market research to ux research

Market Research vs UX Research: The Definitive Guide (2024)

Market research vs UX research: What’s the difference? It’s a common question. This is especially the case amongst founders looking to explore new market and product opportunities. And with global spending on CX estimated to reach $640 billion in 2022, it’s no wonder CEOs want to get their head around these terms.

There are many similarities between market research and UX research. So much so, that the terms are occasionally used interchangeably. At their core, both research types focus on the customer experience. That said, there are also some key differences in their applications and business goals. 

Read on to discover the similarities and differences between these two types of research. Plus, we’ll look at how to integrate them for better business results.

Definitions: Market research VS UX research

Let’s dive right in with some definitions. 

What is market research?

Market research is the process of learning about customers’ needs and buying preferences. The goal is to determine whether a product is worth launching . 

Market research utilizes large-scale surveys and data analysis to define a market for a product, narrowing it down to a specific audience that is most likely to buy your product. In doing so, your business can determine if a product is worth launching or not. What’s more, companies use this information to create targeted ads and messaging to connect with the target demographic.

While Steve Jobs may have famously not been a fan of market research, the industry’s global revenue exceeded $76.4 billion in 2021. That’s over double since 2008. 

What’s UX research?

UX research is essentially a methodical study of users designed to inform and improve a product team’s decision-making . This empowers teams to be more user-centric and actionable. 

UX relates to the in-product experience, falling under the umbrella of customer experience (CX) . Interestingly, better UX design can yield conversion rates of as much as 400% .

UX research employs qualitative and quantitative research methods to uncover:

How customers use a product

What issues users experience

Where the product isn’t meeting users’ needs

UX experts use the results to come up with design solutions that must then undergo iterative testing. As a result, your business can improve common issues, such as high drop-off rates, low customer satisfaction scores, or other usability complaints. 

UX research focuses on getting to know an existing audience better. That information is then used to tailor the product to make it more desirable to the target demographic.

Although UX principles can be applied to any product, UX is most typically associated with software. Conversely, market research can be applied to any product; physical or software. 

Recap: Both market research and UX research form a specific (and equally important) part of the product development and design process:

Market research → focused on understanding buying behaviors and preferences

UX research → aims to understand how users interact with a product .

Put another way, market research tells you who your audience is and UX research reveals how to make the product more desirable to them.

When to carry out market or UX research

Now let’s talk about when these research types are used.

UX research is almost always applied when there is at least a rudimentary prototype ready for user testing. Having said that, it’s technically possible to carry it out without having a product. 

We’ll elaborate.

Since there’s a broad spectrum of research methods, UX research can be carried out throughout the full product development life cycle. 

In contrast, market research almost always precedes a product launch or major update.

Summing up: Market research is typically done before a product launch or update. UX research, on the other hand, can technically be carried out throughout the product development cycle.

Market Research vs UX Research: Applications and goals

Do you remember when we said there were some differences in the application of market research vs UX research? Good. Here’s a closer look.

We’ve broken down our process when conducting each type of research. 

Market research

Generally speaking, market research focuses on understanding purchasing behavior and user preferences. Put simply, it’s oriented toward selling products to customers. During market research, we want to answer the following 3 questions:

Is there a market need for the product?

Who would buy the product?

How can you reach the target buying audience?

In essence, market research uncovers the viability of the product, informing the market strategy your business should take.

During market research activities, we recommend focusing on:

Market size

Defining pricing

Market trends

Testing concepts

Gauging competition

UX research

As we know, UX research studies users to gain insights into their needs, expectations, and behaviors. In other words, the interaction between users and products. Generally speaking, UX research should aim to answer 3 key questions:

What do users want?

What do users need?

How do they use your product?

During the UX research process, the goals are: 

Define personas and user journeys

Understand users’ needs and goals

Identify bottlenecks in the user journeys

Test the potential for new features

Pinpoint optimal information architecture & onboarding

Determine areas for experience improvements

Compared to market research, UX research is carried out on a much smaller scale. In fact, the majority of usability issues can be identified in test groups with just 5 or 6 participants.

Review: As you can see, we have very different purposes for each research type. For instance, market research tends to look outwards (market, competitors, etc,). Meanwhile, UX research typically looks inwards at the product itself. That said, the end goal remains very similar; build an incredible customer journey .

Market research vs UX research methods

Now let’s get back to the similarities between these two types of research. 

Both market and UX research use practically identical research methods. These include:

Focus groups

Personal interviews

Observation & Field trials

Competitive research

A/B testing

Let’s be clear, though. Despite these methods being almost identical, the context that we apply them to is different. 

This brings us back to goals.  

Market research leverages the methods above to determine how marketable and viable a product is for the business. By contrast, a UX researcher employs the same methods to learn about and analyze user behavior . 

Despite sharing many research methods, some are more commonly used for a specific type of research. For instance, UX research utilizes techniques such as usability testing , heuristic evaluation , and eye tracking . 

While these methods are part of UX research, the insights uncovered may be valuable for the market research team too. 

Here’s an example.  

Let’s say your UX research uncovers the potential for a new product or feature. Market research will help you gain deeper insights into that opportunity. As such, they are still tightly connected. 

Similarly, certain activities like social media listening and analyzing sales data are generally better suited to market researchers. However, they may also be employed by UX researchers to understand the interaction between the customer and product better. In short, there is a strong overlap between the tactics used for both market and UX research.

The bottom line: Market and UX research share a plethora of identical research methods. Even though there are some methods that are better suited to a specific research method, a strong overlapping remains. Therefore, there are no clear lines of separation between the methods used for each. 

Market research vs UX research: Which do I choose?

Unsure which type of research is best for your business? We suggest first identifying the business problem you want to solve. 

Let’s say you have launched a new product. 

Despite being marketable, it is still not fulfilling business goals. In this case, UX research will help you better understand how your customers are interacting with your product. As such, you’re more likely to get the answers you’re looking for.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario. 

If your business has concerns over the marketability of your product, market research will deliver the answers you need.

Here’s our two cents.

At Adam Fard, we don’t really differentiate between market and UX researchers. Instead, our researchers both integrate research types for more holistic insights.

Integrating UX & Market Research

As we’ve just seen, there is a huge overlap between these two types of research. As such, it doesn’t always make sense to have a wall between the two activities. In fact, doing so can result in an inefficient workflow with a sub-par result.

Here’s why.

Firstly, separating market and research will lead to duplicating work. Since there are so many similarities, it’s highly likely that your teams will carry out the same subactivities twice.

More importantly, allocating one part of the research process to marketers and the other to design experts disjoints the customer journey. As a result, the overall customer journey will lack cohesion. Considering 89% of businesses compete primarily on the basis of customer experience (CX), this is a risky move.

Things are changing.

The research landscape is evolving rapidly. In fact, the Walker 2020 Progress Report forecasted that customer experience would become the key brand differentiator by 2020. As such, businesses can no longer rely on clever marketing or low pricing to win over customers. Instead, they need to offer customers a thoughtfully-designed product that is seamless to use. 

