected your data, it is important to analyze and interpret it so that you can use it to improve your product or design process. 
• User research can be challenging, but by following best practices and being prepared for common challenges, you can conduct successful user research studies that will help you create better products.

To learn more about establishing a UX design practice rooted in research and user-centered data, check out UX Academy Foundations , an introductory course that teaches design fundamentals with practical, hands-on projects and 1:1 mentorship with a professional designer.

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The importance of user research in UX design

User research is synonymous with good UX. You can’t design relevant, user-friendly, enjoyable experiences without understanding your target users—and that’s only possible through user research. 

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.

User research is the cornerstone of good UX—but what exactly are the benefits? Learn about the importance of user research in this guide, as well as how to get stakeholder buy-in. 

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of user research in UX design. 

This crucial step ensures that you’re designing the right products/features for your target users—and that you’re solving the problems they actually need you to solve.

As a UX designer, you know that user research is important. But how do you articulate the value it brings, not just to your design process but to the business as a whole?

In this guide, we break down the true importance of user research and show you how to get stakeholder buy-in for your next UX project. Keep reading to learn:

What is user research?

The importance of user research in ux design: 5 key benefits.

• How to get stakeholder buy-in for user research 
• How to get started with user research

We’ll start by explaining what user research is. If you’re already familiar, skip straight to the benefits using the clickable menu. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN USER RESEARCH]

User research in UX design is an integral part of the overall process . It helps you get to know your target users, giving you a clear understanding of:

• Who you’re designing for and why;
• The problems your target users encounter in relation to your product/service;
• What your target users need and want from the product/service/feature you’re designing.

Ultimately, user research ensures that you’re designing to meet the end user’s needs.

So what exactly happens during user research?

User research is a process in itself. During the user research phase, UX designers (or dedicated UX researchers ) use one or several user research methods to gather data about their target users. 

The exact methods used will depend on when the research is being conducted (before designing a brand new product, for example, or to learn more about the users of an existing product), the kinds of insights you want to uncover, as well as the time and resources available. 

After conducting user research, it’s important to analyse and synthesise your results in order to turn them into actionable insights. These insights will inform your design decisions and move the project forward. 

What are the different types of user research?

User research can be qualitative or quantitative. 

Qualitative user research explores how your users think and feel about their experience with a particular brand, product, or service. It includes methods such as user interviews, ethnographic studies, and surveys with open-ended questions which invite qualitative answers (not just a yes/no or numerical rating). 

Quantitative user research gives you quantitative (i.e. measurable) data. It results in objective insights—such as how many times a user clicks on a certain button in a given period, or the average time it takes for the user to complete a particular task. 

You can learn more about the different types of user research and their associated methods in this guide: Quantitative vs. qualitative research.

That’s UX research in brief. Now let’s consider why user research is so important.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

When defining user research , we said that it helps you get to know your target users and ensures that you’re designing to meet their needs . 

That already speaks volumes about the importance of user research. The ultimate goal of UX design is to solve user problems and create products and services that are accessible and user-friendly. 

How can you do that if you don’t know who your users are and what problems they face? 

How can you design a user-friendly website or app for a particular target audience if you don’t know anything about their needs, goals, and expectations? 

You can’t. 

Well, you could—but you’d be basing your designs on guesswork and assumptions, with a very slim chance of landing on the right solution. 

User research is essential because:

• It helps you cultivate empathy for your end users
• It identifies the exact user problem you’re designing to solve
• It empowers you to make data-driven design decisions (no more guesswork!)
• It saves time and money in the long run
• User research = a better user experience (and a more successful product)

Let’s delve deeper into the benefits of user research.

1. User research helps you cultivate empathy for your users

How many times have you read or heard that empathy is one of the most important skills for a UX designer ?

Empathy is about putting yourself in your users’ shoes and understanding, as closely as possible, how they experience a particular task, product, or service. If you can cultivate empathy for your target users, you can start to envision the most helpful solutions. 

User research is the first step towards building empathy. It gives you the opportunity to speak to, observe, and/or hear from your target users—giving you first-hand insight into who they are, the problems they encounter, and what they might need from the product you’re designing. 

2. User research identifies the exact user problem you need to solve

If you’re familiar with the UX design process, you’ll know that one of the most important early steps is defining the problem you’re going to solve for your users.

User research uncovers the most pressing issues your users face, helping you prioritise your design efforts accordingly. 

Imagine a new client approaches you for a redesign of their website. They tell you that they’re experiencing a high user bounce rate and need to improve their overall UX. Now, unless you identify what’s causing the high bounce rate, it’ll be very difficult for you to make any meaningful improvements.

With user research, you can bring user problems and pain-points to light, making sure your design efforts are focused on solving them. 

3. User research empowers you to make data-driven design decisions (no more guesswork!)

Once you’ve identified the problem you need to solve, it’s essential to come up with the right solutions. You might guess what the solution is and design it based on your own assumptions…or you can make informed decisions based on actual data and insights you’ve gathered about your users. 

The first approach is nothing more than guesswork with a heavy dose of bias. The second approach ensures that you’re designing with your users in mind—catering to their specific needs and goals. 

You can guess which approach is likely to be most effective! 

4. User research is a HUGE time- and money-saver

In organisations where UX maturity is low, UX designers can face resistance when it comes to getting the time and resources they need to conduct user research. 

There might be a temptation to ‘save time and money’ by skipping user research and moving straight to the design phase. But it’s a false economy! 

Let’s consider two scenarios:

1) You spend, say, €800 on user research, extending the overall project timeline by 2 weeks. During the user research phase, you discover that the new feature you’d been planning to add to your product wouldn’t actually solve the user problems you’re uncovering. You’re able to change direction to focus on designing a more relevant feature. You reach the development stage a few weeks later than planned, but you’ve designed the right thing. Your end users are happy and you’ve improved your product’s UX.

2) You skip user research and go straight to the design phase, implementing the new feature that you think will solve your users’ problems. You’ve saved €800 and the project is on schedule—woohoo! However, a few months down the line, your users are still experiencing the same issue. You’ve wasted time and money developing the wrong feature, and now you have to go right back to square one.

User research requires more time and money up front. But, in the long-term, it will save you both. 

5. User research = a better user experience (and a more successful product)

The bottom line is that user research ensures a better user experience—which ultimately results in a more successful product. 

The best brands, products, and services deliver an excellent user experience. They provide their target users with what they want, and they are able to do that because they invest in user research. 

You can’t have good UX without good user research. It’s as simple as that!

How to get stakeholder buy-in for user research

Most UX designers understand the importance of user research. Often, the challenge lies in getting stakeholder buy-in—that is, getting the time and budget you need to conduct user research.

Here are some tips to help you advocate for user research and win stakeholder buy-in.

1. Dig deeper to understand why there’s resistance to user research in the first place

You know how, when conducting user research, you dig deep into how your users feel and why they feel that way? You can do the same with your anti-user-research stakeholders.

Figuring out why they’re resistant to user research in the first place will help you to win them over. It’s like finding out the user problem you need to solve before you can come up with the right solution.

The best way to do this is through an open and respectful conversation. Approach with empathy and genuine curiosity—it should feel like a discussion, not an inquisition. 

You might ask “What are the main barriers to us conducting user research?” or “What are your main concerns when it comes to user research?” 

Once you understand the root problem—lack of funds, not enough time, uncertainty around the value of user research—you can start to come up with solutions.

2. Get good (really good) at demonstrating and communicating the importance of user research

Often, it’s hard to get buy-in for user research because those outside of UX don’t fully understand its importance or value. 

As a UX designer and/or researcher, you may need to spend some time advocating for user research in order to get people on board. Get good—really good—at communicating (or, even better, demonstrating) the value of user research.

Put forward all those benefits we outlined earlier. Explain how user research works and why it’s crucial for cultivating user empathy, identifying and solving the right user problems, and making informed design decisions. 

Highlight how user research saves time and money (presenting real data based on actual development costs, if you have that information to hand). 

Be frank about what happens if you skip user research—that you risk designing the wrong thing or solving the wrong problem, wasting time and money while failing to actually improve the user experience. 

If you can put forward a compelling case for the value of user research, it should be much easier to get stakeholder buy-in. 

3. Create a minimum viable research plan

Just as you might create an MVP (minimum viable product), consider creating a minimum viable research plan. 

Your minimum viable research plan is about doing the best user research you can with the least amount of time and resources . It’s a way of easing stakeholders into the idea of user research by starting off small. 

For example, if you’re asking for just one extra week and a budget of €100, it feels like a smaller investment—which makes it easier for reluctant stakeholders to say yes. 

If you can get your minimum viable research plan approved, you can come back next time with tangible proof as to why user research is valuable. From there, it’ll be easier to get buy-in for more extensive user research in the future. 

Getting started with user research 

Understanding the importance of user research is just the first step. To really unleash the value of UX research, it’s essential to:

• Choose the right user research methods. Different research methods provide different insights, so you first need to determine what kind of data will be most useful—and then choose your research methods accordingly. Do you want to focus on qualitative user research to understand how your users feel, or do you want quantitative data to measure certain aspects of the user experience? Perhaps a mixture of both? Figure out what’s preferable and possible for achieving your research goals
• Leverage user research tools. There are dozens of different tools and software out there to help you recruit user research participants, conduct user research, and analyse your user research data. Before you embark on your next UX research initiative, make sure you’ve got the right tools to hand. You’ll find a guide to the best UX research tools here .
• Turn your user research findings into actionable insights. Once you’ve spent time conducting user research, you’ll need to pull out your key findings and turn them into action points. This involves writing a UX research research report (which can also be useful for communicating the value of your research). We show you how to write a research report and present your findings in this guide . 

You now have an understanding of why user research in UX design is so important. And, if need be, you have a clear list of benefits you can refer to in order to demonstrate the value of user research and win stakeholder buy-in. 

Want to learn more about user research? Check out this interview with Mitchell Wakefield, User Researcher at NHS Digital, exploring the future of UX research —or explore a day in the life of a UX research manager with Dr. Stephen Hessard of Google .

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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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The best user research questions and how to ask them

To get the right insights, you need to ask the right questions. Here’s the best user research questions to start gathering feedback right away.

Lorelei Bowman

Content Editor at Maze

Knowing the right user research questions to ask is vital to the success of your UX research. Research is an invaluable source of input for product development, but before you can get started, you need to make sure the questions lined up will get the insights you need, without influencing the data.

Think of this article as your guide to all-things user research questions: what to ask, how to ask it, and how to create your own questions. Let’s get started.

What kind of user research questions are there?

The kind of questions you ask will depend on your research goals—are you looking to gather user feedback, or find out if a particular feature is (or would be) useful? Are you trying to discover what problems bother your user, or whether they’d prefer one solution over another?

Before planning your questions and diving head-first into research, look at your overarching research plan and objectives. Consider this on a project-by-project basis, as your end questions will be drastically different depending on where you are in the product development process . For instance, if you’re in early product discovery , you may want to discover user intent and pain points. Or, if you’re working on a high-fidelity prototype, you might want to see how users interact with the prototype, and how easy it is to use. Asking questions at different stages of your process is a big part of continuous product discovery and ensuring your product remains the best it can be.

💡 If you’re looking to understand the types of question format used in surveys or user questionnaires, take a look at our guide on how to write survey questions .

User research questions can be categorized in many ways—by objective, research scenario, or point in the product journey, to name a few. Since different questions may apply in multiple situations, we’re going to consider questions organized by their research focus.

Questions for user research can typically be categorized three ways:

• Questions about the problem e.g., what are users’ pain points, what task are they trying to complete, what solution do they want
• Questions about the people e.g., who they are, how they use products, what they want to accomplish, how likely are they to use the product
• Questions about the product e.g., how users’ feel about content or design, can they navigate the product, how usable is it, what features do they like or dislike

Now we know what kinds of questions there are, let’s delve into the value of pre-made questions, and some examples of each question type.

Using pre-made user research questions

To elevate your research, you can opt to use pre-existing questions from a question bank. As with all research tools , there are many benefits to this, including saving time and effort, and having many questions to choose from. Using a question bank also ensures questions are always carefully considered, easily understandable for users, and unbiased.

Meet the Maze question bank

An open-source question repository for product teams, our question bank is aimed at helping you ask the best user research questions to gather insight that will help build truly user-centered products.

A good question bank will be multifunctional, with questions you can use when running moderated to unmoderated testing, conducting generative or evaluative research, or gathering quantitative or qualitative data. So you can have one place to go for all your user research question needs.

🚀 Boost your research with Maze templates

If you’re a Maze user, you can also use the question bank as a handy companion to fuel your team’s research with Maze—check out the templates column and question block suggestions for maximum efficiency when building mazes.

Ultimately, a pre-made question bank can help save you a lot of time, and allow you to focus on conducting the research and processing analysis.

If you’d like to create your own questions, let’s get into the different user research question types, what questions they include, and how to ask them.

Click on the image to head straight to the question bank 👆

Questions about the problem

To support product and design decisions behind any solution, you need to be familiar with the problem you (and your users) are trying to solve. Whether you’re starting product discovery and want to understand user pain points, or you’re testing new features and want to gauge which will be most popular— you can’t begin working on a solution until you’ve honed in on what the problem is.

What’s bothering your users? How can you make their lives easier? What’s their key challenge, and what are they trying to achieve that’s being blocked by that problem?

Only once you’ve narrowed down a key problem statement can you translate solutions into the user experience, and identify opportunities for product development .

Questions focusing on the problem you’re trying to solve are key in product discovery stages and concept validation . The reason for using a particular product or feature may vary between users—consider Instagram’s Explore tab: it could be used to find friends, connect with like-minded people, or find inspiration.

Questions that can help hone into the problem at hand include:

• What problems do you face when you do [task]?
• Please complete this sentence: "The most frustrating part of trying to complete [task] is…”
• What is your main goal when trying to complete [task]?
• What is your personal measure of success when it comes to [goal]?
• How are you currently solving [problem]?
• Describe your ideal solution to [problem]

Questions about the people

Understanding the problem you’re trying to solve goes hand in hand with the people who are facing this problem—who they are and how they think, how they adopt and use products, their wants, needs and dislikes.

Put simply, there’s no point building a product if it solves the problem your user is having—but not in the way they wanted it to.

To really understand how your users think, and the way they approach a product, you need to understand their mental models. Broadly speaking, a mental model determines how someone forms their thinking process—it might impact the way they approach a problem, the kind of solution they’d like, and how they expect certain features to work.

UX research methods like card sorting are a good way to understand people’s mental models, but you can also gather this insight through thoughtful user interviews or research questions.

User-focused questions also cover understanding attitudes towards product adoption, use habits and circumstances, pricing models, and demographics.

Some example questions you could ask to learn more about your target users include:

• Are there any products that you prefer to use to do [task]?
• What does your job look like in your company?
• How do you prefer to be trained on new products?
• How much would you pay for [product]?
• Please describe who you might collaborate with when [task]?
• How often do you do [task]?

Questions about the product

Once you understand the problem your product will solve, and the people who’ll be using it, it’s time to circle back to the product itself. Questions about the product may be about its usability, what features you’re including, how users feel about content or design, and whether it does what they need it to.

Just like all research, it’s a good idea to ask product-related questions multiple time during the research phase, as both questions and answer will vary depending on what development stage you’re at—from prioritizing which feature to focus on developing first, to assessing how navigable a certain product section is, or reviewing the appeal of specific design aspects.

To gain a well-rounded understanding of how users find using your product or feature, usability testing is imperative. And, if you’re trying to nail down product navigation and identify any bumps in the user journey, tree testing is the research method of choice.

Whatever your focus, questions relating to the product are useful in both evaluative and generative research , and critical for creating a user-centered, solution-focused product.

Sample questions you can use to learn more about the product and features could include:

• How did you find the language (including but not limited to copy, phrasing, tone) used on the website?
• What’s the single most important thing we could do to make [product] better?
• On a scale of 1-10, how was your experience when [task]?
• Was the product navigation as expected?
• If you could change one thing about the design what would it be and why?
• Thinking about what [product] offers, which of the following best describes your feelings about it?

