Well, there are three main questions user researchers need answered:

  • What do your users want?
  • What do they need?
  • Can they use your product?

User experience research or UX research answers these questions and improves your chances of developing a profitable product.

If you want to use the best user research methods to gather real user insights, keep reading this comprehensive guide on how to conduct user research for actionable insights.

When you come up with a brilliant idea for a future product, you have no doubt about its success. You present it to your product team, and they tell you what you want to hear—making you think you've already won.

If that's precisely how your product development process works, then we have bad news for you—the outcome may be different from what you expect.

However, if you've done extensive research on your target audience and they liked your idea, then your concept has a decent chance of being a hit.

After all, it's the end users who should define how your product should function and what it should look like, not your team, friends, or potential employers/investors.

When you stop assuming and start asking users what they actually want and need, your ideas will lead to a successful design.

  • The Truth About User Research 🤷‍♀️
  • What Is User Experience Research, And How Does It Work? 🕵️
  • How To Select A Suitable UX Research Method 👉
  • Core UX Research Methods And Their Essence 🙋‍♀️
  • Why You Should Conduct UX Research 💁
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra). For more information, read our affiliate disclosure.

    The Truth About User Research 🤷‍♀️

    According to the 2017 UX and User Research Report, 22% of surveyed companies announced that in 2016 user testing became much more frequent compared to 2015.

    Apart from that, the report shows that there is a clear tendency to analyze target user insights as early as possible, often even before a product concept is created. This aids in preventing usability issues.

    All these numbers and facts speak to a shift in the main purpose of user experience research, which is changing from the question "How good is my interface?" to "What do prospective users actually need?"

    If development teams take UX research seriously, you'll be surprised at how many valuable insights come with it.

    Let's take SalesHacker, a sales and market development resource whose design researchers conducted user experience research to determine the direction of future planning and strategizing.

    The experts learned that SalesHacker users spend most of their time on the blog. They also found out that the audience consists mainly of male visitors aged 25-34 who click more on templates and checklists.

    This information is collected to shape SalesHacker policies the way its users want and need them to be.

    Another great illustration is HubSpot's main page design decisions. The research team analyzed Google Analytics data and other metrics to build certain assumptions about their users' behavior and create the ideal user journey.

    They plunged into various testing, interviews, and prototyping. And as a result, designed a new homepage that generates more trial sign-ups and supports increased user engagement.

    💡
    Yes, UX research does work. In fact, human behavior analysis doesn't just influence design rationale but business relationships with clients as well.

    The formula for a successfully delivered service consists of understanding the users and their needs, as well as properly utilizing qualitative and quantitative methods to reduce error rates. This helps development teams gain that knowledge and attain satisfied users.

    But what is it, and how can you perform user research?

    Well, let's find out.

    What Is User Experience Research, And How Does It Work? 🕵️

    User experience research is a collection of different qualitative research methods used to improve a product with the help of user feedback.

    This coordinated effort and analysis make it possible to place customers at the center of your development process and account for their needs during the actual design stage.

    As a result, your design team may improve your product in the early stages as well as avoid costly changes and usability issues after the product is released. However, this process is not only limited to the digital world.

    If you want to understand the nature of UX research, it is important to realize that this concept is much more global than you would have ever thought. It goes far beyond web design and development.

    UX research provides key insights into task analysis for planning city navigation, choosing locations for street signs, and building restrooms.

    Donald Norman, in his book The Design of Everyday Things, mentions a case when he used user experience feedback to organize trash cans in the research laboratory.

    The user-centered design process helped people avoid throwing away important notes and led to a neater arrangement of personal items.

    💭
    These examples show that collaboration with end users has been used for ages in the design thinking process but has only received due attention in recent years.

    Usability testing comes with many explorative methods, and all of them can be categorized through 2 main characteristics:

    • Qualitative research methods
    • Quantitative methods

    Qualitative research methods are aimed at establishing why users behave the way they do and not in some other way.

    Quantitative measures determine how many users do this and that. Basically, the latter method helps measure different situations numerically. Online surveys are a good example of this.

    As you can see, UX research is a pretty broad concept with many uses, but with one major goal—to make informed decisions on what's best for the end user.