This evolution in research has seen an even bigger overlap between market and UX research. UX research opens the doors to a deeper understanding of your customers’ engagement with your product. By finding this out, your business can pinpoint where it needs to invest its energy and where it is succeeding.

The Roundup

We hope this has given you a better understanding of market research and UX research and the benefits to your business. Both market and UX research form vital parts of the design and development process. Although they are almost identical in some ways (research methods, business objectives, etc.), they approach business problems from different angles. As such, we believe integrating both research types offers better holistic insights. 

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Market Research vs. UX Research: How to Decide?

Posted by Julia Marks on Mar 20, 2023

It’s an exciting time to be in UX research – a rapidly, evolving world means an increasingly important need to understand it. Where do you start, you ask? When to turn to market research, UX research – or both – to answer your company’s most burning questions isn’t always black and white, so let’s unpack the differences and similarities between the two.

The line between market research & UX research can be blurry at times. When speaking with fellow colleagues who’ve transitioned from dedicated market research to UX research roles over the years, you'll hear there’s a lot of overlap. Some argue:

• UX research is a subset of market research
• Both research types can occur at any point along the company and/or product lifecycle
• Both researchers advocate for and/or act as the voice of the consumers

While both market researchers and UX researchers conduct research with many different purposes, in general, market research champions who your target is, while user experience research champions that target’s ideal experience. Ask these three questions to decide which expertise, UX or Market, to invest in:

What questions are you trying to answer?

• What’s the desired delivery of insights timeline?

What impact will this research have?

Research objective:.

In market research , the questions usually stem from any team focused on trying to make business decisions related to the brand, its product or service offerings, or its mission. These teams will ask questions to understand consumer purchase behaviors, ensure business strategies are intact, and competitiveness is maintained in the industry. Here are some example questions:

• What demographic targets and market niches hold the most sales potential?
• What impact does an advertising campaign have on the audience’s brand perceptions and purchase interest?
• How does the target audience feel about the brand’s overall mission?

UX research explores the optimization of product design and interaction. So whereas market research often focuses more broadly on the sales of a product or service, UX research narrows in on how people engage and interact with the products or services. In most cases, UX research is geared towards solutions-based insights because it stems from the idea that there is a problem to be identified, solved for, and/or prevented. Here are some example questions:

• How do people use or interact with the product on a daily basis, and what frustrations or delights do they have?
• How do product features impact the user’s ability to effectively complete a task? 
• How will users feel about a redesign of a product or service, and what are the key watch-outs?
• What groups of people use the product differently or have different expectations than others?
• What current solutions and behaviors exist that unearth the white space for new product development?

Every company within every industry can benefit from both types of research to thrive – ensuring your target audiences are offered the right products that work optimally for their needs. Although the questions vary, the reality is that a research study can include aspects from both research types. For example, studies we’ve conducted at AnswerLab have assessed how users currently use products, as well as their interest in new products the team was considering, which included profiling the potential target. Here are some example questions that overlap:

• Who is the target audience – what do they think, feel, see, and do…and what are their unique needs and desires?
• How do people comprehend and resonate with elements of marketing programs and platforms, such as websites, social media messaging, content marketing, etc.?

Study Design:

What’s the desired delivery timeline for insights.

How quickly do these insights need to be shared with stakeholders? The answer will not always help you discern which research is best but in many cases, certainly not always, UX research can be better for quicker turnaround times. This is often because the questions and decisions needed to be made tend to be more pointed toward a specific product, service, or need.

Although UX research is historically associated with qualitative studies and market research with quantitative studies, both types of research can involve quantitative and qualitative methodologies and span any length of time to meet a deadline. In fact, both types of research can be conducted using most of the same types of quantitative or qualitative methodologies. 

So if the methodologies and the insights delivery timelines can overlap between the research practices, why are they often conducted by different researchers in dedicated agencies or departments? Although not drastically different, there’s a level of expertise and skill in asking UX-type questions and conducting impactful UX studies. For instance, UX researchers are often deeply embedded and knowledgeable in engineering and design team terminology. That said, those that transition between the two disciplines either for a specific project or in their larger career, usually feel really comfortable diving in. At its core, consumer research is consumer research.

Research Impact:

Last but not least, the impact of this research will determine if market or UX research should be the main focus. How will the answer to this research question affect the company’s next move? If the answer will impact the trajectory of the user’s engagement with the product or future product’s design, UX research is key. However, if the answer will impact the trajectory of the overall strategy that the product will thrive in, market research is necessary.

Regardless of the intended impact, it’s important to remember why we’re here. The center of all research questions is what the impact will have on the business. Making users [insert goal: happier, more successful, etc.] will ultimately drive them to continue coming back to what your company has to offer. A holistic approach to research ensures users’ sign-off on every touchpoint with your product and brand overall.

Understanding your audience and their experiences are dependent on each other’s success, which is why one research type is not more important than the other. Knowing which type of research to employ based on these three factors – research objective, study design and research impact – will help your team decide which route to take.

Need help building your research program? Get in touch with a UX strategist to get started. 

Julia marks, related insights.

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Market Research vs User Research: How To Overcome Uncertainty

Creating a digital product from scratch can make for an exciting process but never a smooth ride. But by doing the right research at the right time, you can get the information you need to advance. Easier said than done... Is it not just a question of market research vs user research?

We wrote this to help you choose the right research methods more easily.

In this article we answer:

• How do we distinguish between types of research?
• What characteristics define market research vs user research?
• How do we combine market research and user research?

Whether a product manager working in a big company or the owner of a startup, you face a multitude of uncertainties along the way. When taking on the challenge of converting an idea into a real product, you identify the target users and their pain points.

You also find out if your solution works for them and analyze how they use it. How do we decide then which way to go whenever we come to a crossroads?

At UX studio , we strongly believe that research provides the answer! But choosing the right type of research for the right questions at the right time doesn’t come so straightforwardly. It is not just about market research vs user research anymore.

So how should you do it then? Let’s take a look at some of the questions you might have along the way.

So many questions regarding research. What should I do?

• Does the need for our product exist? How big of a potential market has it got?
• What competing products have already entered the market? What market shares have they gained?
• Who would we see as the customers for our product? What are they trying to accomplish? What pain points and motivations have they got?
• How do potential users currently solve their problems?
• How likely will they buy our product? How much would they pay?
• What features do they find the most important?
• Does our product solve their problems? How intuitively can they use the product?
• How do they use it? How satisfied does it leave them?
• How can we get more of them?

We know that questions like these keep coming and they can overwhelm us sometimes. Don’t panic. Doing the right research can give the answers you need to move on and create a great product. However, things could look a bit fuzzy. So, what type of research do you need and when?

In a previous post about UX research ,  my colleague Alexandra explored the kinds of user research methods product managers have at hand at each step of the product development life cycle in order to make informed decisions.

Now I want to take a step back and think of research in general. Some questions might not find the best answers applying user research methods. Sometimes we need to turn to market research to get the relevant and reliable answers we need. And use other tools as well.

So not all research works the same?