🤔 To dive into the questions you should be asking during usability testing, check out how to ask effective usability testing questions .

Regardless of what questions you ask, it’s worth bearing in mind that this information should be considered a guide, not a rule—as sometimes what people think they’ll do is not what they always do in practice . This is why it’s so important to continue research and testing in all stages of product development, so you can always be working off the most reliable and up-to-date insight.

Guidelines for crafting the right user research questions

Research questions set the standard of the data you’ll gather with them, so it’s crucial to properly craft each question to maximize insight and ensure accurate results.

Using a pre-made question bank is one way to keep questions effective, but if you’re writing your own questions, bear in mind that everything from the language you use to the structure or format of questions can influence the user’s answer.

The best questions for user interviews and research are clear , precise , and unbiased . Let’s go over some ultimate tips for crafting questions that fulfill this.

Stay neutral: avoid leading questions

One of the most important points when it comes to any research is being a neutral party, which means removing cognitive bias from your work. Research isn’t helpful if it’s biased, so ensure your questions are as impartial as possible—after all, just because you like Concept A over Concept B, doesn’t mean everyone will.

The key to staying neutral is avoiding leading questions where you subconsciously favor one thing over another, or plant an opinion or idea in the user’s mind, such as “How would you use concept A?”—this assumes they preferred concept A, which they may not have. Instead, try asking which concept they would use, followed by how they would use it.

Take it one question at a time

The majority of us think best when our minds are clear and able to focus on one thing, so avoid bombarding research participants with multiple questions phrased together.

Rather than asking a question like “What did you think about the design, copy and layout of the page?”, ask individually about the design, copy, and layout. Otherwise, you risk users merging their thoughts into one answer, when in fact they may feel very differently about each element.

Of course some questions lend themselves to being combined (e.g., “Which concept did you prefer and why?”), but it’s best to keep things separate when possible, and ask “Why?” in follow up questions, to allow users space to think and form individual answers for each question.

Ask open-ended questions

Similar to ensuring questions are unbiased, it’s also a good idea to ask open-ended questions—that is, to avoid questions which result in simply a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

The benefit of open-ended questions is that they give participants an opportunity to expand on their answer, work through their experience, and share details with you that may otherwise be missed. Consider that, while asking “Did you like the product?” may answer whether a user liked it, you’ll be left wondering what it is they like about it. Instead, try framing questions in a way that provides space for additional information, e.g. “What did you think about the product?”.

Pro tip ✨ If you do ask closed-ended questions, always keep follow up questions aside to dig deeper gather and extra insight from your participants.

Help users find their own voice

The language we use is incredibly powerful. Used well, words can move us, sway our opinions, educate us, and more.

By helping your research participants to find their own voice, you can unlock powerful statements and user insights which will truly impact your product. Formatting questions with the user at the center—using ‘you’ and asking emotive questions—builds empathy with the user and encourages them to find and share their own opinions through honest answers.

Ask questions you think you know the answer to

Our final question-crafting tip is to use research questions to test and validate your own assumptions and opinions. Ask questions you think you know the answer to—if you believe all users will prefer one new feature over the other, see if you’re right. If you think a certain design element works better on a different page, ask research participants to determine where they prefer it.

As with any research, while you may be user-adjacent, you are not your users. You are the expert in your product; they are the expert in using your product. Trust their opinions, and use their knowledge and experience to confirm your suspicions, or disprove them. Either way, you gain valuable insights.

User research is as effective as the questions you ask

Whether you’re investigating user preferences or conducting usability testing, research is only as effective as the questions you ask—and how you ask them.

Focus on questions that fit your research objectives, phrase your questions in the best way possible, and work to build empathy with your user; you’ll be able to gather valuable insights in no time.

Frequently asked questions and user research questions

What makes a good user research question?

A good research question is open-ended , unbiased , clear , and precise . It helps research participants share their thoughts, feedback, and opinions with researchers, without influencing or limiting their responses.

What type of user research questions are there?

User research questions can broadly be broken down into three categories:

How do you create a user research question?

There are several ways to create a user research question: you can either write your own question, or select premade questions from an existing research question bank.

If you choose to write your own research questions, it’s important to keep them clear and precise above all else—focus on asking questions that encourage users to open up, share additional information, and speak honestly.

Continue Reading

How to avoid leading questions in UX research (+ examples)

UX research best practices: Building and researching products with ethics in mind

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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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You’re on a business trip in Oakland, CA. You've been working late in downtown and now you're looking for a place nearby to grab a late dinner. You decided to check Zomato to try and find somewhere to eat. (Don't begin searching yet).

• Look around on the home page. Does anything seem interesting to you?
• How would you go about finding a place to eat near you in Downtown Oakland? You want something kind of quick, open late, not too expensive, and with a good rating.
• What do the reviews say about the restaurant you've chosen?
• What was the most important factor for you in choosing this spot?
• You're currently close to the 19th St Bart station, and it's 9PM. How would you get to this restaurant? Do you think you'll be able to make it before closing time?
• Your friend recommended you to check out a place called Belly while you're in Oakland. Try to find where it is, when it's open, and what kind of food options they have.
• Now go to any restaurant's page and try to leave a review (don't actually submit it).

What was the worst thing about your experience?

It was hard to find the bart station. The collections not being able to be sorted was a bit of a bummer

What other aspects of the experience could be improved?

Feedback from the owners would be nice

What did you like about the website?

The flow was good, lots of bright photos

What other comments do you have for the owner of the website?

I like that you can sort by what you are looking for and i like the idea of collections

You're going on a vacation to Italy next month, and you want to learn some basic Italian for getting around while there. You decided to try Duolingo.

• Please begin by downloading the app to your device.
• Choose Italian and get started with the first lesson (stop once you reach the first question).
• Now go all the way through the rest of the first lesson, describing your thoughts as you go.
• Get your profile set up, then view your account page. What information and options are there? Do you feel that these are useful? Why or why not?
• After a week in Italy, you're going to spend a few days in Austria. How would you take German lessons on Duolingo?
• What other languages does the app offer? Do any of them interest you?

I felt like there could have been a little more of an instructional component to the lesson.

It would be cool if there were some feature that could allow two learners studying the same language to take lessons together. I imagine that their screens would be synced and they could go through lessons together and chat along the way.

Overall, the app was very intuitive to use and visually appealing. I also liked the option to connect with others.

Overall, the app seemed very helpful and easy to use. I feel like it makes learning a new language fun and almost like a game. It would be nice, however, if it contained more of an instructional portion.

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What is User Research? Definition, Methods, Types and Planning Best Practices

What is User Research?

User research is defined as a systematic and multidisciplinary approach used to understand and empathize with the needs, behaviors, and preferences of a product or service’s end users . It is a critical  component of the product development process, helping designers, developers, and businesses create products and services that are user-centered and meet the real needs of their target audience. 

One of the primary goals of user research is to inform design decisions and product improvements to deliver better user experience across the user journey map . By engaging with actual users, researchers can uncover critical information about how a product is used, uncover pain points, and identify areas for enhancement. 

This iterative process ensures that the end result is more user-friendly and effective. User research can also help companies identify market opportunities, make informed decisions, and prioritize features or design changes based on user feedback and data.

Researchers may assess user attitudes, preferences, and behaviors, ultimately helping product teams understand the context in which their products will be used. As a result, user research is a cornerstone of user-centered design, driving innovation and improving the overall user journey , ultimately leading to more successful and satisfying products and services.

Importance of User Research in the Digital Landscape

User research is of paramount importance in the design and development of products and services for several compelling reasons:

– User-Centered Design: User research places the focus squarely on the end-users, ensuring that products and services are designed with their needs, preferences, and behaviors in mind. This approach leads to user-centered UX design , which results in solutions that are more intuitive, efficient, and satisfying for users.

– Reduced Risk: Investing in user research early in the product development process helps identify potential issues and challenges before they become costly problems. By addressing these concerns proactively, businesses can reduce the risk of developing products that fail to gain user acceptance or market traction.

– Improved Usability: User research helps uncover usability issues and provides actionable insights to improve the user interface and overall user experience. By optimizing usability, organizations can increase user satisfaction and retention while decreasing support and training costs.

– Informed Decision-Making: User research provides data-driven insights that inform decision-making throughout the product lifecycle. It helps prioritize features, validate assumptions, and guide strategic choices, ultimately leading to more successful product development and customer experience strategies .

– Competitive Advantage: Companies that invest in user research gain a competitive edge by delivering products and services that better meet customer expectations and deliver better customer experiences . Users are more likely to choose and recommend products that are designed with their needs in mind.

– Market Relevance: As markets and user preferences evolve, user research helps companies stay in tune with changing trends and emerging needs. It enables organizations to adapt their offerings to remain relevant and competitive in dynamic business environments.

– Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: By addressing user pain points and incorporating user feedback , organizations can increase customer satisfaction and build loyalty. Satisfied users are much more likely to make more purchases and of higher values.

– Cost Savings: While conducting user research may involve an upfront investment, it can ultimately lead to cost savings by preventing costly design and development mistakes. It also reduces the need for post-launch fixes and redesigns.

– Innovation and Creativity: User research can uncover unmet needs and untapped opportunities, driving innovation and creativity in product development. It encourages businesses to think beyond existing solutions and come up with novel ideas.

Learn more: What is User Journey?

Key Components of User Research

User research is a multifaceted process that involves various components to gain a comprehensive understanding of users and their needs. The key components of user research include:

• Research Goals and Objectives: Defining clear research goals and objectives is essential. What do you want to learn or accomplish through the research? These goals guide the entire research process and help ensure that it remains focused and actionable.
• User Personas: Creating user personas involves developing detailed profiles of different user types or segments based on demographics, behaviors, needs, and goals. Personas help the team empathize with and understand the diversity of potential users.
• Research Methods: User research employs a range of quantitative and qualitative research methods , such as surveys, interviews, usability testing , ethnographic studies, focus groups , and ther respective data analysis. The choice of methods depends on the research goals and the stage of product development.
• Participant Recruitment : Identifying and recruiting participants who represent the target user base is crucial. They should reflect the diversity and characteristics of the actual user population to ensure the research findings are valid and representative.
• Data Collection: During this phase, researchers gather data using selected methods. For instance, interviews and surveys collect quantitative and qualitative data , while usability testing observes users’ interactions with a product or service.
• Data Analysis: Researchers analyze the collected data to extract meaningful insights. This process involves quantitative and qualitative data analysis coding, categorizing, and synthesizing the information to identify patterns, trends, and key findings.
• Insights and Findings: Researchers distill the analysis results into actionable insights and findings. These should answer the research objectives and help inform decision-making.
• User Journey Mapping: Understanding how users interact with a product or service over time is essential. User journey mapping helps visualize the user’s experience, highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
• Usability Evaluation: Assessing the usability of a product through testing and evaluation helps identify areas that require improvement. Usability issues can significantly impact user satisfaction and adoption.
• Feedback and Iteration: User research often leads to recommendations for design changes or product improvements. Incorporating user feedback and iterating on the design is a critical step to enhance the user experience.
• Reporting and Documentation: Documenting the research process, findings, and recommendations is vital for sharing insights with stakeholders, ensuring transparency, and serving as a reference for future development efforts.
• Communication and Collaboration: Effective communication with cross-functional teams, including designers, developers, and product managers, is essential. Collaboration ensures that research findings are integrated into the product development process.
• Ethical Considerations: Ethical practices in user research involve obtaining informed consent from participants, ensuring data privacy, and maintaining the confidentiality of user information.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity: User research should consider accessibility and inclusivity, ensuring that the research process and products themselves are designed to accommodate a diverse range of users, including those with disabilities.
• Continuous Learning and Improvement: User research is an iterative process. Teams should be open to continuous learning and ongoing improvement, using research insights to enhance products and user experiences over time.

Types of User Research Methods with Examples

Each of the below methods offer a unique approach to understanding users and can be adapted to suit the specific research goals and context of a project. The choice of method depends on what insights are needed and the constraints of the research environment.

Here are the types of user research methods with examples:

1. User Interviews: User interviews involve one-on-one conversations with users to gain deeper insights into their experiences, preferences, and pain points. Open-ended questions are used to encourage participants to share their thoughts and feelings.

Example : Conducting interviews with smartphone users to understand how they use their devices and what features they find most valuable. This can reveal user habits and priorities.

2. Surveys and Questionnaires: Surveys and questionnaires are tools for collecting structured data from a large number of users. They consist of a set of predetermined questions with options for responses, allowing for quantitative analysis.

Example : Sending out a questionnaire to a group of online shoppers to gather data on their satisfaction with a recent e-commerce experience, including rating the checkout process.

3. Usability Testing: Usability testing involves observing users as they interact with a product or prototype. Researchers can identify usability issues, task completion rates, and areas where users struggle or excel.

Example : In case of mobile usability testing , an example would be inviting participants to try out a prototype of a mobile app for a cab service, while researchers observe and note where users encounter difficulties during the cab booking and ride-end process.

4. Contextual Inquiry: Contextual inquiry is an ethnographic method that involves researchers visiting users in their natural environment. It provides a real-world context for understanding how a product fits into users’ daily lives. Example : Researchers visiting a construction site to understand how workers use a mobile app for project management, observing how it helps or hinders their work processes.

5. Card Sorting: Card sorting is a method used to understand how users categorize and organize information. Participants group content or features into categories that make sense to them, helping inform website navigation and information structure.

Example : Asking participants to organize and categorize the various functions and features on a new software application interface to determine the most intuitive layout.

6. Eye-Tracking Studies: Eye-tracking studies involve using specialized equipment to monitor and record where participants look on a webpage, application, or physical product. This method reveals visual attention and engagement patterns.

Example : Tracking users’ eye movements and gaze patterns while they browse an e-commerce website, showing which elements capture their attention and where they focus during the shopping process.

7. A/B Testing: A/B testing involves comparing two or more variations of a product or website to determine which one performs better with users. It’s often used to optimize specific elements, such as the layout of a webpage or the wording of a call-to-action.

Example : Testing two different homepage designs for an e-commerce site by randomly showing one version to half the visitors and the other version to the remaining half.

8. Field Studies: Field studies involve researchers immersing themselves in the user’s environment to gain a deep understanding of their behaviors, needs, and challenges. It’s often used to investigate long-term use of a product or service. Example : Spending time with healthcare professionals in a hospital to understand how they use electronic health record systems throughout their daily routines, identifying workflow improvements.

9. Diary Studies: Diary studies require participants to keep a diary or journal of their experiences and interactions with a product or service over a specified period. Example : Participants documenting their experiences with a fitness tracking app over a month, recording daily activities, goals, and any frustrations or successes.

10. Remote Usability Testing: Similar to usability testing, remote usability testing involves users interacting with a product or prototype, but it is conducted remotely, often via screen-sharing or video conferencing tools.

Example : Participants from various locations testing a new software application by sharing their screens with researchers, who observe and guide them through tasks.

11. Card Sorting with Tree Testing: This combines card sorting with tree testing. It first asks participants to categorize items, and then it tests their ability to find items within the categories on a well-defined menu structure. Example : Having users categorize and then find specific items in an online retail store by navigating through the product categories and subcategories.

12. Cognitive Walkthrough: In cognitive walkthroughs, researchers assess a product’s usability by walking through it from the user’s perspective, considering how users might think and make decisions at each step.

Example : Evaluating a mobile app’s onboarding process by step-by-step analysis to determine whether users can easily understand and complete the registration.

13. Heatmaps and Click Tracking: Heatmaps and click tracking tools collect data on where users click and how they move their cursors on a webpage. This provides insights into which elements attract attention and engagement. Example : Analyzing heatmaps to see which areas of a website receive the most clicks, indicating which sections or buttons are most popular with users.

Learn more: What is User Experience (UX) Optimization?

Potential Challenges Faced in User Research

User research, while highly valuable, can present various challenges that researchers and organizations need to address. Some of the potential challenges faced in user research include:

– Recruitment Issues: Finding and recruiting suitable participants can be challenging. It may be difficult to locate users who represent the target audience, especially in niche markets or with specific requirements.

– Participant Bias: Participants may alter their behavior or responses during research sessions, known as the Hawthorne effect, which can lead to data that doesn’t accurately reflect their typical interactions with a product.