    To achieve that objective, researchers usually rely on 3 key approaches that shape the whole process of user experience study:

    Observation - In most cases, your clients have no idea what they want or what they need. When conducting research, gaining advice from people is not as effective as you would want it to be. That's why it's important to observe and note the user's behavior and reactions if you want to get valuable insights.

    Understanding - Gathering the information isn't even half the battle. It's also essential to interpret it properly to get the maximum benefit from the users' insights. This approach includes understanding people's mental models and identifying the gaps that need to be filled.

    Analysis - To come up with a relevant solution, the research findings must be analyzed. Larger teams of analysts should organize them into patterns and present them to team members in the form of a scenario, chart, statistic, graph, etc.

    These 3 concepts are something you do every day without giving much thought to it, but they are your entry point into UX research.

    It's pivotal to concentrate on these approaches instead of taking them for granted.

    What's more, various smart methods can scale up the results of these operations. To know which one to use, you first need to determine exactly what you want to find out.

    How To Select A Suitable UX Research Method 👉

    Tomer Sharon, the VP and Head of User Experience at WeWork and a former Senior UX Researcher at Google, suggests that you ask several important questions before performing usability testing:

    • What kind of information do you want to learn?
    • Why do you want to gather that data?
    • What gaps do you intend to fill with that knowledge?
    • What solutions do you wish to present based on the research findings?
    • What current assumptions do you have about your users?

    These open-ended questions are used to define your goal.

    It can be a web page redesign, improvement of a certain product function, color choice for a button, or improving customer satisfaction ratings.

    To answer these questions, you need to do internal research on your users' mental models.

    Use the information you already have—for example, data from Google Analytics, info about your target audience from online surveys, current/trending issues you need to factor in, and so on.

    After you determine the goal of your future UX research, consider how Tomer Sharon categorizes all user research processes by using these 3 simple questions:

    1. What do people need?
    2. What do people want?
    3. Can people use it?

    For example, if you want to launch a completely new product, you should find out what people need.

    💡
    If you wish to choose the right design for the homepage, it implies learning about users' preferences and paying attention to user sentiment.

    However, if you want to test a readymade application, it's a question of difficult user interfaces and whether they can use it.

    It's as simple as that—and now we're going to categorize the main and most important user research analysis methods using these questions.

    Core UX Research Methods And Their Essence 🙋‍♀️

    At this stage of your user research process, you should focus all your resources on observation. Why? Because, as we've seen, what people say quite often differs from what they do—and this isn't done on purpose.

    It is hidden in our basic psychology. There is even a name for such a phenomenon—the Hawthorne effect. It suggests that research participants have an unconscious desire to satisfy the user experience researcher.

    Users evaluating your product will most likely give you the answers you want to hear, not the ones you really need.

    Although this is a great obstacle on the way to obtaining rational and reliable information, the problem can be partially solved.

    💡
    Choose the right research method for the UX investigation and use several methods to collect the findings. This will help prevent a mismatch between users' opinions and dishonest responses.

    In our guide, the UX tools and user research processes are categorized according to the different questions they help to answer, so let's delve deeper into this.

  • What Do People Need? 🤷‍♀️
  • What Do People Want? 🧐
  • Can People Use It?🙋‍♀️
  • What Do People Need? 🤷‍♀️

    Contextual Inquiry

    This technique involves observing people, as they say, "in the wild." You visit the place where they work or live and keep your eyes on how they go about doing everyday things.

    You take note of how individuals conduct task analysis and resolution in their natural environments and ask questions about the reasons for people's actions.

    During this type of investigation, it's best to minimize your interventions into processes and develop more human insights so you can receive more weighed data.

    This is a perfect user research method for understanding the natural behavior of your target audience and what they need.

    Interviews

    Interviews and online surveys are a tried and trusted way to get information. Of course, the risk of bias interference is high (the Hawthorne effect is not going anywhere), but it's possible to deal with it.

    There are 3 main types of interviews; each aims at different actionable insights:

    • User interviews - They are usually held at the user's home or in a location relevant to your project (e.g., interviewing people in a café to ask about the types of coffee they prefer). The main point of such one-to-one sessions is to walk in your user's shoes, understand their needs, world outlook, and their ways of solving problems.
    • Expert interviews - This implies that you interview people with high competency and qualifications in a sphere relevant to your product's concept. This way, you obtain information from an authority/influencer—it also provides valuable insights that help your product team develop the right idea in a suitable way.
    • Extreme interviews - Here, your participant must show the "extreme" qualities of your users. For instance, if you create a running app, think about interviewing marathon or Ironman runners. They will give you a competitive advantage and help you avoid designing idealized concepts from users that do not have substantial experience in the field.