Exactly. The type of research depends on the questions you want to answer and the kind of information you need. Take two of the most important questions we face at the beginning of a project: Does the market have the need for a product like we want to build and how much ?

The user research approach

A UX researcher would try to find answers by conducting interviews with potential users. Ideally, they would spend time observing them in their environment ( ethnography ). They would pay special attention to user behavior observing the problems they face and how they solve them.

The interviews should provide information on:

• What the people want to achieve;
• How they currently do it;
• What problems they face along the way; and
• What motivates them to keep going.

The research should indicate if a need for a product like we envision exists. However, it wouldn’t say anything about how much need exists (how many people have the problem, with what frequency, etc.).

The market research approach

A market researcher would also try to conduct interviews with potential users. This is where the question market research vs user research comes in. Market researchers would concentrate on the product idea’s appeal, key purchasing factors and other possible solutions.

They would follow the interviews with a survey on a representative sample from the target group. It would find out the product’s occurrence and frequency, the current solution, the likelihood of using the new product, and user demographic characteristics.

The survey results would add a quantitative dimension to the qualitative insights. Consequently, they give an idea about the amount of need on the market, and in turn an estimate of the new product’s potential.

This example shows how user research and market research clearly differ in strategy. It also indicates that the insights they provide complement each other.

User research aims to find people’s true pain points and motivations based on their behavior. However, market research aims to find people’s attitudes towards a product and estimate the size of the potential market .

So how exactly do user research and market research differ?

Market research: broad insights focused on attitudes.

Market research primarily involves getting the broad picture , uncovering high-level information regarding a specific industry. Market researchers use mainly quantitative methods , meaning they focus on numbers. They run studies on large representative samples so to infer results for the whole population.

The results of surveys reflect the situation in the whole population within an acceptable margin of error. This can make us quite sure of the average potential user’s age, income level, level of education and other general characteristics.

Market research tends to give more weight to attitudinal data (what people say about themselves or about what they would do) rather than to concrete behaviors in a certain context. They use insights from market research primarily to inform marketing decisions .

User Research: Detailed insights focused on behavior

User research employs a very different strategy. It has nothing to do with market size and shares, trends, market segments, demographics, and less to do with attitudinal responses. Instead, it looks at people’s behavior , how they solve everyday problems, use a product, etc. It does not deal with broad data, but rather very specific, deep insights regarding users.

User research provides a direction about how to design a product, and to what extent it meets user needs. We can use significantly smaller sample sizes because the results don’t need statistical accuracy.

User research focuses on producing qualitative data about what lies behind what people say. It looks specifically at what they literally do while using a product. Also, it prioritizes design guidance and improves the user experience.

Can’t I just choose one and adapt the results to fit my needs?

Not really. Both research methods play an important role, and you must avoid using one in the wrong place. Relying on market research insights to inform UX design decisions works equally as bad as relying on user research insights to derive market size.

UX design requires different information from what market research delivers. It also estimates market size, and market shares require different information.

Also, a UX researcher or a market researcher requires different knowledge and skill sets. All-rounders who can equally master both come along a lot less often.

When do I apply user research and when market research?

Apply market research early in the product development cycle.

Market research plays an important role during the product development cycle’s early stages for analyzing the potential to make money. Here we need business insights on market size, trends and competition, and to identify product/service areas that interest people.

Apply user research to understand users and guide the design process

After the initial market research, user research will take over and dive into one of the focus areas we want to understand more deeply.

User research brings useful insights for building an innovative product: validating specific design decisions, deriving features and testing product ideas.

Once we have some concrete product ideas, market research again plays an important role. It helps in evaluating which of these concepts will most likely sell successfully and also in identifying approximate price points.

Combine market and user research to make better decisions

For making the best decisions, understand when to use both market research and user research. See below how to combine user research and market research throughout the product development cycle.

“ The most important thing for user experience professionals to know is when marketing research is needed, and when user experience research is needed. If you understand how these two methodologies work together through a product lifecycle, you will be able to work effectively with marketing departments. You can demonstrate the value of including user experience research in their projects because you are able to explain how it complements the market research they are already conducting .”

Apala Lahiri Chavan Chief Oracle and Innovator Human Factors International

Summary: Market Research vs User Research: Overcoming Uncertainty

#1 Research methods don’t all work the same. Think of the kind of information you need and choose a method that can provide the relevant answers.

#2 Although the line between and user research and market research looks quite blurred, don’t confuse the two or use them interchangeably!

#3 Market research mainly provides broad, quantitative insights about people’s attitudes and their willingness to buy a product. This, in turn, informs marketing decisions.

#4 User research mainly provides deep, focused qualitative insights about people’s behavior and how they would use a product. As a result, this informs design decisions.

#5 Used together, user research and market research can help product managers make better decisions and provide a clear roadmap to create successful products.

Want to read more?

What is beyond market research vs user research? Read more related articles to research on our blog: Product Manager’s Guide To UX Research and Nine UX Research Methods Product People Should Know .

Want to know more about the UX process? Download our free ebook Product Manager’s Guide To UX Design to read our UX case studies and learn about tools and tricks.

We also have additional reading for you, an actual hardcover Product Design book as well! And we ship it worldwide!

More into in-person learning. Reach out to us if you are thinking about organizing an in-house UX training for your team. We sure have some ideas! 😉

Let's talk

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Experience improvement

The post-pandemic dominance of crm and ux research.

Product development and digital marketing in new and established companies have spurred the growth of digital user experience research, or UX research as we call it, in 2022.

UX research is nothing new. It had existed for a long time before the "UX" term became a thing - as part of the trend of adding an "X" to all things connected to the experience economy. Ironically, in the search for a unique identity, this research discipline is trying to grow apart from other adjacent research disciplines, including market research, from which UX research borrows heavily.

Current State

The current challenge with UX research is that most of its practitioners come from functions without a direct link to research, marketing, or business management.

Many UX researchers are first graphic designers, user interaction designers, or software developers who need to incorporate the customer or user perspective into their work by choice or mandate. Many UX practitioners operate under the mantra of "scrappy, fast, and dirty research," pressured by tight deadlines, small budgets, and DIY expectations that many tech companies have adopted as part of their agile product development model.

Why should market researchers /insights professionals care about this? Although many in the UX community have a negative opinion of marketing and market research, their methods are adaptations of market research techniques. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of rigour or connection to business outcomes.

Many market researchers who have been working long enough in the insights industry, know how low quality resulting from short deadlines, limited resources and lack of thinking time to translate insights into business implications, undermined the value of research at the C-suite level. UX research seems to be heading in the same direction.

What is UX?  

UX stands for user experience. 

The term user experience was first used in 1993 by the User Experience Department at Apple when they worked at improving the user experience of Apple computers. It is time to put to rest the myth that Steve Jobs was a research naysayer. 

Don Norman, who was part of that group at Apple, and Jacob Nielsen co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group (NNg), a well-known consultancy and training agency that has advocated for best practices in UX research. 