– Time Constraints: User research often competes with tight project deadlines, which can compromise the thoroughness of research or lead to rushed decision-making.

– Sample Size and Diversity: Small sample sizes may not adequately represent the diversity of users, leading to findings that aren’t generalizable. Achieving diversity among participants can be a challenge, too.

– Emotional and Subjective Responses: Users’ responses can be influenced by emotions, making it difficult to separate personal opinions from actionable insights. Researchers must navigate subjectivity.

– Recall Bias: Users may not accurately remember or describe their experiences, which can affect the quality of the data collected during interviews or surveys.

To address these challenges, it’s important for researchers to plan thoroughly, remain adaptable, and continually refine their research methods. Overcoming these obstacles ensures that user research provides accurate, actionable insights for improved product design and user experiences.

Related: What is User Experience (UX) Research?

User Research Planning: Key Steps

Effective user research planning is essential for gathering valuable insights and ensuring that research efforts are well-organized and productive. Here are the key steps in planning user research:

1. Define Clear Objectives:

Begin by clearly defining the research objectives. What specific questions do you want to answer or problems do you want to address through the research? Ensure that your objectives are specific, measurable, and actionable.

2. Identify Target Users:

Determine the user personas you want to study. Understand who your primary and secondary user segments are and the specific characteristics that define them.

3. Select Research Methods:

Choose the most appropriate research methods based on your objectives and the characteristics of your target users.

4. Create a Research Plan:

Develop a detailed research plan that outlines the scope, timeline, and resources needed for the research. Specify the number of participants, the research team, and any tools or equipment required.

5. Recruit Participants:

Identify and recruit participants who match the criteria for your study. Ensure diversity among participants to gather a representative sample. Consider using recruitment agencies or online panels if necessary.

6. Design Research Materials:

Prepare research materials such as interview scripts, surveys, prototypes, or test scenarios. Ensure that these materials align with your research objectives and the chosen methods.

7. Pilot Testing:

Before conducting the main research, perform pilot testing to identify any issues with your research materials and process. This step helps fine-tune your approach and ensures that the research runs smoothly.

8. Data Collection:

Conduct the research sessions, whether they involve user interviews , surveys, usability testing , or other methods. Ensure that you capture data thoroughly and consistently.

10. Data Analysis:

Analyze the collected data to extract meaningful insights. This involves coding, categorizing, and synthesizing the information to identify patterns and key findings.

11. Generate Insights:

Transform your analyzed data into actionable insights. Summarize the findings in a way that is understandable and relevant to stakeholders.

12. Reporting and Documentation:

Create a comprehensive research report that includes an executive summary, research objectives, methodology, findings, recommendations, and any supporting data. Document the process for future reference.

13. Share Insights and Recommendations:

Present the research findings to relevant stakeholders, such as designers, developers, product managers, and executives. Collaborate on how to incorporate the insights into product development.

14. Iterate and Follow-Up:

Encourage an iterative approach to user research. After making improvements based on the research findings, consider conducting follow-up research to verify the impact of changes.

15. Ethical Considerations:

Obtain informed consent from participants, protect their privacy, and maintain data security.

16. Budget and Resource Management:

Manage the budget and resources for the research, ensuring that you have the necessary funds and tools to carry out the plan effectively.

17. Flexibility and Adaptation:

Be prepared to adjust your research plan as needed. Unexpected issues or new findings may require adaptations to your approach.

Learn more: 20 Essential User Interview Questions

Interested in learning more about the fields of product, research, and design? Search our articles here for helpful information spanning a wide range of topics!

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When to use which user-experience research methods.

July 17, 2022 2022-07-17

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The field of user experience has a wide range of  research methods  available, ranging from tried-and-true methods such as lab-based usability testing to those that have been more recently developed, such as unmoderated UX assessments.

While it's not realistic to use the full set of methods on a given project, nearly all projects would benefit from multiple research methods and from combining insights. Unfortunately, many design teams only use one or two methods that they are most familiar with. The key question is what to use when.

In This Article:

Three-dimensional framework, the attitudinal vs. behavioral dimension, the qualitative vs. quantitative dimension, the context of product use, phases of product development (the time dimension), art or science, 20 ux methods in brief.

To better understand when to use which method, it is helpful to view them along a  3-dimensional framework  with the following axes:

• Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative
• Context of Use

The following chart illustrates where 20 popular methods appear along these dimensions:

This distinction can be summed up by  contrasting "what people say" versus "what people do"  (very often the two are quite different). The purpose of attitudinal research is usually to understand or measure people's stated beliefs, but it is limited by what people are aware of and willing to report.

While most  usability studies should rely on behavior , methods that use self-reported information can still be quite useful to designers. For example,  card sorting  provides insights about users' mental model of an information space and can help determine the best information architecture for your product, application, or website.  Surveys  measure and categorize attitudes or collect self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues to address.  Focus groups tend to be less useful for usability  purposes, for a variety of reasons, but can provide a top-of-mind view of what people think about a brand or product concept in a group setting.

On the other end of this dimension, methods that focus mostly on behavior seek to understand "what people do" with the product or service in question. For example  A/B testing  presents changes to a site's design to random samples of site visitors but attempts to hold all else constant, in order to see the effect of different site-design choices on behavior, while  eyetracking  seeks to understand how users visually interact with a design or visual stimulus.

Between these two extremes lie the two most popular methods we use: usability studies and  field studies . They utilize a mixture of self-reported and behavioral data and can move toward either end of this dimension, though leaning toward the behavioral side is generally recommended.

The distinction here is an important one and goes well beyond the narrow view of qualitative as in an open-ended survey question. Rather, studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing or hearing them  directly , whereas in  quantitative studies , the data about the behavior or attitudes in question are gathered  indirectly , through a measurement or an instrument such as a survey or an  analytics tool . In field studies and usability testing, for example, researchers directly observe how people use (or do not use) technology to meet their needs or to complete tasks. These observations give them the ability to ask questions, probe on behavior, or possibly even adjust the study protocol to better meet study objectives. Analysis of the data is usually not mathematical.

In contrast, the kind of data collected in quantitative methods is predetermined — it could include task time, success, whether the user has clicked on a given UI element or whether they selected a certain answer to a multiple-choice question. The insights in quantitative methods are typically derived from mathematical analysis, since the instrument of data collection (e.g., survey tool or analytics tool) captures such large amounts of data that are automatically coded numerically.

Due to the  nature of their differences ,  qualitative  methods are much better suited for answering questions about  why  or  how to fix  a problem, whereas  quantitative  methods do a much better job answering  how many  and  how much  types of questions. Having such numbers helps prioritize resources, for example to focus on issues with the biggest impact. The following chart illustrates how the first two dimensions affect the types of questions that can be asked:

The third distinction has to do with how and whether participants in the study are using the product or service in question. This can be described as:

• Natural  or near-natural use of the product
• Scripted  use of the product
• Limited  in which a limited form of the product is used to study a specific aspect of the user experience
• Not using  the product during the study (decontextualized)

When studying  natural use  of the product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behavior or attitudes as close to reality as possible. This provides greater external validity but less control over what topics you learn about. Many ethnographic field studies attempt to do this, though there are always some observation biases. Intercept surveys and data mining or other analytic techniques are quantitative examples of this.

A  scripted  study of product usage is done in order to focus the insights on specific product areas, such as a newly redesigned flow. The degree of scripting can vary quite a bit, depending on the study goals. For example, a benchmarking study is usually very tightly scripted, so that it can produce reliable  usability metrics by ensuring consistency across participants.

Limited  methods use a limited form of a product to study a specific or abstracted aspect of the experience. For example, participatory-design methods allow users to interact with and rearrange design elements that  could  be part of a product experience, in order discuss how their proposed solutions would meet their needs and why they made certain choices. Concept-testing methods employ an expression of the idea of a product or service that gets at the heart of what it would provide (and not at the details of the experience) in order to understand if users would want or need such a product or service.  Card sorting and tree testing focus on how the information architecture is or could be arranged to best make sense to participants and make navigation easier.

Studies where the  product is not used  are conducted to examine issues that are broader than usage and usability, such as a study of the brand or discovering the aesthetic attributes that participants associate with a specific design style.

Many of the methods in the chart can move along one or more dimensions, and some do so even in the same study, usually to satisfy multiple goals. For example, field studies can focus a little more on what people say (ethnographic interviews) or emphasize studying what they do (extended observations); concept testing, desirability studies, and card sorting have both qualitative and quantitative versions; and eyetracking can be natural or scripted.

Another important distinction to consider when making a choice among research methodologies is the phase of product development and its associated objectives.  For example, in the beginning of the product-development process, you are typically more interested in the strategic question of what direction to take the product, so methods at this stage are often generative in nature, because they help generate ideas and answers about which way to go.  Once a direction is selected, the design phase begins, so methods in this stage are well-described as formative, because they inform how you can improve the design.  After a product has been developed enough to measure it, it can be assessed against earlier versions of itself or competitors, and methods that do this are called summative. This following table describes where many methods map to these stages in time:

While many user-experience research methods have their roots in scientific practice, their aims are not purely scientific and still need to be adjusted to meet stakeholder needs. This is why the characterizations of the methods here are meant as general guidelines, rather than rigid classifications.

In the end, the success of your work will be determined by how much of an impact it has on improving the user experience of the website or product in question. These classifications are meant to help you make the best choice at the right time.

Here’s a short description of the user research methods shown in the above chart:

Usability testing (aka usability-lab studies): Participants are brought into a lab, one-on-one with a researcher, and given a set of  scenarios that lead to tasks  and usage of specific interest within a product or service.

Field studies : Researchers  study participants in their own environment (work or home), where they would most likely encounter the product or service being used in the most realistic or natural environment.

Contextual inquiry : Researchers and participants collaborate together in the participants own environment to inquire about and observe the nature of the tasks and work at hand. This method is very similar to a field study and was developed to study complex systems and in-depth processes.

Participatory design : Participants are given design elements or creative materials in order to construct their ideal experience in a concrete way that expresses what matters to them most and why.

Focus groups : Groups of 3–12 participants are led through a discussion about a set of topics, giving verbal and written feedback through discussion and exercises.

Interviews : a researcher meets with participants one-on-one to discuss in depth what the participant thinks about the topic in question.

Eyetracking : an eyetracking device is configured to precisely measure where participants look as they perform tasks or interact naturally with websites, applications, physical products, or environments.

Usability benchmarking : tightly scripted usability studies are performed with larger numbers of participants, using precise and predetermined measures of performance, usually with the goal of tracking usability improvements of a product over time or comparing with competitors.

Remote moderated testing :  Usability studies are conducted remotely , with the use of tools such as video conferencing, screen-sharing software, and remote-control capabilities.

Unmoderated testing: An automated method that can be used in both quantitative and qualitative studies and that uses a specialized research tool to capture participant behaviors and attitudes, usually by giving participants goals or scenarios to accomplish with a site, app, or prototype. The tool can  record a video stream of each user session, and can gather usability metrics such as success rate, task time, and perceived ease of use.

Concept testing : A researcher shares an approximation of a product or service that captures the key essence (the value proposition) of a new concept or product in order to determine if it meets the needs of the target audience. It can be done one-on-one or with larger numbers of participants, and either in person or online.

Diary studies : Participants are using a mechanism (e.g., paper or digital diary, camera, smartphone app) to record and describe aspects of their lives that are relevant to a product or service or simply core to the target audience.  Diary studies  are typically longitudinal and can be done only for data that is easily recorded by participants.

Customer feedback : Open-ended and/or close-ended information is provided by a self-selected sample of users, often through a feedback link, button, form, or email.

Desirability studies : Participants are offered different visual-design alternatives and are expected to associate each alternative with a set of attributes selected from a closed list. These studies can be both qualitative and quantitative.

Card sorting : A quantitative or qualitative method that asks users to organize items into groups and assign categories to each group. This method helps  create or refine the information architecture  of a site by exposing users’  mental models .

Tree testing : A quantitative method of testing an information architecture to determine how easy it is to find items in the hierarchy. This method can be conducted on an existing information architecture to benchmark it and then again, after the information architecture is improved with card sorting, to demonstrate improvement.

Analytics : Analyzing data collected from user behavior like clicks, form filling, and other recorded interactions. It requires the site or application to be instrumented properly in advance.

Clickstream analytics:  A particular type of analytics that involves analyzing the sequence of pages that users visit as they use a site or software application.

A/B testing  (aka  multivariate testing , live testing, or bucket testing): A method of scientifically testing different designs on a site by randomly assigning groups of users to interact with each of the different designs and measuring the effect of these assignments on user behavior.

Surveys : A quantitative measure of attitudes through a series of questions, typically more closed-ended than open-ended .  A survey that is triggered during the use of a site or application is an intercept survey, often triggered by user behavior. More typically, participants are recruited from an email message or reached through some other channel such as social media.

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UX design research methods

Effective user experience design is intuitive, accessible, and engaging. But how do you design a delightful experience that meets your target audience’s needs? Conducting user experience research gives you a glimpse inside your users’ heads, so you can understand what they care about and the challenges they face.

In this article, Figma Designer Advocate Ana Boyer weighs in on:

• What user experience research is, and why your team needs it
• Different types of UX research that support product development
• UX design research methods made easier with Figma

What is user experience research?

User experience research helps design teams identify areas of opportunity to improve user interfaces and enhance the overall user experience. According to Ana, UX research can reveal insights about target users across all phases of product development—from strategy and planning to product launch and post-launch improvements. A robust UX research framework includes both quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative research

Using information gathered from larger sample sizes, quantitative research yields concrete numerical data that reveals what users are doing. Researchers run statistical analyses and review analytics to gain insights into user behavior. For example, Ana says, “you might try tracking the number of times users clicked a CTA button on a newly designed web page, compared to an old version."

Qualitative research

For qualitative research, researchers collect subjective and descriptive feedback directly from users, tapping into users’ personal feelings and experiences with a product or design.  "Qualitative research gives you a more thorough explanation of why someone is doing something in the context of a flow,” Ana says.

User-centered design research often covers two types of qualitative research: attitudinal and behavioral. Attitudinal research examines users’ self-reported beliefs and perceptions related to a user experience, while behavioral research focuses on observing first-hand what users do with a product.

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3 benefits of user experience research

According to Ana, with UX research you can:

• Validate your design. "You can learn whether or not your design is hitting project goals and your users are able to accomplish a task—for example, ordering an item from your platform.”
• Put your users front and center. UX research uncovers what users want and need, so you can deliver a product that delights customers.
• Save time and resources. Doing user research and testing early and often allows you to make smaller adjustments quickly and easily. That way, Ana says, “you can take a more iterative approach to design—without having to backtrack and redo your entire UX design.”

How to conduct  UX research

Most common UX research methodologies break down into these essential activities:

• Observe how users act and react . This not only includes clicks and scrolling onscreen, but also their body language and facial expressions. Careful observation helps you understand how users normally perform a task, what interactions users pick up easily or enjoy, where they get stuck in a flow, and more.
• Empathize with your users . To create a useful and usable product, you need to consider how users' context influences them as they interact with your design.
• Analyze information to surface common themes. “Tagging key user responses helps you pinpoint what needs the most work and refinement to improve the user experience," Ana advises

When to use key UX research methods—at a glance

Given all the UX research methods you can use for  product development, when is each most useful? Ana offers these pro tips.

• User personas help you understand your core users in the early stages of development. “If you don’t know who you’re building for, then the time you invest in building and creating something will be wasted,” Ana explains. FigJam’s user persona template will help you get the ball rolling.
• Interviews gather in-depth information directly from users to test your ideas, so you can lower the risk of building a product that misses the target. FigJam’s user interview template will help you lay the groundwork.
• Card sorting invites users to show you what they think is the most intuitive way to organize high-level information in your design. Try FigJam’s card-sorting tool to shape your product’s information architecture.
• Task analysis studies users as they use your site or app to complete tasks, or jobs to be done. Use it to validate your design, and ensure users can quickly and easily accomplish their goals. Get started with FigJam’s jobs to be done template .
• Eye tracking analyzes where users look, when, and how long as they interact with your product.
• Surveys indicate how useful and usable your design is. Surveys  can provide useful insights at any phase of product development, pinpointing where users are struggling with an interface, and revealing user sentiment about a product’s colors, fonts, and overall design.