    In a perfect-case scenario, you will create a list of questions to help you control the time allotted for the interview, as well as its direction. If you get distracted, the guide list will remind you where you should head with the participants.

    There are also survey tools to make these user experience studies much easier.

    What Do People Want? 🧐

    A/B Testing

    In this type of user research analysis, you create two versions of something you want to change/create.

    You present them to your target audience and let the users choose whatever they like best.

    For example, design two different templates for a newsletter. Then, divide your subscribers into group A and group B. After that, send each version to the corresponding group and analyze the click rate/user behavior to identify the ideal user journey.

    💡
    This is an ideal way of generating qualitative user insights to aid your design process.

    There are many elements you can test this way—style, images, content, buttons, etc., as well as products with more than 2 versions.

    Group Sessions/Focus Groups

    The process for focus group sessions involves interviewing 3-6 individuals simultaneously. However, there are a lot of pitfalls in such a research method.

    For instance, collective thinking can arise when stronger personalities suppress the voices of the weaker ones.

    Among other issues, there is also the inability of people to predict what they desire when interviewed outside the real context. And don't forget about the Hawthorne effect.

    This is also why you need to be careful with survey report results and properly examine explanations for survey answers.

    However, when conducted in the proper environment, using focus groups sessions for your UX research may help to:

    • Decode what kind of attitude the extensive users have towards your product.
    • Determine its most significant features and the effectiveness of design improvements.
    • Get to know the language and cultural contexts of your target audience.
    • Trigger some ideas/memories that may not be mentioned if the participants are interviewed separately.

    If you wish to get results by using a focus group, you need to take precautions.

    👉
    Avoid asking guiding questions because they may give away the issues you really care about.

    Just specify a few leading topics related to your cause, but without concentrating the participants' attention on a specific element.

    Can People Use It?🙋‍♀️

    Card Sorting

    Card Sorting is a UX research method that centers around grouping, categorizing, and systematizing.

    💡
    Employing this usability testing technique may help you find out how to structure your website, name the menu sections, or organize your blog content. 

    This way, you'll create a familiar and conventional environment for your customers and improve user satisfaction.

    It is usually done with simple paper cards distributed to the research participants.

    They, in turn, must perform card sorts by arranging the cards into certain categories according to what makes sense to them.

    There are also use online tools/software and templates to help with this technique.

    Usability Testing

    Usability tests require users to complete a certain set of tasks prepared by the UX research team. This is one of the most powerful UX research techniques as it analyzes behavioral user data.

    If you plan to use just one method to test your product, Nielson Norman Group advises you to choose usability testing for the most informed decisions.

    There are 3 ways to do user research analysis of this kind:

    • Moderated testing: This is usually carried out in specially equipped labs. Independent facilitators, who explain the process, lead the users and ask follow-up questions. It is efficient because it allows the gathering of the maximum amount of information.
    • Unmoderated testing: This type of testing is organized online using special software that records the screen activity and audio. The instructions are sent in a form of a video or audio, and a range of people complete the tests whenever they like.
    • Guerilla testing: This is a relatively new form of usability research, which is conducted outside of any labs or users' homes. It is done in public places (cafes, bus stops, etc.) where users are asked to do some tasks for free or for a small payment. But if the target audience of your product is limited, randomly selected people on the street won't be of much help and could actually stunt your product's progress over time.
    💡
    According to research by Jakob Nielsen, a Co-Founder of Nielsen and Norman Group, it is possible to detect 85% of core usability problems using only 5 extensive users as participants in the UX research experiment.

    Why You Should Conduct UX Research 💁

    You design products for people. It means that decisions and solutions surrounding the design of products should be driven by users' desires and preferences.

    This is one of the principles of interaction design.

    User experience research allows you to breed design components based on user-centered concepts and prevent errors in the early stages when the time on task for making changes will not be not so great or expensive.

    Use this opportunity for improved design scope by implementing one of the numerous user research processes. It will deliver better user satisfaction scores and make your business more successful.

    It's all about the customers and the ideal user journey. Make this the unofficial slogan for your business and get started in creating your company by customers.