NNg’s founders defined user experience as a state of mind, combining emotions and attitudes resulting from user interactions with products and services, customer support, and even marketing. 

However, over time, in reality, UX has become narrow in scope as a function in mostly digital-first and eCommerce companies to support software development, often disconnected from marketing and business strategy. 

Customer Experience (CX)  

In this context, a new crop of CX consultants and job titles has also come to add to the confusion. 

Depending on the organisational structure and who does different types of research, the terms user experience and customer experience (CX) may be used interchangeably or kept separate to represent different teams. 

CX is primarily grounded in customer satisfaction research, which has always been a market research discipline. Many in CX roles promote customer-centricity across all channels and use high-level metrics from customer satisfaction research like the NPS to connect customer-centricity to business impact. 

While UX is often more concerned with micro-interactions with products and marketing channels, CX tries to get an integrated macro view of all interactions. Marketing is supposed to do that at a strategic level with the support of a mature and integrated market research function. This was precisely the role my research team played at Match.com and Blockbuster Online. 

However, when marketing is disconnected from product development and gets reduced to short-term promotion tactics focusing on customer-facing channels without a strategic role, a vacuum is created for a new function trying to connect the dots to support strategic business outcomes. 

Similar user experience drivers on- and off-screen

Developers of digital products like software, apps, and websites have been interested in the user experience at the micro-level, especially the usability aspect of the experience. For many years, the term "User Experience" has been used interchangeably with "Usability." 

Usability contributes to the user experience but does not explain it thoroughly. 

Usability aims at creating ease of use. Its technical definition includes ease of learning the task, becoming proficient, remembering how to perform it after stopping for a while, making few errors and recovering from them, and feeling satisfied with the experience. 

Other contributing factors to the user experience are the surface design (visual/graphic design) and product functionality, which is the ability of the product to provide benefits and satisfy a need. 

When we combine usability, utility, and surface design, we can have different user experiences depending on how we implement those dimensions. Ideally, we should develop products and services that meet a need, are easy to use, have a great surface design, and induce satisfaction. 

These drivers of user experience are not exclusive to digital products. Traditional product market research uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand similar drivers of the user experience in the physical world. 

UX researchers and market researchers are essentially dealing with similar research questions even if the research techniques may require some adaptations to the medium in which the product lives. 

Research function maturity  

A 2019 study from usertesting.com about trends in the customer experience field found that many designers don't have access to research. Many researchers are struggling to do quality work at the rapid pace of product development. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of executives (86%) support scaling up user research. 

The challenge usually lies in the level of UX maturity many companies have, which is strongly associated with the priorities for the business, management’s willingness to hire experienced researchers to build or manage research teams and provide them with resources to do research that moves the needle. 

UX research maturity levels vary from product-focused companies with no research function to those with a research function that can handle tactical and strategic research to support the development of a product roadmap. Levels in the middle represent progressions in awareness, increased use of more advanced methodologies, and widening connections to other parts of the organisation. 

The increased discussion about UX research maturity and the realisation that most digital companies are at a  low maturity level has led to the call for a new research function: ResearchOps. This follows the trend of adding "Ops” (short for Operations) to everything that touches the product development process. The overarching goals of "ResearchOps" are to create standards for the research process and increase the involvement of internal stakeholders in it. 

ResearchOps is essentially a new name for the old Market Research Group, although it doesn't reside in marketing and is more focused on data collection logistics such as in-house participant recruitment for qualitative research (e.g., user interviews and usability testing) and maintenance of data repositories, in any. Consequently, coordination of the UX research and market research/insights groups is rare even in more UX mature companies. Each group tends to work in a silo and hardly knows what the other is doing. Their research efforts are often not integrated or connected to common business goals.

As a market researcher, I often hear both curiosity about and dismissiveness of market research among UX practitioners, indicating some territorial hostility between both groups that prevent them from learning from each other. 

The entrenched DIY approach in UX that has now extended to research operations to be faster and cheaper (up to a point) under the pressure of short deadlines in product development, lack of knowledge about the roots of the discipline exacerbated by terminology inflation, siloed structures, and lack of education standardization and pedagogy in this field are likely to delay maturity of the UX research discipline for some time.

Misconceptions about market research  

Neither market researchers nor UX researchers realise they use similar research methods under different names. 

Most UX researchers, which rely heavily on qualitative research methods for data collection, don't know that those techniques are adaptations of techniques market researchers have used for decades. The most common misconception of UX researchers is that market researchers only do quantitative research. Terminology inflation is usually part of the problem. 

A typical example is the renaming of in-depth interviews (IDIs) based on the target audience  (User interviews, stakeholder Interviews) or the interview's goals (Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews for need exploration). 

Personas research is another UX adaptation that comes from market segment profiling. Many UX practitioners don’t distinguish between market segmentation and personas, which is another name for a segment profile. Often, personas development is an internal opinion-based workshop exercise without actual market segmentation data behind it. 

Currently, one can find LinkedIn posts advising UX practitioners to exclude demographic information from the description of personas. This indicates a lack of understanding of the impact demographics have on the context in which people use products and services. Ignoring this information can insert biases into product development due to a lack of diversity in the user experience. 

The need for research integration  

What is the problem with this separation between UX and market research? 

Customers don't care about the channels. They will continue or stop buying from your brand based on cumulative experiences through multiple interactions in the stores, on the website, on the app, on customer service calls, or chat conversations. 

Each interaction will affect brand perceptions, brand trust, and willingness to become or stay a customer. This is the result of an omnichannel experience. 

To capture this omnichannel experience and become customer-centric, we need to both diversify and integrate research functions. We can achieve it by: 

Building a diverse research team by age, gender, race, socio-economic background, culture, disability spectrum, and experience in UX research and market research/insights. 

Combining qualitative and quantitative methods in market research and UX research projects deriving insights from triangulating different perspectives. 

Using a hybrid model blending internal and external resources. Internal research teams are most efficient at supporting short-term and long-term business goals when they partner with external research suppliers for certain research tasks or projects. Relying only on DIY research may end up being more expensive and less efficient in a variety of scenarios. 

These are not theoretical principles, but evidence-based best practices. I personally saw them in action during my time as a corporate researcher at Match.com and Blockbuster Online in the early 2000’s. 

We had a small but integrated team that conducted qualitative and quantitative market research and UX research througha hybrid working model including internal DIY research and work supported by research suppliers. All research efforts were coordinated to reach key business outcomes, common to all businesses: adquire and retain customers to increase revenue, profits and cost on cost. 

Final thoughts  

Digital user experience is an exciting area of research that would benefit from the experience of market researchers. To support and better communicate with digital product teams, it helps to understand basic principles of interaction and graphic design, but researchers don't have to be designers or developers to conduct digital product research. 

At the same time, designers, product managers, and developers who act as UX researchers should become familiar with the scientific method and qualitative and quantitative methodologies to guarantee a minimum level of quality and showcase its value to the organisation. 

Diverse teams, integrated or working in coordination (“living apart together”) with a shared understanding of principles of research and different methodologies are more likely to have a bigger impact on business sustainability, enhance the value of research, and provide a rewarding research career for its members.