Launch & post-launch

• A/B testing shows which version or iteration of a webpage, app screen, or CTA button performs better with your users.
• Analytics track KPIs like time spent on page, bounce rate, number of clicks on key CTAs, and more to see what’s working—and what isn’t. Analytics may also reveal useful insights about your users, including location, device usage, age, and gender.
• Usability bug testing identifies and helps fix usability issues that affect your product’s quality and ease of use. “Teams struggle to invest the time and process in doing this, but it can have a huge impact on quality,” Ana says.
• Diaries captured in writing or on video track users’ thoughts and impressions over a certain time period. This self-reporting approach reveals how a product fits into and enhances users’ daily lives.

Kick off user experience research with Figma

No matter where you are in the product development process, FigJam’s research plan template can help you define your research goals. Figma’s research and design templates help you conduct research with user interviews , user personas , card sorting , and Sprig study integration .

With the insights gained from your research, you're ready to design, develop, and prototype engaging user experiences. Use Figma’s UX design tool to:

• Give and receive instant feedback on designs or prototypes—and enjoy real-time collaboration with your team. Figma's Maze integration makes testing prototypes easy.
• Set up design libraries to quickly launch user research projects and improve UX design.
• Easily share assets between Figma and FigJam to help keep your projects moving forward.

To jumpstart your UX research, browse inspiring UX research resources shared by the Figma community .

Now you're ready to roll with UX research!

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[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

[2] https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/

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User research techniques for product managers: what should I be looking for?

User research is the driving force behind product experience insights and UX improvements. But where do you start?

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If you don't know what you’re looking for—or where to look for it—user research turns into an overwhelming game of “find the conversion needle in the data haystack.”

So let’s talk about  how to find the right data the first time.

Decide on a goal before you start (3 questions to ask yourself)

If you tune into a movie halfway through, you might get the gist of the story, but you'll miss some critical details. User research is the same, which is why you should  resist the urge to jump into testing too quickly.

Deciding on a goal in advance and laying out a clear plan sets you up to:

Work smarter instead of harder:

you know what info you need so you can get in, and get out.

Get buy-in from the team and stakeholders:

you can convey where you’re going, how you’ll get there, and why the team should care.

Easily find insights:

narrowing your approach means you have less rogue data to sort through at the end of the project.

Aly Abel from Moonpig put it best when she said, “the consequence of [not defining the research process is] research requests come in last minute, questions aren't properly defined, answers are needed now, which means work is rushed.”

“Great, great,” you say, “ but how do I plan user research? ”

Here are three key questions to ask yourself before starting any project.

1. What's the topic?

Prioritizing the research process starts with  deciding what to look at.  You might have a list of research ideas that include finding out:

Why users make certain choices or take certain actions

Which pricing and packaging performs best

How to drive upgrades and increase retention

Why users behave a certain way on your website

Who your different users are

All of these are worthy endeavors, but you can’t do them all at once—you need to rank their importance and tackle one at a time.

It can be tempting to only focus on the big roadmap items, but  spending too much time on long-view projects  puts you at risk of missing out on ways to help your customers  right now . On the flipside, tackling a lot of small goals and changes could make the user experience (UX) feel scattered.

The solution?  Fill your schedule with mostly intermediate goals  that balance catering to the company’s current strategy and user’s needs  today .

If you’re still stumped over which project deserves your attention, try running a  cost of delay analysis , which considers how much potential revenue you lose by waiting. This comparison between timelines and impact can help you identify which projects have the most potential payoff.

No matter which user research topic you pursue, simplify the question you hope the research will answer.

Josh Morales, Lead Product Researcher here at Hotjar, says, “Normally the first research question is too generic, packed with topics to research and not too well informed with the information available. The first thing is to bulletproof the research question by simplifying it, break it into pieces, and then prioritize the right question.”

2. Why is it important?

Clarifying your user research project’s  why  helps you:

Communicate the importance of the task at hand:

set yourself up to win team and stakeholder buy-in by clearly explaining the purpose of your user research project. Include expected outcomes, potential impact, and the results of your cost of delay analysis. Oh, and… skip the jargon.

Decide which testing methods to use and what metrics to focus on:

when you know the purpose of your user research and have identified potential impact and expected outcomes, you'll have a better idea of how to measure success, and which key results to share with your team.

3. When will it happen?

In a perfect world, your research projects would fit nicely within your company’s sprints. You could even create an annual research roadmap like the one  Aly Abel shares here :

Laying out all of your research projects this way makes it easier to ensure you have a mix of topics and project sizes, and helps you align with company-wide goals or OKRs.

Reality isn’t always so cut and dry, though.

If you can't align your research with sprints, you may have to  rethink what it means to be   done —instead of reporting on a final research project, share new findings like early conclusions or further questions you want to explore.

Learn from the people who matter most: your customers

Hotjar gives you product experience insights to help you empathize with and understand your users.

Choose user research techniques to match your goal

Now you have a user research goal in mind, you need to decide how to reach it and which  user testing tools  will get you there.

Here's how to choose the right technique based on your goal:

Quantitative and qualitative research: the perfect pair

The best research method for your project could be a blend of approaches. Quantitative research uses numerical data to let you know  what  is happening, while non-numerical insights like user feedback from qualitative research tell you  why  it happens.

To get a well-rounded picture of what’s happening on your site and in your product,  use quantitative and qualitative data together .

💡 Pro tip:  to get more comprehensive user and  product experience  (PX) insights, combine research tools like  Google Analytics and Hotjar .

Different research methods and tools each bring something unique to the table, and  combining different types of data broadens your view  so you don’t miss the context of any UX or PX issues.

Here are three ways quantitative and qualitative data work well for user research projects:

1. Learn how users make decisions

By learning  why  users behave a certain way in your product, you can  understand what’s working—or what could be improved  by your  product management  team.

For example, imagine you want to figure out what’s holding people back from starting a free trial. You can look at  scroll heatmaps  of your landing page to find out what information most people are seeing—or missing.

Then, you can use an  open-ended question  survey to ask users whether they have questions before starting a free trial. Their responses can help you decide where clarity, customer education, or different positioning is needed.

2. Find out why users leave

Let’s say  web analytics  data tells you the session duration for a particular page is low, and at the same time you've noticed more incomplete signups than usual from the same page. You could  assume  those two metrics are connected… but  how can you be sure?

Start your research by watching  session recording s to see how users interact with and experience the page and at what point they exit. Recordings can reveal broken elements or other  UX issues  that are driving people away, which you can use as the basis for  customer interviews  to dig deeper into product and user experience.

3. Understand how different user segments behave

To truly understand user segments, you have to  go beyond demographics  to learn their preferences and motivations.

To kick off user segment research, you can conduct a  heatmap analysis  to compare what catches different users' attention. When you see that certain elements are getting more attention than others, use an  Incoming Feedback  widget to let users share their opinions and comments—in their own words—on the elements in question.

🤔 How well do you know your users?  Customer personas used to be rooted in demographics like age and ethnicity. We know that humans are much more complex than that, though.

To really understand why your customers choose you, consider these psychographic factors during your user research:

👉  Read more:  learn how to use  psychographics and personas  to get to the truth about why people buy.

Consider your constraints

When you’re planning research,  start with your ideal scenario . What tests would you like to conduct, and what questions do you have? Then, consider your constraints. You may have limited:

After you know your constraints, you can work backward from the ideal scenario to find a feasible middle ground.

For example, if you need to work out a conversion issue before a fast-approaching launch date, the impact of the research and resulting  technical debt  could warrant a higher budget and an all-hands-on-deck effort.

If, on the other hand, you want to monitor how user preferences change over time, you can conduct smaller research projects over the entire year to gain perspective.

Involve stakeholders

How much are people going to care about information they weren't expecting or didn't ask for? If you wait to involve stakeholders until you've already finished your user research, you risk misalignment and low adoption of the outcome.

Let your team and stakeholders know early on in the process  what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and where the data is coming from.

💡  Remember:  you can set yourself up to win stakeholder buy-in by  clearly explaining the purpose of your user research project.  Include:

Expected outcomes

Potential impact

Cost of delay analysis results

Keep your eye on the insights

The point of user research is to  answer questions and challenge assumptions about your users’ preferences, goals, and experiences.

So, now what? Uncovering user insights is one thing;  actually putting them to use  is where the real work (and payoff!) comes in.

Here are three quick tips to help you keep your eye on the insights, and make use of your user research:

1. Evaluate results in phases

Rather than conducting a ton of user research and evaluating everything at the end, take a phased approach:  review data as you go , so you can decide whether a question is worth further exploration. You may find that you have enough information already to make a decision, or that research has brought up ten  more  questions.

2. Align metrics with OKRs

What should you measure once you have research data?

It pays to  align your metrics with team or department OKRs . For example, if your company wants to increase account upgrades, focus on ROI in your research. If you’re trying to build the case that a site redesign is in order, basing your  usability testing metrics  on things like error rate at a specific stage of the user journey can help.

3. Translate findings into challenges

After you’ve done the hard work of researching and analyzing user behavior through UX and PX insights, you have to  translate your findings into an actionable report .

A mere write-up won't do. Turn your results into challenges to be solved, and involve the right people to work together on a solution. Showing how others can get involved generates awareness and gets the issue in front of the decision-makers.

The right tools can improve your research

User research is a mix of art and science, but one thing remains constant: the  right tools  will give you the in-depth  insights you need .

Behavior analytics  and  product experience insights tools like Hotjar  give you ways to discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs—and then make the changes that matter most.

• Cosima Mielke
• Mar 27, 2024

The Future Of User Research: Expert Insights And Key Trends

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About The Author

Cosima has been an editor at SmashingMag since 2013. Whenever she’s not writing articles for the weekly Smashing Newsletter , she’s probably working on a … More about Cosima ↬

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This article has been kindly supported by our dear friends at Maze , the user research platform that empowers any company to build the right products faster by making user insights available at the speed of product development. Thank you!

How do product teams conduct user research today? How do they leverage user insights to make confident decisions and drive business growth? And what role does AI play? To learn more about the current state of user research and uncover the trends that will shape the user research landscape in 2024 and beyond , Maze surveyed over 1,200 product professionals between December 2023 and January 2024.

The Future of User Research Report summarized the data into three key trends that provide precious insights into an industry undergoing significant changes . Let’s take a closer look at the main findings from the report.

Trend 1: The Demand For User Research Is Growing

62% of respondents who took the Future of User Research survey said the demand for user research has increased in the past 12 months. Industry trends like continuous product discovery and research democratization could be contributing to this growth, along with recent layoffs and reorganizations in the tech industry.

Emma Craig, Head of UX Research at Miro, sees one reason for this increase in the uncertain times we’re living in. Under pressure to beat the competition, she sensed a “shift towards more risk-averse attitudes, where organizations feel they need to ‘get it right’ the first time.” By conducting user research, organizations can mitigate risk and clarify the strategy of their business or product.

Research Is About Learning

As the Future of User Research report found out, organizations are leveraging research to make decisions across the entire product development lifecycle . The main consumers of research are design (86%) and product (83%) teams, but it’s also marketing, executive teams, engineering, data, customer support, and sales who rely on the results from user research to inform their decision-making.

As Roberta Dombrowski, Research Partner at Maze, points out:

“At its core, research is about learning. We learn to ensure that we’re building products and services that meet the needs of our customers. The more we invest in growing our research practices and team, the higher our likelihood of meeting these needs.”

Benefits And Challenges Of Conducting User Research

As it turns out, the effort of conducting user research on a regular basis pays off. 85% of respondents said that user research improved their product’s usability , 58% saw an increase in customer satisfaction , and 44% in customer engagement .

Connecting research insights to business outcomes remains a key challenge, though. While awareness for measuring research impact is growing (73% of respondents track the impact of their research), 41% reported they find it challenging to translate research insights into measurable business outcomes . Other significant challenges teams face are time and bandwidth constraints (62%) and recruiting the right participants (60%).

Growing A Research Mindset

With the demand for user research growing, product teams need to find ways to expand their research initiatives. 75% of the respondents in the Maze survey are planning to scale research in the next year by increasing the number of research studies, leveraging AI tools, and providing training to promote research democratization.

Janelle Ward, Founder of Janelle Ward Insights, sees great potential in growing research practices, as an organization will grow a research mindset in tandem. She shares:

“Not only will external benefits like competitive advantage come into play, but employees inside the organization will also better understand how and why important business decisions are made, resulting in more transparency from leadership and a happier and more thriving work culture for everyone.”

Trend 2: Research Democratization Empowers Stronger Decision-Making

Research democratization involves empowering different teams to run research and get access to the insights they need to make confident decisions. The Future of User Research Report shows that in addition to researchers, product designers (61%), product managers (38%), and marketers (17%) conduct user research at their companies to inform their decision-making.

Teams with a democratized research culture reported a greater impact on decision-making. They are 2× more likely to report that user research influences strategic decisions , 1.8× more likely to state that it impacts product decisions, and 1.5× more likely to express that it inspires new product opportunities.

The User Researcher’s New Role

Now, if more people are conducting user research in an organization, does this mark the end of the user researcher role? Not at all. Scaling research through democratization doesn’t mean anyone can do any type of research. You’ll need the proper checks and balances to allow everyone to participate in research responsibly and effectively. The role is shifting from a purely technical to an educational role where user researchers become responsible for guiding the organization in its learning and curiosity.

To guarantee data quality and accuracy, user researchers can train partners on research methods and best practices and give them hands-on experience before they start their own research projects. This can involve having them shadow a researcher during a project, holding mock interviews, or leading collaborative analysis workshops.

Democratizing user research also means that UX researchers can open up time to focus on more complex research initiatives . While tactical research, such as usability testing, can be delegated to designers and product managers, UX researchers can conduct foundational studies to inform the product and business strategy.

User Research Tools And Techniques

It’s also interesting to see which tools and techniques product teams use to gather user insights. Maze (46%), Hotjar (26%), and UserTesting (24%) are the most widely used user research tools. When it comes to user research methods, product teams mostly turn to user interviews (89%), usability testing (85%), surveys (82%), and concept testing (56%).

According to Morgan Mullen, Lead UX Researcher at User Interviews, a factor to consider is the type of projects teams conduct. Most teams don’t change their information architecture regularly, which requires tree testing or card sorting. But they’re likely launching new features often, making usability testing a more popular research method.

Trend 3: New Technology Allows Product Teams To Significantly Scale Research

AI is reshaping how we work in countless ways, and user research is no exception. According to the Future of User Research Report, 44% of product teams are already using AI tools to run research and an additional 41% say they would like to adopt AI tools in the future.

ChatGPT is the most widely-used AI tool for conducting research (82%), followed by Miro AI (20%), Notion AI (18%), and Gemini (15%). The most commonly used research tools with AI features are Maze AI (15%), UserTesting AI (9%), and Hotjar AI (5%).

The Strengths Of AI

The tactical aspect of research is where AI truly shines. More than 60% of respondents use AI to analyze user research data , 54% for transcription , 48% for generating research questions, and 45% for synthesis and reporting . By outsourcing these tasks to artificial intelligence, respondents reported that their team efficiency improved (56%) and turnaround time for research projects decreased (50%) — freeing up more time to focus on the human and strategic side of research (35%).

The Irreplaceable Value Of Research

While AI is great at tackling time-consuming, tactical tasks, it is not a replacement for a skilled researcher. As Kate Pazoles, Head of Flex User Research at Twilio, points out, we can think of AI as an assistant. The value lies in connecting the dots and uncovering insights with a level of nuance that only UX researchers possess.

Jonathan Widawski, co-founder and CEO at Maze, sums up the growing role that AI plays in user research as follows:

“AI will be able to support the entire research process, from data collection to analysis. With automation powering most of the tactical aspects, a company’s ability to build products fast is no longer a differentiating factor. The key now lies in a company’s ability to build the right product — and research is the power behind all of this.”

