Don’t just do usability tests. Do what you need. Consider five criteria to help you determine the most effective UX research method to use for your situation, to meet research goals, and achieve desired outcomes.
Diary studies are a longitudinal research method used to understand user interactions at different touchpoints, which is especially useful for omnichannel user research. Participants record their reactions as experiences unfold throughout the customer journey.
Do you need numerical data about your product’s user experience, but you aren’t sure where to start? The first step is choosing the right tool. Check out this list of the most popular types of quantitative methods.
Radical redesigns are best tested using an A/B experiment, while multivariate tests indicate how various UI elements interact with each other and support incremental improvements to a design.
Affinity diagramming has long been used in business to organize large sets of ideas into clusters. In UX, the method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.
All usability studies involve asking participants to perform tasks, but the correct way to write those tasks depends on the methodology you’re using. Good quantitative tasks are concrete and focused, while good qualitative tasks are open-ended, flexible, and exploratory.
Developing goals for a usability study, deciding what to test, and crafting user scenarios can be challenging. This method makes the process straightforward.
Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas include the same information and also add behavioral and attitudinal details.
The PURE method quantifies how difficult a product is to use and provides qualitative insights into how to fix it, both without costing a lot of time or money.
Jakob Nielsen answers an audience question about small and large usability studies. Which of these will improve your user interface design the most? (From the UX Conference in London.)
Writing good tasks for a usability study is an art, not a science, but there are still rules. Examine your tasks for these 10 common task-writing mistakes.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
Good UX design requires understanding the context and patterns of human behavior, especially in new products or features that solve real needs. The 5 steps to rapid corporate ethnography lead you to these discoveries.
Communicating UX work and findings to the full team, stakeholders, and leadership requires engaging deliverables. Amanda Gulley shared her experience improving the design and usability of UX deliverables at a UX Conference participant panel.
Two user research methods allow you to quickly test a large number of design alternatives, thus accelerating UX innovation. Rapid iterative design and within-subjects testing of multiple alternate designs aren't for every project, but are great when they do apply.
Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.
For each research or design method you employ, create a document that defines this method and can be used to educate other team members on UX activities.
To gain a holistic picture of your users, exchange data with the non-UX teams in your company who are collecting other forms of customer data, besides the user research you do yourself. You gain; they gain.
We compare the budgets needed for different kinds of qualitative user research: in-person usability testing vs. remote studies run by software (unmoderated) or run by a human moderator.
Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.
Qualitative and quantitative are both useful types of user research, but involve different methods and answer different questions for your UX design process. Use both!
Ask users to keep a diary throughout a fairly long period is great for researching customer journeys or other bigger-scope issues in user experience that go beyond a single interaction.
What is the difference between a field study, an ethnographic study, and a contextual inquiry in a user experience design project? Not much. The main difference is that between field methods and lab-based user research.
Locating features or content on a website or in an app happen in two different ways: finding (users look for the item) and discovering (users come across the item). Both are important, but require different user research techniques to evaluate.
Learn how to run a remote moderated usability test. This second video covers how to actually facilitate the session with the participant and how to end with debrief, incentive, and initial analysis with your team.
In remote usability studies, it's hard to identify test participants who should not be in the study because they don't fit the profile or don't attempt the task seriously. This is even harder in unmoderated studies, but it can (and should) be done.
Know the inherent biases in your recruiting process and avoid them in order to recruit study participants that are representative for your target audience.
In the early stages of a UX-design project, recruit enough people to gain an in-depth understanding of users’ experiences and needs. The number of people needed for an interview study is often smaller than you think.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about ethnographic methods like field studies and diary studies — methods that help you learn about your user’s context.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about quant research, quant usability testing, analytics, and analyzing data.
Qualitative usability testing aims to identify issues in an interface, while quantitative usability testing is meant to provide metrics that capture the behavior of your whole user population.
User testing in different countries helps identify culturally specific usability issues. Testing correctly and at the right time will help you thrive in a new market.
Preparing a guide for a user interview ensures that topics relevant to your research questions are covered, and that the interview captures in-depth information about people’s lives and needs.
Poorly designed qualitative or quantitative research may produce invalid results. Avoid encouraging certain responses or behaviors and make sure that your study conditions and participants are representative.
Through observation and collaborative interpretation, contextual inquiry uncovers insight about user’s that may not be available via other research methods.
Sometimes you should intentionally overrecruit test participants for one-on-one user-research studies. Backup participants must be recruited according to the same screening criteria and paid at least as much as regular participants.
Task analysis is the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. This knowledge ensures products and services are designed to efficiently and appropriately support those goals.
Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.
Exact costs will vary, but an unmoderated 5-participant study may be 20–40% cheaper than a moderated study, and may save around 20 hours of researcher time.
Uncover the story within extensive UX-research data by following a process of revisiting original research objectives and organizing findings into themes.
For most teams, approaching persona creation qualitatively is the right balance of effort vs. value, but very large or very small organizations might benefit from statistical or lightweight approaches, respectively.