Michaela Mora

Michaela Mora, the founder of Relevant Insights, is an insights professional with a diverse background and more than 20 years of experience in market research, UX research, and multicultural research in many different industries. She is a graduate of the MSMR program at UTA and has working experience from both the client-side and the supplier-side in the U.S. and abroad, using qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Before founding Relevant Insights in 2007, she managed the research team at Blockbuster Online, and  Match.com  after working as a researcher for MARC Research in Texas, Kantar in Sweden, and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television in Cuba. 

Michaela is also a founding member of the Multicultural Insights Collective, which conducts multicultural research into best practices to help brands speak both internally and externally on topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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Building a bridge between UX research and market research

Table of contents.

1. Survalyzer provides answers and TestingTime test users 2. Methodological approach to market research and UX research 3. Quality in the offer, quality in the experience 4. Clients from market research, user experience and customer experience, as well as innovation departments 5. Templates for quantitative UX research to measure UX KPIs 6. UX Toolbox for free quantitative UX research

1. Survalyzer provides answers and TestingTime test users

Christian Hyka has been Managing Director of Survalyzer for almost 10 years. He is responsible for strategic product development and corporate strategy, but also supports sales. With its intuitive survey software, Survalyzer supports market researchers in survey creation, sampling and evaluation. The software has great features such as reports in the form of a ready-made PowerPoint presentation at the push of a button, as well as an online dashboard with various filtering options. The product covers all needs concerning the online data collection process to provide the desired insights fast and in an agile manner.

Reto Lämmler , Co-Founder and CEO of TestingTime, created the company in early 2015, together with Oliver Ganz, who acts as Chief Technical Officer. The idea behind TestingTime is to simplify the lives of UX and user researchers. For this purpose, TestingTime takes over the entire test user recruiting effort, thus pursuing the vision of creating a world full of happy users. As CEO, Reto ensures that TestingTime progresses in the right direction. 

This is also the topic of the conversation between the two thought leaders from market research and UX. What is the next step in these fields? What is the next step for these companies? Christian and Reto appear to be at home in two different worlds, but actually they are extremely similar. Why? Read on and find out.

2. Methodological approach to market research and UX research

In general, market research is directed at understanding purchasing behaviour and preferences related to products and messages. Its aim is to understand and interpret the factors that lead to achieving a sale. UX, on the other hand, focuses on the interaction between customers and products. Market research reveals the target group and trends for a product or service. UX, on the other hand, explores how to achieve a more desirable user experience for the target group. When reading this, the immediate question that arises concerns the potentials that could be derived from a combination of both fields. And considering their development, could there be a merger sooner or later?

2.1 Quantitative or qualitative market research

Classic market research is a traditional field, while UX research is considered agile and modern. The differentiation between quantitative and qualitative market research has existed for several decades. And user experience research, which is now available in a wide variety of facets, historically originates in qualitative market research. 

The quantitative market research that Survalyzer is doing, traditionally sneers a little at qualitative market research, according to Christian. Because when it comes to hard facts for a broad mass of people, quantitative market research, with its big sampling, is required. In this case, a qualitative study with just a few participants is simply not sufficient.

Christian believes that digitisation is a major game changer in connection with a possible combination of both methods. Research tools can bridge the gap, because some of their functions are the same. For example, the way a screener for test users is created is technically very similar to that of an online survey. Hence, Christian feels certain that the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative research will tend to disappear. Because suddenly people are working with the same tools and sharing their experiences. Both domains still have different tools in use, but they will be able to benefit more and more from each other.

2.2 UX researcher or classic market researcher

Reto’s position is similar. In past times, market researchers used to sneer at UX researchers and their approach. Exaggerating a little, quantitative market researchers did not seriously believe that it is possible to tell everyone how tomorrow’s product should be designed with just five user tests. At that time it was a very agile way of working, while market researchers had to rely on methodical correctness following the waterfall principle. 

In addition, market research has existed as a study path for several years, and the concept is still the same as it was years ago. UX courses, on the other hand, are something very new. Reto himself obtained a master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction Design (HCID), something that has not been around for very long. 

In the meantime, the methods in the world of UX have changed and improved. No longer is there just the simple 5-people usability test—currently various study methods are used. In addition, these have been supplemented by quantitative UX methods. Qualitative results are supported with quantitative validation. 

Reto therefore agrees that the worlds of market research and UX research are getting increasingly closer. Not only are some of the same tools used, but there are also parallels in the methods. Ultimately, both intend the same: to offer or develop products and services that customers love, and as a consequence thereof, use and buy them.

3. Quality in the offer, quality in the experience

Quality is a central issue for both Survalyzer and TestingTime—but in a slightly different context. It is a key factor for a great customer experience.

3.1 High-quality results in online surveys 

Survalyzer focuses on ensuring quality for the integration of their solution. Quality checks for this purpose are basically carried out automatically and by machine. However, they are constantly faced with challenges, such as the time required to complete a survey. How long does it take to complete the survey? What is appropriate here and what could indicate an unsuitable participant? Another issue are the so-called “straightliners”. Straightlining occurs when survey participants select identical (or almost identical) answer options. This reduces the data quality of the survey results. 

Another issue are “trap questions”. Survalyzer provides its clients with a list of questions to intercept such people. It is used to identify respondents who do not pay much attention to the questions in the survey and not only answer the “trap question” itself in a non-optimal manner, but also other questions included in it.

Finally there are the “bad open answers”. This is the biggest problem for Survalyzer and its clients. Because participants sometimes write letter sequences like “afds” in the answer field. Uncovering and eliminating precisely these behavioural patterns is extremely crucial for Survalyzer and its clients to achieve quality.

3.2 High-quality panel with reliable test users 

What TestingTime often hears from its clients is how they have had bad experiences with quantitative research panel providers in the past. They wished to use some of them for qualitative research purposes and were disappointed with the results. For Survalyzer, the above problems are a major challenge, and if unsuitable test users are added to the process, it has an even more negative effect on the result. 

TestingTime, on the other hand, comes from the world of qualitative research, and it was necessary to make sure from the start that reliable test users were recruited. There was no way around checking people carefully beforehand. Because they have to appear personally for interviews—regardless of whether on site at the customer’s, at a research lab or remotely. When doing so, these people must match exactly the profile requested by the client. In addition, they have to be exactly what they said about themselves during the screening process. 

TestingTime has always made the effort to carry out careful quality checks. However, at some point a database size was reached where it was no longer possible to do manual checks, for example, by calling the candidate in person. For this reason and to be able to continue to scale, machine learning was invested in. The team checked whether it was possible to use past responses and data to determine whether they could be rated correctly. You can find out more about this process in the blog posts “ Pool quality at scale with the help of artificial intelligence “ and “ Great quality and reliability are no coincidence “.

3.3 Survalyzer and TestingTime as a power duo

TestingTime has the same mechanisms in the screener as Survalyzer’s trap questions, response speed, etc. But the algorithm is based on all the information that the test users have provided so far. It automatically calculates whether a test user is reliable and suitable for the respective study. 