Looking Ahead

With teams adopting a democratized user research culture and AI tools on the rise, the user researcher’s role is shifting towards that of a strategic partner for the organization .

Instead of gatekeeping their knowledge, user researchers can become facilitators and educate different teams on how to engage with customers and use those insights to make better decisions. By doing so, they help ensure research quality and accuracy conducted by non-researchers, while opening up time to focus on more complex, strategic research . Adopting a research mindset also helps teams value user research more and foster a happier, thriving work culture . A win-win for the organization, its employees, and customers.

If you’d like more data and insights, read the full Future of User Research Report by Maze here .

UX Research, the complete guide to reach ferpection

UX Research is an exciting and fast-moving heuristic approach based on user needs and behavior. It combines methodologies, tools and the goal of putting user experience at strategic level for organizations of all sizes. In this UX research guide, we will look together at topics such as:

• UX research, why and how to implement it?
• The value of UX Research.
• How do these methods relate to UX Design?
• Concrete examples of market studies, testing and research.
• How does one become a UX Researcher?
• And much more...

So, if you want to make user experience an asset for your projects, your business or your career, follow the guide.

• Definitions: UX Research, user research, UX research
• Why do UX research?
• The different UX research methods
• How to succeed in your UX research? How to implement UX research?

The job of UX researcher

How can you make ux research work for you, definitions: ux research, user research, ux design.

In this chapter, we will answer some fundamental questions. What is UX Research, what are its origins and how does it differ from its cousins such as UX Design or user testing?

For the record, UX or User eXperience, groups together approaches that aim to capture the user's point of view about a product or service, as opposed to the sole point of view of the designer of this experience. They will thus enable us to understand - UX research - or influence - UX design - user behavior.

What is UX research?

UX Research aims to understand the expectations, reluctance and behavior of a target population towards a product or service over time. This may be existing or future, in concept or prototype form. The aim will be to improve its adoption and by extension its value to the organization offering it. For example, you may wish to improve the conversion rate of an e-commerce site.

It relies on qualitative and quantitative research methodologies . Historically linked to software and then to the Internet, UX Research can nevertheless be applied more broadly to any user experience, for example in a store. In this respect, it is similar to heuristics, the art of discovery or, more prosaically, the method of solving problems on the basis of incomplete knowledge.

Origins: Don Norman, Nielsen's 5 users and the term User Experience...

Symbolically, UX Research and UX Design were born in 1993. While behaviors similar to listening to users may have existed from time immemorial, the need to make this a more systematic approach has emerged more recently:

• Increasingly technical products are being put on the mass market whereas previously they were reserved for trained people.
• These products are increasingly controlled via an interface, or even merged with software and now even a website or mobile application.

One personality, Don Norman , embodies the emergence of UX Design and UX Research:

• In 1988, he published the book "The Psychology of everyday things" which was later renamed "The Design of everyday things"
• In 1993, he took the position of User Experience Architect at Apple, the first job officially dedicated to user experience!
• In 1998, he and Jakob Nielsen founded the Nielsen Norman Group, part agency, part institute, 100% UX!

Credit: Andy Ng, 2020

Also in 1993, Jakob Nielsen , together with Thomas K. Landauer, promoted a more scientific approach to user behavior with an academic publication in April 1993. One of the things that history has learnt from their research is that it only takes five users to discover 80% of a website's problems . It is actually more subtle than that, and we have a copy if you're interested in learning more!

Synonyms for UX research

In English, we talk about user research, UX research or even user experience research. The French translation was initially literal with "recherche utilisateur" (user research) and "recherche UX" (UX research), but French also came to use "étude UX" (UX study), "recherche utilisateur UX" (UX user research - which may well be a tautology?), and eventually "stratégie UX" (UX strategy).

With these various terms, you can take your pick, even though the safest bet would be to use the term "UX Research" as a priority, as it is a direct correlate to its alter ego, UX Design. And finally, UX is an abbreviation of User Experience, or "expérience utilisateur" in French. These 3 terms are also interchangeable.

What is the difference between UX research and UX design?

UX Research and UX Design are closely linked. In two words: understanding vs. creating. While UX design seeks to influence behavior, UX research provides the levers for that influence.

In essence, UX Design draws on the user's point of view , as it aims for a design that is as easy to use as possible. UX research asks the questions that will provide the keys to user needs and behavior. While it is possible on a small scale for the same person to carry both responsibilities, this quickly becomes counterproductive:

• Firstly, because the creator becomes a judge and may be biased if they are also the one who evaluates the creation.
• Secondly, because both interface design and research activities are very time-consuming, which makes it difficult to balance the two.
• Finally, because, despite a common grounding in psychology, the skills required for each are rich, varied and demanding. Just within UX Research, there may be, for example, UX consultants with social science skills and others with a better command of the more statistical aspects.

Peter Merholz, renowned designer and author of books on UX design, shows that there are too many skills expected of a designer today for one person to master them all:

What is the difference between UX research and user testing?

User testing is one of the historical components of UX Research and one of its main contributions. Supporting the design of a new interface with one or more phases of user testing is at the heart of UX Design. However, UX Research now goes much further:

• It is possible to combine the tests with the exploratory part of the market studies , for example to precede them by a customer knowledge phase.
• To produce insights (user truths) from various qualitative and quantitative research methodologies , but also from data typically coming from tools and methods such as: Google Analytics, heatmaps, AB tests, etc.
• To reconcile the lessons learned over time from various studies, regardless of the UX method used, for example via atomic research.

Market research vs. user research

Market research, testing, measurement: from a distance, UX Research seems very similar to market research. In practice, however, traditional research institutes are rarely found on these projects. So what makes them different?

• The systematic approach over time.
• The connection with design in a spirit of continuous improvement.
• Specific innovations such as remote user testing .
• The need for agility.
• And often the web and mobile expertise of UX projects, such as when it comes to optimizing conversion rates in practice.

The link between UX research and design thinking

'Design thinking' is a UX design approach that focuses on both innovation and user needs . UX methods will therefore often be used. However, design thinking is often associated with a project with a defined beginning and an end , where the value of UX research grows with time and the number of projects covered. In summary, design thinking will borrow aspects of testing and research for a specific need, whereas UX Research will systematize these methods at the enterprise level.

The following example shows a study process built on the double diamond logic, often found in design thinking. We see an alternation of divergence and convergence phases to which we have associated in this example different methodologies: user interviews, focus groups, online survey and remote user testing .

UX research: asking questions to better understand it

UX research asks questions to understand and act in response to the expectations expressed or not by users. This will allow us to build or improve an offering: product, website, mobile application, service design. Through precise research, testing and analytics methodologies , it provides the insights - or customer truths - that will influence the design of this offer, from ideation to UX design and finally to UI design .

In this section, we will look at some examples of research objectives and then focus on what makes UX research a discipline: its strategic, omnichannel aims, beyond individual projects and countries. Our UX research video, beyond user testing, details these different topics.

What is key in user research and what are the objectives?

Some examples of the goals of UX research are:

• Explore new strategic directions.
• Assess the potential of a new or existing market.
• Capture the expectations of a target population.
• Understand user needs.
• Improve the current or future user experience.
• Boost conversion rates.
• Reassure yourself and others about the chances of a successful market launch.
• And many others...

The usefulness of this approach

The fields of application are very broad , although they can be grouped into two main categories: exploring possibilities and auditing an existing or planned execution . Beyond that, your imagination is the only limit to finding research topics that can change the future of your business. Don't forget that UX research has inherited both the advances of the last 20 years in UX analytics and, more importantly, over a century of social sciences - most notably psychology and sociology. The key is to ask the right questions .

For example, let's say you are working on a connected object to measure your sleep. Will you be satisfied with testing existing iOS / Android apps or will you go further to understand what science tells us about sleep and even dreams? In the first case, you'll do user testing and that's a solid start. In the second, you will do UX research with the aim of opening up new possibilities for your business.

Project vs. product or, continuous improvement

In the classic approach to IT projects, start and especially end dates are used to limit the scope of action. This could be the launch of a website or the roll-out of a new version of a mobile application. In the product approach, we will seek to improve continuously over time. There will be staging points but no finish line.

UX research serves both of these purposes but ideally promotes a continuous optimization process , asking questions and learning all the time. In addition, the UX approach seeks to capitalize on the knowledge gained from past projects and improvements to save time on new actions.

Operationally, UX methods are organized around a user roadmap equivalent to the product roadmap. Over time, atomic research aims to organize this systematic review of learnings by enabling traceability of learnings and their reconciliation between projects and over time.

Omnichannel, from shop to website and beyond

In the 90s when UX design emerged, this subject was strictly limited to HMIs or human-machine interfaces, especially on computer software. Even the Internet was in its infancy, not to mention mobile applications.

Nowadays, digital is everywhere and any user journey, whether in a shop or in contact with customer services, may be supported with a digital element on a smartphone, a computer, a connected terminal, etc.

The optimization of this user experience must therefore be understood in its entirety , both within the interfaces and outside them! From this point of view, the UX research approach is likely to influence not only UI design but also the design of services and all the components of the experience.

UX performance and how to measure the success and value of user experience

How can we assess the value of the user experience? What are the components? What is the R.O.I. or return on investment? This is a very wide subject. It ranges from the classic conversion rate measured via Google analytics to the societal impact of brand experiences. We shared with the UX community on this topic in a video webinar by detailing the 5 types of UX performance indicators:

• Satisfaction
• Productivity
• Brand image

When UX becomes a strategic issue

Originally part of operational optimization, UX research is now tending to focus on more strategic insights:

• customer knowledge leads to the identification of new markets, new offerings, prioritization of areas for innovation...
• the holistic approach pushes organizations to work across functions and rethink their processes.
• the concept of UX performance , lastly, guides the actions of companies through user experience indicators.

Defining the UX maturity of an organization

Back in 2014, Juan Manuel Carraro proposed the Keikendo model to assess the UX maturity of each company. It has 5 stages of development:

• Unintentional, the user experience by accident
• Self-Referential, user experience as awareness
• Expert, user experience by experts
• Centralized, the industrialized user experience
• Distributed, user experience as a strategic business performance indicator.

Developing internationally

A word to conclude this section on international UX Research as many brands will be considering their success at a global level. To do this, they will need to take into account country specificities. As part of their training, UX Researchers learn how to manage this diversity, although they will ideally call on local experts. The latter will be able to ask the right questions and identify their local cultural specificities. In this type of international study, the challenge is to distinguish between local specificities and the results of the study - regardless of the country. Here are some examples of verbatims where the original language was English, Portuguese, German, Chinese and Japanese:

What are the UX research methods?

The methodologies associated with UX research are really very valuable! They enable analysis of user needs and behavior. In this part we have a good program:

• list the main quantitative approaches,
• do the same for qualitative methodologies,
• identify user testing techniques,
• to end with the complementarity between qualitative and quantitative methods,

Quantitative methods and associated measurements

• The advantage of a survey is that it collects declarative data from a large number of individuals. How many individuals, do you think? More on this below. Historically, this was done both in writing and by telephone, although online surveys now make up the vast majority.
• Analytics tools provide you with statistics on the number of visitors to and use of your site. A distinction is made identifying site-centric tools such as Google analytics, which analyzes the data seen on the site. There are also user-centric tools such as Content Square, which analyzes data from the point of view of the visitor to a website or user of a mobile application.
• The AB test makes it possible to determine, on the basis of a performance indicator, the best of two solutions for a single parameter and an indicator, for example the conversion rate. There are also multi-variant models where several parameters are taken into account.
• The heatmap aggregates the hot and cold areas measured over a large number of user paths. Hot represents where the mouse moves or clicks the most, cold the opposite. It allows you to see just in a few moments what most attracts the attention of visitors.
• Eye tracking , initially a qualitative technique, has also developed via the use of webcams with technical limits linked to the equipment and legal limits concerning consent.

Qualitative methods

• The individual interview during which a qualitative interviewer will get the respondent to talk about their views on a subject. Depending on the level of depth sought, the interview can be directive, semi-directive or exploratory. It can be done face-to-face or remotely by video conference or by telephone. The strength of this approach is twofold. The interviewer may ask follow-up questions to probe certain topics. He or she can also interpret the unspoken part, for example via the interviewee's body language.
• The focus group has two main benefits that can be combined in one session. It allows generation of new ideas around a theme or concept and is based on creative techniques. It also permits study of the group's reaction to an offering, a product or a concept. Because of its collective nature, however, it is less relevant for testing individual experiences such as a website, software or mobile application.
• But also ethnographic studies, beta-testing communities, task analysis, card sorting, eye-tracking in a room...

For more detailed information on cognitive biases, interviewing and facilitation techniques, please see our detailed guide to qualitative research .

User testing methodologies

• Semi-structured interviews are particularly relevant to the individual experience of each user. They are what we call moderated by a qualitative specialist who leads the session and asks the questions.
• Guerrilla testing is a simplified version of interviewing. Conducted in an everyday setting such as a café with people recruited on the spot, it overcomes the cumbersome logistics associated with interviewing. The downside is less targeted recruitment and a more superficial interview.
• Self-administered remote user tests on tools offer rapid testing under real conditions. There is no moderator, one-way mirror or any other element influencing the user during monitoring of their behavior. They can be completely unmoderated or post-moderated to ensure the quality of the verbatims for example on the Ferpection platform.
• The "5 seconds test" seeks to determine what a person understands about a site on their first impression, while the "first click test" identifies the path chosen spontaneously - the first mouse click - to perform a given task. Both are suitable for visits where the user is not very involved.

Mixing qualitative and quantitative methodologies

Whether for UX research or market research, mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches is often a key success factor . In the case of UX research, these two approaches answer complementary questions:

• What and who? The quantitative study shows what is happening and to what extent.
• Why and how? The qualitative approach explains the decisions behind these actions.

The order in which you answer these two questions - and therefore the order of the methods - is important and should be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on your objectives.

Finally, be aware that there are possible exceptions, such as the possibility of constructing qualitative surveys if, for example, it proves complex to speak directly with the users you wish to interview.

Set up and succeed in your UX research

Now that we have started to explore what it is possible to achieve through listening to users, let's see how to make it a success:

• At what point should user needs be included?
• How do you organize it?
• What sample size should you recruit?
• How do you successfully analyze a market research or user test?
• What type of service provider should be used to carry out these studies?

When should user experience be addressed?

Start early and regularly! Integrating client knowledge from the beginning of your project gives you the necessary leeway to make changes. Making UX design changes at the wireframe stage will cost you:

• three times less than during web, iOS or Android development
• ten times less than once your product is on the market.

Regularly checking in with users means inviting them to the table for your project and never losing sight of their point of view. This is also what fuels UX Design! The organization of the various UX studies can be done via a user roadmap , which is a real counterpart to the product roadmap.

How long does it take to set up a UX research study?

The time required to organize a study varies greatly : from a few hours for guerrilla testing to several months for a study involving several methodologies and countries. However, a study typically takes 3-6 weeks to complete:

• recruitment,
• study area,
• UX recommendations
• and reporting the results.

UX design agency, SaaS testing tool, research institute, UX consultant... Who are you going to call?

There are a wide range of providers of user testing and research. As an agency specializing in UX Research, our view is necessarily biased, but here is a first overview:

• The research institute is the historical gold standard. It excels at building and implementing a tailor-made methodological system. Most institutes, however, have not made the shift to digital or have done so only to a limited extent. They are less sensitive to the UX design dimension, which is synonymous with agility and operational recommendations to improve the conversion rates of your customer or user paths.
• The UX design agency and by extension the web agencies or creative agencies are the counterpart of the research institute. They bring the design dimension to you and will instead partner with other players to conduct UX studies. So much the better, that prevents them from becoming judge and jury of your projects!
• The panellist is a specialised player who helps you in the constitution of your sample.
• SaaS testing tools : these products provide you with fast test results. On subjects as technical as studies, you should demand tailor-made support, both upstream to design the protocols and downstream for the analysis and UX design recommendations.
• Finally, the UX specialist consultant can be independent, part of a specialist UX Research provider such as Ferpection or an internal member of your team.