Our offer would solve the problem for Survalyzer and its clients. If only well-rated and quality-tested people were used for studies, there would be no problem with the quality of the survey results and no time would be lost in sorting out straightliners, etc. The advantage of using Survalyzer in combination with TestingTime is that market researchers can access a qualitative panel like the one provided by TestingTime and use high-end survey software.

4. Clients from market research, user experience and customer experience, as well as innovation departments

Survalyzer serves clients from various industries in the DACH region as well as in the Netherlands. The company boasts a large number of clients from the banking industry, which has high requirements concerning compliance guidelines and Survalyzer specialises in these. Most of Survalyzer’s clients are still market researchers, but this is something the company wishes to change. 

TestingTime is active across Europe, with a focus on the DACH region, France and the United Kingdom. At TestingTime, clients can be divided into three different fields: classic market research (the main focus of Survalyzer), user and customer experience, and innovation departments. 

Six years ago, there was only the UX designer. Some time later, the UX researcher split off. The UX designer creates the experience and the UX researcher checks the experience. Or even before the UX designer creates the experience, the UX researcher checks what the experience should be like. Therefore, there was also a change at TestingTime, and the focus, although mainly on UX researchers, now also is on product managers, because these are often concerned with product-market fit. 

However, innovation specialists and market researchers are also increasingly among TestingTime’s clients. People working in UX and innovation do small and regular projects with us. Market researchers, on the other hand, come with very big projects, but not so often. Agility has always been in the DNA of UX professionals, and market researchers are becoming increasingly aware of agility. For this reason, they also approach TestingTime, as we include agile practices in our offer. 

Specialists from the three areas are looking for slightly different answers, and we are very excited about all of them at TestingTime. They have one thing in common though: they are looking for people to validate their idea, product or service. And they all need a survey tool to find answers.

5. Templates for quantitative UX research to measure UX KPIs

With its technology platform, Survalyzer provides easy-to-use templates as an option. This template approach requires application purposes. Last summer, Christian and Reto came up with the idea of creating standardised templates for UX. 

5.1 System Usability Scale (SUS)

When evaluating the most important KPIs that are common in the world of UX, they quickly came up with the System Usability Scale (SUS). It offers a fast and reliable method for assessing the usability of design solutions. After a deep dive, Christian realized that it fits Survalyzer’s approach very well.  Among other things, he read our various blog posts on how to measure UX (see the blog post in German Make UX measurable & strengthen the UX culture in the company ). 

5.2 Single Ease Question (SEQ) 

After doing some further brainstorming, Christian and Reto decided to build together a UX toolbox with various measuring tools. Thus, the Single Ease Question (SEQ) was added to the SUS. It checks how easily a tool can be used and how easy it is to complete a task. As the name suggests, the SEQ focuses on just a single question.

5.3 Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Finally, they decided on the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The Net Promoter Score uses a standardised survey to determine the satisfaction of a company’s customers. It’s origins can be found in the world of marketing, but surprisingly, it is often used in the world of UX. The SUS is superior to the NPS for the purposes of UX research, but the NPS has become an industry standard because it allows a better communication with stakeholders outside the world of UX.

6. UX Toolbox for free quantitative UX research

With these three tools mentioned above, Survalyzer and TestingTime launched the UX Toolbox. Its purpose is to build the bridge between market research and UX research. We wish to give our customers an advantage by using Survalyzer and TestingTime in combination, thus getting the best out of their studies. 

UX has matured extremely from a methodological viewpoint in recent years, and UX measurability is a topic increasingly focused on. The toolbox helps its users to measure UX and to show to their supervisors and other stakeholders that progress and investment in UX is important. 

The UX Toolbox with its evaluation convenience feature can now be used free of charge.

Toolbox with templates for measuring UX KPIs

The free toolbox reliably supports UX researchers with user experience evaluations. It allows a valid, trustworthy and objective measurement of user perception. The three relevant KPIs—Single Ease Question (SEQ), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and System Usability Scale (SUS)—help you to better assess risks and derive improvements based on them.

Use the UX Toolbox now for free.

Ines Misura

As a longtime marketer, Ines gained in-depth marketing knowledge within different industries and in companies of different sizes. She has always been at the forefront of testing new marketing trends, even in private projects. Ines always puts the customer’s expectations, needs and wishes at the centre of her work in order to provide a positive customer experience.

Related UX resources

Ux tip of the week.

Combining UX Research with Market Research

Most organizations have distinct groups for marketing and user experience research.

And not only are they separate departments, they usually have separate methods and mindsets.

The two functions are often delineated something like the following:

• Marketing does the quantitative; UX the qualitative
• Marketing measures branding and satisfaction; UX observes behavior
• Marketing does segmentation; UX manages personas
• Marketing concerns themselves with what customers say; UX is concerned with what customers do

This often results in some turf wars on who owns what method and who “owns” the customer data.

While functions need to be defined and some methods and skills make more sense in marketing rather than in UX research, the truth is that the line between market research and UX research is increasingly blurring. Both teams are ultimately responsible for collecting customer data to make better decisions . It’s something I’ll be talking about more in a webinar next week (May 25th, 2016).

The successful researcher, regardless of title, should understand how to combine traditional market research and UX research activities for the best results. The goal of any company is to create a customer. And by extension, the goal of customer (or user) research is to better understand who a customer is and deliver products and services that meet their needs—which should help keep that customer too!

This doesn’t mean that UX researchers should start planning trade-show events, marketing campaigns, or the next conjoint analysis. It also doesn’t mean the market research professional should start running usability tests and performing heuristic evaluations . But it does mean that if you’re in either role, you should understand the tools and techniques that help define what customers think and what they do—and that means blending methods and mindsets.

In principle this means:

• It’s OK to mix quantitative and qualitative . They are complementary, not competing, methods.
• Don’t be afraid to use surveys and observation to answer the same research questions.
• Understand how the user experience affects brand attitudes and vice versa.
• Measure what people think and what they do, often in the same study.

For organizations where the website represents a major touchpoint for commerce (or is the only point of commerce), it’s even more important for a researcher to mix methods and mindsets.

The following table shows how the market research and UX research activities can be blended to better understand and serve your customers’ needs.

You might also be interested in

• Login to Survey Tool Review Center
• How to Leverage UX and Market Research To Understand Your Customers

Summary: In this webinar organized by the UX Research & Strategy Group, Michaela Mora, founder of Relevant Insights, discusses what market research is, the similarities and differences between market research and UX research, and how they could be integrated to gain deeper insights to deliver business impact.

45 minute video. By author Michaela Mora on July 19, 2021 Topics: Business Strategy , Market Research , UX Research

At Relevant Insights, we have been using UX and Market research to provide a deeper understanding of the customer journey and derive insights to guide business decisions for our clients.

Here is the transcript for the presentation given on this topic for a virtual event organized by the UX Research & Strategy Group.

In my section I discussed:

• What market research is and its connection to UX
• Differences and similarities between Market Research and UX Research
• Benefits of collaboration between practitioners in both areas

The webinar took place on June 2021. Give it a listen (~45 minutes) or read the transcript below.

What is Market Research?

What is it? I want to clarify that the terms market research and marketing research are used interchangeably in our field. This discipline has nearly 100 years. Over the years the nuances between market and marketing in the context of research have been lost.

Market research essentially involves the identification, collection, analysis, and use of information to make business decisions.

Notice I didn’t mention surveys or focus groups or any particular data collection method. It starts with identifying what information we need, we then get it, analyze it, and derive insights to make business decisions. The last part is essential because our concern is about business outcomes which is why the Market Research Association changed its name to Insights Association a few years ago.

We conduct market research to identify or solve problems that businesses may have in different areas.

Market researchers are found working at in-house research teams often called Insights and Analytics, Customer insights, or just Insights. We refer to them as corporate researchers.

The new label for this group in the UX community is research operations and it’s being treated as something new, revolutionary concept, but this type of group has existed for decades in many organizations. They either are attached to a marketing department or are an independent group supporting other company functions depending on the size and structure of the company. This may be a centralized function, or they may be embedded within other groups by brand, by product, or industry vertical.

There’s also a whole ecosystem of research suppliers, offering services across all the steps of the research process. You will find market researchers in full-service agencies like ours, and agencies specializing in specific methodologies or provide supporting services like survey tools, survey programming, sample, recruitment, interview and focus group moderation, data visualization and reporting, etc.

Market Research Across the Customer Journey

I like to connect the two main reasons for doing market research to the customer touchpoints along the journey, the customer journey. Many of you have probably seen a version of this diagram in customer journey maps.

I want to clarify a couple of terms here.

 In market and marketing and market research, we usually are interested in the journey from non-customer to customer because we are looking at it from the business impact perspective.

We don’t use the term “user” as it’s common in the UX field because the term emphasizes the behavior or some aspect of the behavioral component of a customer or non-customer and doesn’t capture necessarily the needs, perceptions, and attitudes that materialize in the decision to buy or use a product. We can’t forget that both profit and nonprofit organizations have to make money to stay in business.

For a market researcher in a commercial organization, someone who comes to your website or an app and hasn’t paid yet for your products or services it’s just a non-customer. If they are paying, we call them customers. If they stop paying, we call them lapsed customers sometimes or go back to non-customers.

In non-profit organizations, depending on what they do even if there is no financial transaction, we also tend to call them customers, sometimes it’s a membership organization you call them members as well to reflect the fact that they consume the services we offer. This terminology is important because, in the end, companies need to acquire new customers and retain the customers they have.

All the research we do should support decisions related to the strategy, operations, organization, and the leadership to convert non-customers to customers and stay in business.

In general, we use research to discover problems at the beginning of the journey and often progress with research to test solutions. However, you might conduct problem discovery research at any stage of the journey depending on what you already know, and what you don’t know. Ideally, this is an iterative process. It’s just a matter of budget and timing in which you combine discovery research with problem-solving research to support business decisions.

Market Research to Identify Problems

When we do market research to identify problems, we do it often to support business strategy decisions, although there is a lot of tactics, research done to support tactics too, but this is the main goal. This can be related to product development, branding, investments, etc.

Essentially, we are looking for opportunities through gaps and problems that are not obvious to the business now and may arise in the future. This may include research to uncover unmet market needs, to understand the path to purchase journey, to understand market segments where the business can expand, and to detect any issues with brand awareness and positioning that might lead to customer defection or preventing the company from attracting new customers.

Any analysis we do to understand market characteristics, sales trends, business trends in the industry help monitor what’s going on to discover problems affecting the business or providing opportunities for growth. There is actually a growing discipline in market research concerned with foresight trying to forecast the future and trying to identify emerging trends so businesses can adapt and pivot as the market changes.

Market Research to Solve Problems

Market research for problem-solving usually revolves around finding and testing solutions that ultimately support decisions about how to proceed to acquire and retain customers. This is where a lot of, actually, current UX research is done.

The solution we look for and test are mostly connected to one or more of the four Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. Place is just distribution or point of sale. Point of sale could be a store, a website, and any particular channel where you sell products or services.

Marketing decisions are not only related to advertising and promotion but are directly connected to decisions made in product development, pricing, and distribution, so yes, product development is part of the marketing strategy.

If you are in a UX team dedicated to product development and make decisions on product design features, navigation, and other very product-specific problems that may seem unrelated to marketing and business outcomes, I want to tell you that’s not the case.

Everything you do will have an impact not only on the user experience but also on what the business can claim it offers to customers, the prices it can change, and where you can sell the products. I would argue that having the marketing perspective and business impact in mind will help you to prioritize the product feature backlog and elevate the value of the UX function.

So, here are examples of types of market research connected to the four Ps we do to support decisions in different phases of the customer journey. As you can see, there is a lot of research we can do. Some fall in what many call UX research, some are part of what is known as traditional market research, but the fact is that UX research is a particular application of market research methodologies.

Research for Business Impact

To avoid fomenting division, we should think of them as research for business impact. Ideally, you should have a plan to coordinate different types of research to answer questions related to both the strategy and tactics the business can pursue. Within each of these types of research, there are many specialized research designs and techniques that include qualitative and quantitative methods.

Market Research Process

Let’s talk about the research process. This is pretty typical for research projects regardless of whether they are qualitative, quantitative, or are related to UX or not.

The first step is to define the business problem in discussion with decision-makers and other stakeholders. That’s a super important step that unfortunately many stakeholders and internal teams don’t spend enough time on.

Once we define the business problem, we have to translate it into research questions to gather the needed information. Next, we go to step two where we select the theoretical framework or analytical model, the hypothesis that we are working on to guide our search for information.

 In step two, we may need to talk to industry experts, do secondary research, do qualitative research if it is unclear what the approach should be. We are not discussing data collections yet. We are trying to select a framework to understand and analyze the data that we will collect.

For example, if you are interested in determining pricing for one product or more, you can use different approaches to ask to answer this question. Depending on the pricing model complexity, the number of pricing points you want to test, whether you include competitors’ pricing, substitute products, etc.

Next, we go to the research design, step number three. This is where you get into the actual blueprint the detailed procedures of how to do this. I’ll talk more about that in a couple of slides. Then we go to field, collect the data.

Once that’s done, there usually is a phase of data processing. Whether we use qualitative or quantitative data collection methods, we need to inspect the data, clean it, format it for analysis.

For example, if we do surveys, we usually create cross-stability tables with statistical testing. We also do what we call coding of open-ended questions in which we categorize the answers to do content analysis.

 If we do qualitative research, we may have transcripts that also are likely to need cleaning and thematic categorization. Once the data is ready, we’re diving into the analysis and the process of deriving insights which usually goes together with the creation of reports and different deliverables.

Reporting is not only about creating PowerPoint reports or dashboards or other deliverables but also about sharing the information and insights with the stakeholders and helping to implement the insights. This last part is often the most difficult to do well because the implementation of insights is influenced by financial, operational factors and competitors’ actions, etc.