Build the sample according to your study and your UX strategy

The sample size depends primarily on whether you are using a qualitative or quantitative approach:

• For quantitative approaches , it is common to set up a panel of 300-500 people, even if, here again, certain study configurations - targets, need to cross-reference data - may require a lower or higher sample size.
• On the qualitative side , each series or session typically includes 5-15 individuals per target and per country, with variations depending on the methodology.
• A qualitative sample does not need to be representative, but appropriate targeting criteria are still necessary for good recruitment.
• Qualitative as quantitative , statistical data obeys mathematical laws that dictate what can be done in terms of analysis: use of the average, order of priority, margin of error, confidence in the sub-samples resulting from the crossing of targeting criteria, etc.

Analyze the results of a user study or test

• Review your initial hypotheses , those that led you to launch this UX research method.
• Include in the analysis the limitations of the chosen methodology such as cognitive biases .
• In an international study , take into account local cultural references.
• Consider all the results , whether they come from an adhoc study, your analytics, or a user test, for example.
• In the case of market research , perhaps you can refine the results based on a sub-target or persona?
• In the case of UX analytics, focus on what is happening factually without seeking to interpret. The friction points that you may discover will be the subject of hypotheses to be tested during a qualitative study phase.
• In the case of user testing , identify strengths to build on and weaknesses to improve.
• Compare the final results with your hypotheses: which ones can you confirm or refute?
• Prepare a summary of the results in the form of an action plan : what will you change in your business in future? Do you need new hypotheses to investigate?

UX application example: client knowledge

Typically, when launching a new offering, knowing who will buy your product or service will lead to a series of key questions:

• What percentage of the population - or penetration - can you expect?
• How many segments of the population will be interested or resistant?
• What are the reasons for this? What are their socio-demographic characteristics, for example?

A mix of qualitative and quantitative research, for example individual interviews followed by an online survey, will allow these different segments to be identified and measured precisely. Personas or - to be more exact - archetypes can then be deduced, as in this example related to the job seeker market:

Perhaps most interestingly, we will be able to deduce from these archetypes what will or will not interest them in your product or service. Here is a second example of this insightful analysis in the mobility market:

Have you always dreamed of leading focus groups or analysing tests for the next hot website? Being a UX Researcher is an up and coming, varied and exciting profession that gives free rein to your listening and analytical skills . While the job is technical with advanced hard skills, it is more likely to be your soft skills that will make the difference with employers. In this section we will look at:

• the practical aspects of the job such as roles and salary,
• the current pathways to this profession,
• the difference between UX Researcher, UX Designer and UI Designer.

What is a UX researcher?

The UX researcher will attempt to hear - in the broadest sense - and understand the expectations and stumbling blocks of users , whether they are prospects, customers, employees, etc. This is why the UX consultant first develops soft skills, primarily listening and analysis. It's a job where you learn to ask questions including questioning yourself in all humility.

It also gives a long-term - and international - role to market research, user testing and behavioral analysis. This is why its projects have become more strategic since the insights discovered from project to project have the potential to feed into strategic opportunities for the company . You will therefore also have an evangelizing and influencing role to fully champion the voice of users.

Of course, it comes with technical skills but the catalogue of methodologies and tools available is constantly growing so there is no expectation of already having mastered everything . Rather, part of the expertise will be to know how to call on others to focus on how to approach research projects and their framing.

The key to UX research is twofold:

• learn to ask the right questions.
• take into account the biases inherent in the study techniques chosen.

This learning is done through experience, especially as the profession is still young and you will rarely have an expert manager to discuss it with. Don't forget to call on the UX community, which is very supportive!

How do you become a UX researcher?

Let's face it, there is no specific degree dedicated to UX Research today and there are people with a variety of backgrounds on the market. This is good because UX studies draw from multiple disciplines. These backgrounds can be in both initial training and professional retraining . There are three main archetypes:

• The UX designer, with a background in design or ergonomics, who wants to be more involved in the upstream creative work.
• People with a business school education. For those who like to be in contact with people, it is natural to retrain after some experience in a research institute, in marketing or in communication.
• Academic backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, such as psychology. More than in the Anglo-Saxon world, those with academic profiles are more distant from private companies and can sometimes have difficulty adapting. The digital world and its agility can be a shock to those who have built careers around a more 'pure' approach from an academic point of view.

In any case, keep in mind that, like any digital topic, this environment is evolving extremely fast. Being proactively curious and enjoying change is a prerequisite for your career.

Which course should you choose?

You will find courses called UX research or user research in the UX Design courses at the Gobelins or Multimedia colleges, for example. Other more general training programs may also offer courses.

Then, an internship or a training contract will enable you to gain practical experience setting up user tests, focus groups, card sorting, Google analytics...

In preparation for a career change, you can experiment with simplified research methodologies in your current job. This is the merit of simple methods such as card sorting and above all guerrilla approaches - guerrilla testing, guerrilla UX, UX analytics. They allow you to carry out field studies, certainly on a smaller scale, but they are also less costly for your employer to deploy.

For contacts, you will find peer networks open to coaching on LinkedIn like UX design family, events organized by Flupa, in groups on Slack or podcasts full of feedback.

The UX Researcher job: salaries, job trends

UX research was born in the United States in the wake of UX design. And, just as we have caught up in Europe on UX design, the UX research side is growing fast but is very immature. Opportunities will increase in the coming years, but the same job title can cover very different realities.

Salaries are close to those of UX designers, with comfortable entry-level salaries. On the other hand, since the profession is new, solid backgrounds with more than 5-6 years of experience are rarer and it is quickly apparent there is a lack of data on the most senior levels. Here is a 2021 benchmark of salaries, in France, for the profession based on similar functions:

Sources: Iergo, Urban Linker, Michael Page, LinkedIn, Silkhom, Digirocks, WTTJ, Glassdoor, Hays...

This is an industry where there is parity between men and women, much more so than in design, which still tends to be fairly male-dominated.

UX researcher, UX designer or UI designer?

Do you like understanding? Focus more on UX research. Do you enjoy creating? UX UI design is for you. Then the choice between UX and UI is made at a more detailed level of your experience. Like for a fullstack developer, it is possible to combine these three professions within certain limits. However, at the beginning of a career, it helps to understand how they work together.

But for the sake of your projects, this quickly becomes counterproductive because of the same cognitive biases that you study as a researcher. We are all susceptible to confirmation bias, which unconsciously leads us to confirm what we believe rather than to understand neutrally.

It is therefore more than essential to separate creation from understanding . For a UI designer, this can be compounded by the frustration of leaving the design behind. UX research is more about observing than doing.

And afterwards, what is the career path for a UX Researcher?

• Become a freelance UX consultant : the job lends itself well to those who are looking for an independent project-based role.
• Climb the corporate ladder to international positions or more technical positions such as Product Owner.
• Open up to other disciplines in innovation or design thinking, for example.

Other careers will emerge but are still difficult to ascertain as the discipline is very new.

Now it's up to you. You have the first key facts on how make UX research an asset for your projects, your organization, your job. And if you need some guidance on how to do this, the entire Ferpection team behind this guide is here to help you with your UX audits , online user testing and focus groups to name just a few examples.

Do you have a usability test or a UX research project?

Call us for more information at +33 1 76 40 00 15 or meet our consultants in:

• User Research Designers
• UX Researchers
• UX Designers
• UX Strategists
• Wireframing Experts
• Product Designers
• SaaS Designers
• UI Designers

The Value of User Research

Unlock the full potential of your product’s UX with the power of user research. Find out how data analytics, user reviews, customer interviews, market research, and usability testing can transform design solutions to exceed your audience’s expectations.

By Frauke Seewald

Frauke is a senior UX designer and user researcher with a background in psychology. Her ability to craft user-centric design solutions comes from years of experience in UX research and a deep understanding of what users need and want. She has worked with companies such as Swisscom, Telus, and Crealogix.

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Imagine this—you’ve just landed a project where the client needs a redesign of their website and app.

Client: “We’d like to improve the user experience. We want our customers to fall in love with our product—it has to be jaw-dropping!”

Here’s the good news: At least this client is aware of user experience (UX), cares about their customers’ needs , and sees the value in investing in a great user experience. They’ve asked for an expert with UX skills to help… but do they really understand what it means to deliver an exceptional user experience?

UX is more than following a collection of rules and heuristics in the product design process. As the name suggests, it 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, their tasks, and context, which are unique for each product.

The UX expert will be familiar with the maxim, it all starts with knowing the user , but may very quickly discover that many clients have common misconceptions about UX.

A UX expert knows that user experience research will help drive the redesign and usually begins by asking about the users: Who are they? What do they do? What do they want? What are some of their pain points?

Unfortunately, not every client or stakeholder will immediately recognize the value of doing user research. What happens when their response is that they think it’s a waste of time and/or money?

It’s the responsibility of UX specialists to educate and convince clients that good UX is next to impossible if it is not preceded by good user research .

No Need for User Research? There Is Always a Need for User Research

You cannot create a great user experience without understanding target users or their needs. User research is one of the most essential components of user experience design.

User research will help shape your product and define the guidelines for delivering a good experience for your users. By not spending any time on research and basing design decisions on assumptions, you risk not meeting your users’ needs effectively and efficiently.

The UX expert should act as an advocate for effective design and never simply accept the argument that there is no time or money for user research.

This is how senior UX architect Jim Ross of UXmatters sees it:

Creating something without knowing users and their needs is a huge risk that often leads to a poorly designed solution and, ultimately, results in far higher costs and sometimes negative consequences.

Lack of User Research Can Lead to Negative Consequences

What problem is the product trying to solve? When designing and refining a product, everything should lead back to the target user.

Sometimes, even the worst ideas can seem great at first, especially when the deeper nuances of human behavior are not accounted for or tested against. Take Google Glass—originally released as a consumer gadget, the high-tech wearable failed to achieve widespread adoption. While the technical functionalities worked as expected, the lack of a clear user need and the device’s off-putting presence on the wearer’s face hint at anemic contextual user research.

Skipping user research will often result in “featurities,” decisions that are driven by technical possibilities and not filtered by user goals. It’s the designer’s responsibility to validate every feature idea against the core use case.

A great example of “featurette” design gone wild is the common television remote control. They are unintuitive and covered with more than a dozen buttons for which your average user has no clue as to their function, which results in annoyance and a frustrating user experience.

The same mistakes are often made in the digital world when the end user’s goals are not considered, understood, or designed for, such as frustrating user flows that add friction or confusion to the user’s experience or too many fields in a form that asks for too much information.

Instead of encouraging habitual use through a quality user experience, poorly designed and implemented interfaces are more likely to scare off potential users—and the most effective way to understand your users is to conduct user research .

Start User Research with Existing Sources of Information

The user research process will expand the timeline a little and its costs will vary , but both time and costs can be minimized. One option is to start with existing, easy to access sources of information about user behavior. Some of these methods may include:

• Data analytics
• User reviews and ratings
• Customer support
• Market research
• Usability testing

Whether you need to collect quantitative data or qualitative data will inform which type of research method to employ. It’s advisable to draw from more than one research method and synthesize the findings. Let’s take a closer look at some sources for existing information.

Data Analytics

If you are working with an existing product, your client may have some data and insights about its use. User data analytics is a user research method designed to obtain a good overview about general product usage: how many visitors are coming to the website, what pages are most visited, how many people download the app and from which geo area, where visitors come from, when they leave, how much time they spend and where… and so on.

By looking at user data analytics, a savvy researcher can begin to draw some conclusions about what users are doing—or not doing—and why. Looking at the abandon rate on sign-ups, for example, can point to a problem in the form design. Analyzing scroll-depth and navigation paths can hint at which content is most compelling to visitors.

However, quantitative data can only paint part of the picture. It doesn’t tell you how the experience feels to a user, what users think about your service, or why they are spending time on your website. On its own, data analytics can tell you when a user leaves but may only partially hint at the reason.

For example, the data indicates that users are spending a lot of time on a specific page. What it doesn’t explain is why . It might be because the content is compelling, which means users found what they were looking for. On the other hand, it could be an indication that users are looking for something they cannot find.

Data analytics are a good starting point, but further qualitative data is needed in order to support the interpretation of the statistics.

User Reviews and Ratings

Your client’s product may have already received some user feedback. There might be a section for feedback or ratings on the website itself, and external sources may also be available. People might have talked about it in blog posts or discussion boards or may have given app reviews in an app store. Check different sources to get an idea of what users are saying.

However, it’s important to be aware of the limitations when employing these kinds of qualitative research methods. People tend to leave reviews and ratings about negative experiences—don’t take this as a reason to shy away from user reviews or to ignore feedback.

Instead, try to look for patterns in the responses and repeated themes in comments. Here are a few tips for making the most from user input:

• Check whether any action has been taken on negative comments.
• Compare the timing of negative comments to releases and changelogs. Even great apps can suffer from poor updates, leading to a lot of negative comments in the days following the update.
• As much as possible, weed out baseless comments posted by trolls.
• What are users saying about the competition? Identify positive and negative differentiators.
• Don’t place too much trust in “professional and independent” reviews because they aren’t always very professional or independent.

User reviews are a good source for collecting information on recurring problems and frustrations, but they won’t give you an entirely objective view of what users think about your product.

Customer Support

Clients may have a customer support hotline or salespeople who are in touch with the user base already. This is a good resource to get a better understanding of what customers are struggling with, what kind of questions they have, and what features/functionality they are missing.

Setting up a couple of quick interviews with call center agents and even shadowing some of their calls will allow you to collect helpful data without investing too much time or money. Conducting a focus group is also a great way to get a group of users to discuss and expand on the information gathered through customer support. Launching a survey is yet another inexpensive method for encouraging users to supply feedback.

Customer support provides a good opportunity to learn about potential areas for improvement, but you will still have to dive deeper to get detailed information about a product’s intrinsic problems.

Market Research

The client may have some basic information about the customer base, such as accurate demographic information or a good understanding of different market segments. This information is valuable in order to understand some of the factors behind a buying decision.

By considering the information reported by market research, a UX expert can get a better picture of a variety of factors in user behaviors. This research helps pose questions around how the target user’s age or geographic location may factor into their understanding and use of a product.

Market research is a good source of information for a better understanding of how the client thinks, what their marketing goals are, and what their market looks like. It should be considered alongside other user experience research in order to draw a conclusion.

Usability Testing

If you are lucky, your client might have done some usability tests and gained insights about what users like or dislike about the product. This data will help you understand how people are using the product and what the current experience looks like.

It is not quantitative research, and therefore you won’t get any numbers and statistics, but it helps you identify major problems and gives you a better understanding of how your user group interprets your interface.

One highly informative method for assessing a product’s usability is by conducting a heuristic analysis , although this might be a hard sell for some clients. Completing a task analysis exercise may be a lower overhead qualitative research methodology for usability testing.

Activities like card sorting can help you understand how users organize and prioritize information. Conducting contextual interviews while watching a user navigate your product in the appropriate environment will help you gain valuable insight into their thought process.

Usability tests are another good way of identifying key problem areas in a product. There is also the option to do some quick remote testing sessions by using services such as usertesting.com to gather data.

How to Educate Your Client About the Value of User Research

The budget might be small and the timeline tight, but ignoring user research will eventually come back to haunt you. Help your clients avoid costly pitfalls by making them aware of the benefits of user research.

A client may insist that user research is not necessary because they are relying on, and trusting in, your skills as a UX expert. As a UX designer, you need to view user research as part of your toolkit, just like a craftsman’s hammer or saw. It helps you apply your expertise in practice, and just as a carpenter can’t work without a saw, you can’t do your job without your tools.

No matter how much expertise you have as a designer, there are no generic solutions. UX design solutions always depend on the user group, the device, and the context of use, so it’s essential that they be defined and understood for every product respectively.

You are the UX design expert, but you are not the user . User research helps to provide an unbiased view ; to learn about the users’ natural language, their knowledge, mental models, and their life context.

Another argument against conducting user research is that the product will succeed by “following best practices.” Best practices originate from design decisions in a specific context, but the digital industry is evolving at a rapid pace. Design trends and best practice recommendations change constantly, and there is no fixed book of rules.

Product designers need to be able to adjust and adapt to changes in trends, user behavior, and technology. Those decisions should be made based on user experience research, not solely on practices employed by others for different projects.

Some clients or stakeholders may insist that they know all there is to know about their users, and therefore user research is unnecessary. However, without a clear picture of what the users are doing and why, a large piece of the puzzle is missing.

Inviting your client to a user needs discovery session will help them observe how users are using their product. Start with small tests and use remote usability testing tools such as usertesting.com to get some quick insights and videos of users in action. Your client may be surprised at the results.

The work product that comes from these exercises might be a user journey map or a user task flow. Aim for a visualized document that identifies unresolved questions so you can define areas that need more research.

Some clients may point to personas as a stand-in for user research. Personas are a good tool for making a target user group more tangible and for surfacing needs, such as building key user task flows and how that might vary for different groups. But personas are intended for identifying a target user base and to help the product team gain empathy for the user.

Personas will help you understand who the users of the product are but not how they will use the product. They will outline certain attributes, behaviors and motivations, goals, and needs but will not give the UX researcher habits, culture, or social context.

To design a robust product, it’s necessary to develop a better understanding of the actual usage. Designers need to know how people work with the product, what they do with it, and when they get frustrated. Ask for further details about user stories and task flows to make use of personas.

One universally-dreaded argument against research is that there isn’t enough in the budget. When that’s the case, a resourceful designer gets creative. The above-mentioned sources of information about user behavior (under the heading: “Start User Research with Existing Sources of Information”) should provide a good starting point for sharing ideas with your client even if their budget is tight. The results of these user research methods will inform and focus any further user research you deem necessary.

Uninformed decisions that lead to mistakes can end up being more costly than the price of doing good research. Make your client aware of the risks if product design decisions are made without a good understanding of the user.

User Research Is the Basis of Every Good User Experience

User experience is still a bit of a “mystery” in many circles, and non-designers may not know what user research is. Everybody talks about user experience, yet it is hard to define, as a good experience is in the eye of every user.

Research is, therefore, key to gaining a sound understanding of the context, the user goals, and the thinking necessary for designing a truly exceptional user experience.

The more transparent you are with your work process, the better your client will understand your tools and the information you need to make good decisions.

While some clients may not be open to the idea of using additional resources on research, it is necessary for user experience specialists to explain the value of user research and to argue for further research when necessary. To accomplish this, UX designers will require negotiating skills to make their case. Help answer the question: Why is UX important?

Luckily, proper user research is beneficial to clients and UX designers, so convincing clients to divert more resources towards research should be achievable in most situations. Reluctant clients may be swayed when shown cost-effective user-research methods, and hopefully, some of the tips and resources outlined in this article will help a designer make his or her case, even if money is tight.

Let us know what you think! Please leave your thoughts, comments, and feedback below.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• The Principles of Design and Their Importance
• The Best UX Designer Portfolios: Inspiring Case Studies and Examples
• Exploring the Gestalt Principles of Design
• Adobe XD vs. Sketch – Which UX Tool Is Right for You?
• The 10 UX Deliverables Top Designers Use

Understanding the basics

What does a user experience researcher do.

A user experience researcher leverages quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to understand and optimize a product’s usability.

What is qualitative user research?

Qualitative research is any research methodology that delivers qualitative results and insights beyond numerical and quantitative data. Qualitative research methods include customer interviews, task analysis, and user testing.

What is guerrilla research?

Guerrilla research is a low-cost research methodology that usually involves conducting user research outside of the office or lab setting—approaching potential users in places like bookstores and coffee shops.

What is a user research?

User research is a field of UX design where designers employ various methodologies to better understand the needs and pain points of users in order to improve a product.

What are the five steps in conducting research?

The five steps in conducting user research are to assess the existing product, investigate any existing data (such as customer feedback reports), and develop a hypothesis. From there, a researcher will conduct appropriate user research methodologies and draw conclusions based on those results.

• UserResearch

Frauke Seewald

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Member since October 8, 2015

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How to do user research effectively as a busy product manager

A comprehensive guide on how to identify customers for research, ask right questions, and communicate insights.

Vikram Goyal

UX Collective

My favorite part of being a Product Manager is talking to users.

After becoming a product manager, I took to user research as a fish takes to water.

Building a product used by people across geographies and industries helped me connect with people from diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their career. Such conversations are quite enlightening and helped me understand the impact of my product.

In this article I want to discuss everything I learnt about user research — different types of user research, identifying users to talk to, questions to ask them, communicating insights, quick ways to do usability testing and gathering insights from data already available to you.

Let’s dive in.

Two types of user research

Depending on the purpose, user research could be either of the following:

Generative user research — The purpose is to understand your users better — what they do, what are their goals, what are their expectations & pain points ( in the context of the product you are building ).

Evaluative user research — It helps you evaluate the usability of a particular feature or a workflow (eg. onboarding, checkout etc). It could be done either with a design prototype or with the live version of the product. It helps you understand the following about the product/feature — how easy it is to use, what do users like/dislike, what are the information & design gaps.

As a Product manager, you will do both generative and evaluative research.

Identifying users to talk to

Lot of people are not able to find relevant users who will be interested in connecting and sharing insights. A lot of time seems to be wasted in simply finding the users to talk to.

My advice here would be to:

• Get started early — It takes time for people to respond to your outreach. Meetings are usually set 1–3 weeks after the first response.
• Build a relationship with customers — Regularly send them updates, proactively address bugs reported by them and be responsive to their outreach. This will make it easier to setup feedback calls with them. ( We have setup slack connect to message our customers from within slack itself )
• Take help of internal teams to setup calls with customers — For example:
• Take the support team’s help in setting up calls with customers who are asking queries or raising complaints via the support channels.
• Take help of the account managers to reach out to customers mapped to them. ( You can also join the monthly/quarterly touch base calls conducted by account managers )
• Take help of sales team to talk to prospects who are actively considering airmeet and have feature requests
• Take help of user education and onboarding team to reach out to customers who have just been onboarded onto the product.

Using the above, you can hopefully avoid the problem of “not finding users to talk to.”

As product managers, you should also have access to your product analytics and CRM tool so that you can quickly filter out customers based on segment, use case, company size, feature usage etc. Doing this reduces dependence on others for finding the target customers to reach out to, thereby making the entire interview scheduling process faster.

Reaching out on email and scheduling time

In case you are doing a direct outreach via email, share context and the questions you may have. Include a meeting scheduler link as well so that users can book a meeting as per their convenience.

If I am reaching out for feedback on a particular feature, I tend to include 2-3 questions in the email itself. The user is free to respond to them via email or book a meeting with me.

Asking the right Questions

Asking the right questions is everything. It is the single most important factor in determining the richness of the insights you capture.

Some useful tips to remember

• Break the ice with a warm introduction
• Keep your questions short, simple and precise
• Avoid Yes/No questions and ask open ended questions
• Listen way more than you speak
• Understand their past experience — Ask them to describe the last time they used the product. What was their experience like?
• When they make feature requests, delve deeper. Understand the underlying user need.
• If you are trying to understand the feedback with the complete product — break down the questions into various stages of the user journey. ( For eg. as a PM at a virtual events platform, I break down the questions into pre-event experience, live event experience and post-event experience )
• If you are seeking feedback on a particular feature , you can focus on the following — what problem does it solve for you, what was your experience of using it, what would you like to improve on this?
• Have the questions ready before the user interview begins — Otherwise, you will be scratching your head during the interview process.
• If its an existing user, see if you can gather insights on their product usage — This way, you can ask them highly contextual questions around their usage.
• To reduce rework for every interview, prepare a document with the standard questions you want to ask during the user interview.

Here’s a detailed guide I have previously written on conducting insightful interviews — Link to guide

Capturing and Communicating Insights

Record all user interviews you do. This way, any team member (including you) can refer back to them in the future.

Don’t worry too much about taking meeting notes. This distracts you from asking good follow up questions to the user. Every recording software automatically generates interview transcripts and summaries — So, rely on this technology for notes.

While summarizing interviews, I break it into the following parts:

• Introduction about the customer — name, industry, use case, deal value
• Details about the customer’s use case — goals for using the product, frequency of usage etc.
• Customer’s pain points and expectations— What activities is the customer struggling with, what features are missing etc.
• Key themes — you also want to highlight the key theme emerging from your interview. These would help identify product areas or key tasks that users are struggling with. The ‘themes’ which reoccur across multiple interviews can then be considered for prioritization during roadmap planning.
• Getting screenshots (via screenshare) and customer quotes is also useful for explaining the customer problems to design and engineering.

Communicating insights is as important as conducting interviews to capture insights.

Useful tips to remember while communicating insights :

• Don’t wait too long to share the insights — Share these as soon as the interview is done.
• Share them as widely as possible — We have a #product-feedback channel (on slack) where most of the company employees are present. I share all the interview summaries there.
• Make the insights memorable by sharing customer quotes, screenshots and crisp summaries. ( Make these quotes and screenshots part of your PRDs )
• Use product/design team meetings to discuss these insights and plan action on them — When everyone reflects on the insights, they are much more likely to act on them.

Using Evaluative Research for Usability Testing

As mentioned above, PMs need to do evaluative research as well. This is useful for testing out the usability of your upcoming features or existing workflows.

Usability testing is a way to find out gaps in Information architecture, UX copy or the visual design in an upcoming feature or the existing product.

The best practice here is to have a clickable design prototype. ( Figma makes it very easy to create clickable design prototypes )

Here’s the process and some tips to do this well:

• At the start, the user is given a set of tasks to perform — For eg. in an e-commerce product, task could be how you search for a product.
• Give no more than 3–4 tasks — Otherwise it might become too overwhelming for the user.
• While performing the task, the user is expected to talk out aloud about what they see, what they understand and what do they expect to happen when they click a particular button. ( Talking out aloud is very important as you want to know what the user is thinking )
• Towards the end, you could also ask the user — How would you describe the feature to a co-worker? ( This can aid the product marketing efforts )

Researching with internal teams instead of users

Sometimes, you are running short of time. And can’t seem to find relevant users to test your feature.

In such cases, take the support of your customer success and sales teams.

Share the design with them and ask for their feedback —This can help you identify gaps and usability issues. While its not the perfect method for testing, something is better than nothing.

Using sales conversations for user research

You can’t possibly talk to every customer and prospect that’s out there.

A lot of insights can be gleaned from simply listening in to conversations that your customers/prospects have with your sales and account management team.

Here’s the process I follow

• Periodically log into Gong ( It is the platform we use for recording all our customer interactions ).
• I go over the summaries of all the conversations which seem relevant. ( Gong automatically summarizes conversations and highlights key points from that )
• There are two kinds of interactions which are relevant
• Prospect interactions —Use these to understand why prospects are looking to buy your product, what are their expectations and what are the gaps in the existing solution?
• Customer interactions — Use these to understand how regularly are customers using the product, what are their pain points and what more do they expect from the product?

Reading these summaries on a regular basis arms you with wealth of insights. These can be used for informing prioritization and strategy decisions.

That’s all on how I drive user research to understand what to build and evaluate what we are building!

Understanding your users deeply and knowing what they want is a superpower indeed.

User research helps you consistently build the right things and solve the right user problems.

So, If you want to start getting things right, its time to get talking and researching.

Additional Reading

• https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/usability-testing-best-practices ?
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/thematic-analysis/
• https://dovetail.com/blog/the-qualitative-research-process-end-to-end/

Written by Vikram Goyal

Currently PM@Airmeet — building a kick-ass product for conducting remote events and conferences.

Text to speech

A Guide to User Research Analysis

When designers perform user interviews, field observations, or usability tests, they gather tons of notes and data to help inform design decisions and recommendations. But how do they make sense of so much qualitative data? Talking to customers is great, but most people walk away feeling overwhelmed by the sense of more information than they know what to do with. Learning how to properly analyze UX research helps turn raw data into insights and action.

What Is User Research Analysis?

User research analysis is a vital part of any research process because it is the very act of making sense of what was learned so that informed recommendations can be made on behalf of customers or users.

As researchers conduct analysis, they’re spending time categorizing, classifying, and organizing the data they’ve gathered to directly inform what they’ll share as outcomes of the research and the key findings.

Why Should Researchers Spend Time on Analysis?

Our natural instinct is to believe we can remember everything we heard or saw in an interview. But following impulsive decisions made from raw notes and data can be misleading and dangerous. Recommendations based on a single data point can lead a team down the path of solving the wrong problem.

Further, doing so is simply reacting to data, not making sense of it. This can cause companies to focus on incremental improvements only and miss important opportunities to serve customers in more meaningful, innovative ways.

A great example of this is when we see teams sharing research findings like, “6 out of 10 people had difficulty signing in to our application.” On the surface, a reasonable recommendation could be to redesign the sign-in form. However, proper research analysis and finding the meaning behind what that data represents is when the real magic happens. Perhaps the reason people had trouble signing in was due to forgotten passwords. In this case, redesigning the sign in form wouldn’t necessarily solve this problem.

Performing the necessary analysis of user research data is an act of asking “why” the “6 out of 10 people had difficulty signing into the application.” Analysis transforms the research from raw data into insights and meaning.

Consider what Slack did with their sign-in process. Slack allows a user to sign in by manually typing their password or having a “magic link” sent to their email which the person simply needs to click from their inbox.  They get signed in to their Slack team and get started.

Slack offers a magic link instead of asking users to type their password.

Slack emails a magic link within seconds that saves the user typing their password.

This decision wasn’t an accident; it came from a deep understanding of a customer pain point. That deep understanding came from making sense of user research data and not simply jumping to a conclusion. Slack’s example demonstrates the power of spending time in analyzing user research data to go beyond reacting to a single observation and instead understanding why those observations occurred.

When to Do Research Analysis

Before the research begins.

Great analysis starts before research even begins. This happens by creating well-defined goals for the project, research, and product. Creating clear goals allows researchers to collect data in predefined themes to answer questions about how to meet those goals. This also allows them to create a set of tags (sometimes known as “codes”) to assign to notes and data as they conduct their research, speeding up analysis dramatically.

Before any research session begins, craft clear goals and questions that need to be answered by the research. Then brainstorm a list of tags or descriptors for each goal that will help identify notes and data that align to the goals of the research.

During the Research

Researchers often tag or code data they gather in real time. This can be done multiple ways using spreadsheets, document highlighting or even a specialized research tool like Aurelius.

When taking notes in a spreadsheet, tags can be added to individual notes in an adjacent column and later turned into a “ rainbow spreadsheet .”

For teams physically located in the same space, an affinity diagram with sticky notes on the wall works well. Here, each note can be added to an individual sticky note with top level tags or themes grouped physically together.

A student stands in front of an affinity exercise on a whiteboard. Photo via Wikimedia

There are also software tools like Aurelius that help researchers tag and organize notes as they’re taken which also makes for quick viewing and analysis of those tags later.

View of analyzing notes and tags in Aurelius.

It’s also useful for teams to have a short debrief after each research participant or session to discuss what they learned. This keeps knowledge fresh, allows the team members to summarize what they’ve learned up to that point, and often exposes new themes or tags to use in collecting data from the remaining research sessions.

When the Research Is Done

This is where most of the analysis happens. At this point researchers are reviewing all the notes they’ve taken to really figure out what patterns and insights exist. Most researchers will have a good idea of which tags, groups, and themes to focus on, especially if they’ve done a debrief after each session. It then becomes a matter of determining why those patterns and themes exist in order to create new knowledge and insight about their customers.

How to Analyze User Research

Tag notes and data as you collect it.

Tagging notes and data as they’re collected is a process of connecting those tags to research questions and the research questions back to the project or research goals. This way you can be confident in the tags and themes being created in real time. Here’s how to make the connection between tags, research questions and project goals.

Imagine the research goals for the project are:

• Increase the number of people signing up for our product free trial
• Increase the number of people going from free trial to a paid account
• Educate trial customers about the value of our product prior to signing up for a paid account

From there, research questions can be formed such as:

• “Does the website communicate the right message to share the value of a free trial?”
• “Is it easy for a new customer to sign up?”
• “Are new customers easily able to start a free trial and begin using the product?”

From those questions, we can extract topics and themes. Since we’re researching the free trial, sign up process and general usability of that process, they become clear choices for tags. Also, since the research is meant to answer a question about whether or not potential customers understand the value of our product and free trial, this too provides a clear topic and tag we can use. So, useful tags based on those questions would be:

• #free-trial
• #value-prop
• #signup-reason
• #signup-process
• #onboarding

As the team conducts the research, they can tag notes and observations according to those themes that align to the high level goals and questions for the project. All of this highly increases the ease and effectiveness of research analysis later.

Analysis After Each Session

A common user research practice is for the team to debrief after each interview, usability test, or field study to discuss what was learned or observed. Doing this while also reviewing the notes and observations helps researchers hear the same information from a new perspective.

Let’s imagine the team found the following patterns while conducting their research:

• Potential customers visited the product page, free trial sign-up page, and went back to the product page several times prior to starting a free trial.
• Some people had multiple browsers open with competitor sites pulled up while signing up for the free trial.
• Potential customers mentioned waiting for the “right time” to start their free trial on several occasions.

This may help the researchers create new tags (or codes) for remaining sessions, such as:

• #right-time
• #competitor-review
• #feature-comparison

Using these new tags adds another dimension to analysis and provides deeper meaning to patterns the team is finding. You can see how the combination of these tags and themes already begin to paint a picture of customer needs without any detailed notes!

Here are some good tips for knowing when to tag or code a note:

• It aligns directly to a project/research goal.
• The participant specifically said or implied that something is very important.
• Repetition – a thing is said or heard multiple times.
• Patterns – when certain observations are related or important to other tags and themes already established in the project goals or research.

Steps for Analyzing Research Once It’s Done

Once all the research is done, it’s time to dig in to find patterns and frequency across all the data gathered .

Step 1 – Review the notes, transcripts, and data for any relevant phrases, statements, and concepts that align to the research goals and questions.

Step 2 – Tag and code any remaining data that represents key activities, actions, concepts, statements, ideas and needs or desires from the customers who participated in the research.

Step 3 – Review those tags and codes to find relationships between them. A useful tip for this is to pay close attention to tags that have notes with multiple other tags. This often indicates a relationship between themes. Create new tags and groups where appropriate to review more specific subsets of the data. Continue this process until meaningful themes are exposed. Once that happens, ask questions like:

• Why do these patterns or themes exist?
• Why did participants say this so many times?
• Does the data help answer the research questions?
• Does the data inform ways to meet the research goals?
• Does one tag group or theme relate to another? How? Why?

Sharing Key Insights from User Research

A key insight should answer one or more of your research questions and directly inform how to meet one or more of the established business goals. When sharing key insights, be sure to make a clear connection between one of the business goals, research questions and why the key insight is relevant to both. The most effective way of turning research into action is by helping teams make a connection between key insights and business outcomes.

3 Parts to a Key Insight

There are three parts to creating a key insight from user research :

• Statement of what you learned
• Tags that describe the insight (often used from the analysis, but can also be new tags entirely)
• Supporting notes, data, and evidence that give further context to the key insight and support the statement of what was learned

A key insight from the example project might be:

“Prospective customers are worried they might not have enough time to review our product during the free trial.” #right-time #signup-process #free-trial

This represents the pattern observed of customers mentioning the “right time” to sign up for a free trial and comparing the product to competitors. It also goes beyond sharing the quantitative data that those things occurred and offers a qualitative explanation of why they happened. All of this leads to clearer recommendations and the ability for other teams to take action on the research findings.

Creating key insights from the research in this way allows for the most effective sharing and reuse later. By providing supporting notes to each insight, stakeholders and others consuming the research findings can learn more detail about each key insight if they so choose.

Next Steps for User Research Analysis

Conducting detailed analysis of user research data helps teams clearly share what was learned to provide more actionable recommendations in design and product development.

Here are some tips for making user research analysis faster and easier on upcoming projects:

• Begin the user research by creating well defined questions and goals.
• Create tags based on each goal.
• Tag research notes and data as it’s collected to speed up analysis later.
• Debrief after each research session.
• Review the data once research is finished to find patterns, frequency, and themes.
• Make statements about each pattern or theme that was uncovered, describing what it means and why it’s important (aka: create key insights).
• Share the key insights!

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Super Guide

How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

Published: Aug 14, 2024, 8:25am

Table of Contents

What is keyword research, how to do keyword research for seo in 5 steps, bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

If you’re just getting started building a website or are upgrading it, you’re likely asking yourself how people will find it. Even if you’re selling the coolest, most innovative products on the internet, no one will know about them if they can’t get to your website. Keyword research is an essential part of ensuring the people looking for the information or services you offer can find them. Read on to learn more about how to get started with keyword research.

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Keyword research is an essential part of a larger SEO and digital marketing strategy. It is the process of researching and analyzing the terms and phrases your ideal audience and potential customers are looking up online to find the information they need.

When people want to find a product or service online, they generally start by typing a few words into a search engine. The results they find are the ones most relevant to the terms they looked for. As a business owner, your goal should be to rank highly for the keywords that represent the products and services you offer. But which ones are they? Conducting keyword research is how you figure this out.

Keyword research is also important because it can reveal marketing insights and customer trends, tell you what potential customers are interested in and help drive traffic to your website by curating your content and copy to this interest.

Keyword research starts generally and then gets more specific. Here are the main steps to take when starting your keyword research.

 1. Brainstorm the Main Keywords That Are Most Relevant to Business

The first part of keyword research is brainstorming the very basic terms that are relevant to your business. This general list will come in handy later when you search for more targeted keywords. For example, say you are running an online jewelry company. An initial list of general keywords may look like this:

• Engagement rings

You’ll want to come up with five to 10 terms. Since this is only the first step in keyword research, don’t worry about making this list perfect or spending too much time on it.

 2. Research Related Keywords Customers and Competitors Are Using

Now that you have a starting point, it’s time to get more specific by adding relevant keywords. You can start drafting this list of more specific keywords by looking up the search terms in your original list. The idea is to get an understanding of how your customers think about the products or services you offer and what specific terms they are searching for to find what they need. For example, when you type “necklace” into a search engine, you may find the term “pendant” is often an associated term. That’s helpful information for keyword research and a term that can be included on your list.

While “necklaces” is a very general term, there are many more specific keywords. “Gold necklace,” “silver necklace” and “pearl necklace” are three examples that could be relevant for your website, depending on what you offer.

In SEO, there are short-tail keywords (keywords with one or two words) and long-tail keywords, which are full phrases or sentences. Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for since there’s usually less competition. Later, you’ll look at how difficult each term is to rank for. But for now, keep an eye out for long-tail keywords, or sentences people may be searching for related to your product or service.

As you write down more specific terms, you can look up these new terms to generate even more ideas for keywords and get even more specific. What are examples of some of the common keywords that come up when you search for “gold necklace”? Some terms you might come across include:

• 14k gold necklaces
• yellow gold necklaces
• gold necklace women
• gold necklace men

This is also a good time to look at what companies offering similar services or products are ranking for. There may be terms you haven’t considered, or this process may even inspire you to come up with new terms that you do not see online. As this is still the brainstorming phase, write down as many terms as you find or can come up with.

Later, you’ll look at these terms from a marketing strategy perspective and consider which ones are worth ranking for.

3. Expand Your List With Long-Tail Keywords

Remember long-tail keywords? Once you have a list of a few dozen keywords and phrases, you can expand your brainstorming by thinking about which long-tail keywords people might be searching for.

A few online tools can help with this.

Answer the Public is a helpful website to find out what people are searching for online, especially what questions they are asking. For example, if you type in “14k gold necklaces,” you’ll find dozens of popular questions people ask about this topic, such as “how much are 14k gold necklaces?” and “what is 14k gold jewelry?” These questions can be great starting points for brainstorming blog topics or an FAQ page on your website. The free version lets you look up three terms per day.

Soovle is another popular free tool that shows the phrases people search for across multiple platforms including Google, Yahoo and YouTube. When you type a keyword, Soovle will show you keywords that are often paired with yours in the search. For example, for the term 14k gold necklace, the phrases “14k gold necklace extender” and “14k vs 18k gold necklace” come up. This shows you what people are searching for and gives insight into what your potential customers want.

 4. Use Keyword Tools To Gather Data on Terms

Now that you’ve created a list, it’s time to evaluate which ones are worth trying to rank for based on your business objectives. There are many online tools you can use to gain insight into keywords. The goal is to identify which keywords are less competitive to rank for in a search engine, but also relate most closely to your company and business objectives.

Ahrefs and Semrush are two SEO analytic tools that charge a monthly (or annual) subscription fee and provide all the data and analytics you might need for extensive keyword research, including identifying valuable keywords. Ahrefs and Semrush provide a few free features, but the main software costs money. There are a few free tools that can provide more data. Google Keyword Planner can help you find ideas for keywords as well as the search volume for these terms. Google Trends can also help you identify popular key terms.

Once you gather this data, you’ll have a better idea about which keywords make sense to focus on trying to rank for. You may be surprised that a term you thought was uncommon is very difficult to rank for. On the other hand, terms you thought would be too hard to rank for might be less competitive. This research process may also lead to new keywords you can add to your list. Both Ahrefs and Semrush , for example, will list keywords related to the ones you’re searching for, which can help you streamline your list.

5. Choose the Keywords You Want To Focus on First

Once you’ve narrowed your list of keywords, you’ll want to choose a few to focus on for your website. You should select these based on which terms have high traffic and low competition but also represent your brand accurately. For example, “14k gold necklace extenders” could be a competitive term, but it won’t be relevant to your business if you don’t sell necklace extenders.

Keyword research is one of the first steps in the process of driving traffic to your website. The general steps of keyword research are to go from very general terms to a narrowed-down list of more specific phrases and sentences. The goal is to end up with short-tail and long-tail keywords you can incorporate into your website that will help drive traffic.

How long does keyword research take?

The amount of time it will take you to conduct keyword research will depend on a number of factors, including what stage you are in your business, how thorough you want to be and whether you already have experience researching keywords. A ballpark estimate would be to carve out one week for keyword research as part of an overall SEO strategy.

Is Ahrefs a good SEO tool?

Ahrefs is one of the best tools available for keyword research. However, while the company offers many free tools, the main software may be costly for some small businesses just starting out with keyword research. If that’s the case, check out our article on top Ahrefs alternatives .

What is a long-tail keyword?

A long-tail keyword is a phrase or sentence that is longer and more specific than one word or phrase. For example, a long-tail keyword could be “how to take care of a 14k gold necklace” while a short-tail keyword would simply be “gold necklace.” Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for in search engines since they don’t receive as much competition.

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Leeron is a New York-based writer with experience covering technology and politics. Her work has appeared in publications such as Quartz, the Village Voice, Gothamist, and Slate.

Cisco Blogs / Networking / Myth-Busting Assurance: Device-Centric vs. Service-Centric and Why Both Are Key

Myth-Busting Assurance: Device-Centric vs. Service-Centric and Why Both Are Key

Jay stewart.

Today, many systems look at assurance purely on a device level, using port stats, device health, syslogs, and other infrastructure or device-based telemetry data. It’s useful to understand and get insight from a device perspective, but this insight is reactive.

Likewise, the primary way to discover that a customer or end user is impacted by network performance issues in this scenario is still through trouble tickets. However, if a customer has already taken the time to call or create a trouble ticket, that also puts IT support in a reactive mode—chasing the problem.

In this blog, we’ll compare a few common ways of managing your network performance and reliability. You’ll learn about the capabilities of different assurance approaches to deliver a view into your customer or end user’s network experience and discover how taking a more proactive, customer-centric approach will help you get ahead of issues.

Device-level assurance is useful—but it’s not enough

Device-level assurance is very good at detecting hard faults and delivering insights that are typically red or green—red meaning the device is not performing as expected and green indicating everything is fine. Gradual degradation is harder to pick up, yet from the customer or end-user perspective, any degradation slows down the network.

For example, recent network analysis performed by one of our service provider customers revealed that even a 0.53 percent packet loss can mean a 50 percent decrease in data or throughput. A five-millisecond delay can cause a 10 percent decrease in throughput. Device-level insights are ineffective at detecting quality of experience (QoE) problems and don’t reveal the impact an issue may have on the customer. Red at the device level does not always mean customer experience is impacted, and green does not always mean everything is good.

Service-level assurance delivers a proactive, customer-centric view

Shifting focus to the service can provide a view of how the customer is experiencing the network and the impact of any performance delays. This allows you to take a proactive approach by continuously monitoring the end-to-end service experience.

Granular measurements of KPIs, such as sub-1 percent packet loss detection and other one-way metrics, can provide fine-grained insights into what customers are experiencing. Small amounts of loss can greatly impact time or latency-sensitive services, and a customer’s perception of slowness is measured in milliseconds.

Metadata is also a key component of service assurance. Metadata could include a customer’s site, region, class of service, geographic coordinates, topology, or other details that add context to performance data and KPIs. This enriches insights and helps you understand the relationship of performance patterns. For instance, if you can see that all customers with a latency issue are going through the same router, understanding that relationship can help you isolate the possible root cause.

Using machine learning algorithms and analytics will further allow you to correlate relevant data and pinpoint the issue. You can even get a glimpse into the future and start to predict performance by baselining what is normal, detecting deviations, and taking preemptive action to prevent customer-impacting issues.

Bringing it all together with a unified view of digital experience

Correlating a single view of device-level and service-centric assurance can save time and costs while helping you continuously improve the end user’s digital experience. In fact, 75 percent of IT leaders plan to enable single-console end-to-end visibility across network domains, according to the Cisco 2024 Global Networking Trends Report . Organizations that do so will empower more proactive and customer-centric network operations with the ability to see, detect, and even predict customer-impacting issues instead of reactively responding to problems only when end users call and open trouble tickets.

An end-to-end view of service performance allows you to focus on the customer-impacting issues that should be prioritized. Bringing together device and service-centric assurance gives you a clearer understanding of what the real issue is—and where it’s happening within your network.

With Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Accedian Skylight), organizations gain microsecond-level visibility and service-centric insights essential for critical enterprise connectivity and managing large-scale, complex provider networks—the “owned” aspect of the global area network.

The result? Simplified operations and seamless digital experiences across carrier-grade environments.

Get more insights on forward-thinking approaches to assurance in our research paper:  ACG Whitepaper — Economic Benefits of Service-Centric Assurance

Leader, Technical Marketing Engineering

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• Saturday, August 31
• AIDA 3 - AIrTonomy Workshop's Call for Participation - Submit Use Case

AIDA 3 - AIrTonomy Workshop's Call for Participation - Submit Use Case

Saturday, August 31, 2024

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About this Event

Join the AIrTonomy workshop to become a lead user   with 6 months free research infrastructure!

Ahead of the exclusive 2-day workshop on Sept 11-12, where we will define use cases and requirements for a cyber-physical  infrastructure  for research on autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs), we're looking for use case submissions.

Submit your research use case, be awarded with a travel grant and other forms of awards, and become a lead user with 6 months free access to the AIrTonomy infrastructure!

Your research ideas and use cases matter. They are essential for shaping the requirements of our AIrTonomy. Please submit your research case in preparation of our AIrTonomy workshop by August 31, 2024. In order to successfully submit a research use case, we strongly encourage you to watch the recording of our  introduction  and  latest  webinars or please read the  info slides , and watch this AIrTonomy Overview  video . We will also post our recording on this  website  for your information. Please check our  YouTube  channel to stay up to date. 

This infrastructure, AIrTonomy, aims to revolutionize how researchers and engineers build artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) architectures for AAVs so that they can be trusted by society.

Details:  https://www.purdue.edu/computes/airtonomy-workshop/

July 29th:  Invitation and  RSVP  opens

August 5th:   Submission  of research use cases opens

August 8th | 10:00 am ET:  Watch the AIrTonomy Introduction webinar recording  here

August 22nd | 10:00 am ET:  Watch the latest webinar recording  here

August 31st:   Submission  of research uses cases/papers and lightning talks close; announcement of travel grants!

September 11-12:   AIrTonomy Workshop  at Purdue University campus and surrounding areas near West Lafayette, Indiana

Event Details

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