Problem Definition

I want to go a little deeper into the problem definition step because a lack of problem definition is a common cause of the failure of many market and UX research projects. Money and time are wasted if the problem is misunderstood. Serious strategic mistakes are frequently made from asking the wrong questions.

So, let’s get a clear idea of the difference between business problems and research problems. The business problem is about what the decision-maker, that stakeholder is trying to do. The focus is on the action he or she is deciding to take with the goal of delivering a business outcome.

When we translate that to a research problem, we are trying to determine what information we need and how to get it. The focus is on information and insights to guide the decisions.

Here are three examples of how to translate business problems into research problems.

 If the company is trying to decide what new products to develop physical or digital, in market research terms we need to find out what needs are not being met in our category or for certain market segments to then generate new product ideas to meet that need. Many of you may be thinking this is one of the things we do in UX research. You’re right, but this is nothing new. It has been part of the product research we have been doing before UX research came as a novel idea in digital companies.

If for example the company has a product already and is trying to decide which product improvements or features they should invest in and develop then the market research problem is about understanding customer preferences, intention to use the product feature, usage behavior, and so on.

Say the company decides to invest in a particular product or product feature and wants to promote it in their marketing advertising, they would ask, how should we position this in our advertising across marketing channels? The market research problem here is to find out which perceived benefits of this product or product feature delivers the most value to the customer and which features support this benefit and then we can use and claim in our advertising.

Market Research Design Categories

Assuming we agree on the problem definition and an analytical plan and approach, we start to work on the research design. There are three major market research design categories we can use alone or in combination.

We have Exploratory designs with objectives that are mainly about discovering unknowns or seeking deeper understanding. Generally, we use qualitative research here but surveys can be used to explore certain topics. They are called pilot surveys because we are asking questions without clear hypotheses in mind.

Descriptive research designs are used, as the name indicates to describe characteristics of markets and customers, non-customer in the context of a particular business problem. We may have certain hypotheses in mind that we might want to confirm or deny. Here we use surveys, observational methods and do secondary research based on data collected for other purposes.

Finally, we have the causal research designs which are trying to infer cause and effect relationships between variables of interest. Here we set up experiments in which we manipulate certain variables in relatively controlled environments and then collect data via observational methods, surveys, and sometimes even qualitative methods. In whatever research design we land on, we need to get into the specifics which fall into one of the six Ws.

First, we remind ourselves again Why we need the research, then go into specific details about What information we need for the analytical plan, then we define Who the target population of interest is. Do we need to talk to customers or non-customers? How many? What are the screening criteria to be included in the study?

We also need to determine When we should ask for the information from the participant. For example, should we do it before, during, or after a particular event or behavior? Then, Where should we contact them, at home, at the store, on the website, in the lab?

Finally, in what Way are we collecting the data? This is where data collection method methods come in. This could be surveys or observations or interviews. So, data collection methods, which is the first thing that comes to mind, that’s why many said surveys, it’s just one aspect of the research design.

Data Collection Methods

I briefly mentioned Secondary research before. The counterpart of that one is Primary research. These categories are based on the question of whether the research was specifically designed to answer the problem we have in our hands. If the answer is yes, then it’s Primary. If the answer is no, then it’s Secondary.

As a general rule, we should start with Secondary research which tends to be cheaper and faster but rarely give us the specific answers we’re looking for.

Among the Primary research data collection methods, we make a distinction between Qualitative and Quantitative, so we do more than surveys.

Qualitative research is one type of exploratory market research methodology based on semi-structured or unstructured data methods including in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, diaries, etc., and small samples. This is where a lot of UX research falls.

The main outcome from qualitative research is to develop an initial understanding or a deeper understanding about something, not to recommend a final course of action, particularly for strategic business problems.

Primary quantitative research is designed to collect data in a more structured way that can be quantified.  In market research, we use two basic methods to do that: surveys and observation.

Observation is more about collecting data on what people do, what is that people do. This is a huge methodology field especially when it comes to surveys.

Designing good surveys is difficult and it goes beyond just writing questions. There’s a lot of statistics involved that you have to understand to be able to design them well. There are full master’s degree programs dedicated to survey methodology at many universities.

Having access to surveys like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics and other tools doesn’t automatically translate into good survey design. The tools won’t do it for you even if they offer some templates. They always need to be customized.

In this diagram, I have organized the major data collection methods. Ideally, we should use a combination of them since they collect different types of data and provide different insights the variation of the methods currently used in UX research also found in one of these categories.

For example, I listed here usability testing which is mostly qualitative and even if it is unmoderated, it is a specific type of interview derived from what we call in-depth interviews.

Other techniques used in UX whether it is card sorting, tree testing, desirability tests, the five-second impression test, unmoderated user testing are also using survey methodology at its core if they are done online or are conducted as interviews.

Avoiding the Law of the Hammer

There is a little bit of obsession with tools in UX, but I encourage you, encourage those involved in UX research to think beyond tools and more in terms of methodologies to facilitate getting insights depending on the business problem.

All these categorizations I have been presented so far help us in market research to find the appropriate methodology to avoid being jailed by the Law of the Hammer which is a cognitive bias. This was put forward by Abraham Maslow in 1966 when he said, “I suppose it is something tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

If all you know is how to do surveys, you will use surveys for every information need. If all you do is qualitative research, you will try to use it for everything. The same is valid for UX applications of these methods, even if you specialize in a particular methodology or tool.

I recommend that you at least be aware of its limitations. If you don’t know other methods or have a preference for whatever you’re using, I recommend collaborating with others, using research suppliers who know more than you in a particular methodology that complements your set of skills because no method will provide all the answers.

UX  vs. CX Definitions

This brings me to the topic of comparing UX research and market research and throwing CX in the mix. The term UX, user experience, was introduced in the early 90s by one of the founders of NNG, Don Norman when he was at Apple and his team realized that the experience of using Apple computers was weak in his own words.

They have been insisting on the original definition of user experience as a state of mind combining emotions and aptitudes that develop as a result of user interactions with products and services, with customer support, and even marketing which helps to set up expectations about the products and services.

I heard the other day an interview with Jacob Nielsen, and he sounded a little dismayed that people have missed the boat with this. This definition is not in people’s minds when they’re thinking about user research because over time in reality UX has been narrowing its scope and has been established as a function in mostly digital-first and e-commerce companies to support software development often disconnected from marketing and the business strategy at large. This is where the CX crowd has seen an opportunity and is creating even more confusion.

CX stands for customer experience and is grounded in customer satisfaction research which has been always one of the disciplines in market research, and according to the CXPA, the professional association, CX is the total effect of all customer interactions across all channels to support an omnichannel strategy that has implications not only for product development but also for operations.

At this time, many in CX roles are trying to get the leadership in the companies, trying to get them on board with the idea of customer-centricity across all channels and use high-level metrics that come from customer satisfaction research, like the NPS, to connect customer-centricity to business impact.

 If you read both definitions closely, you realize they are saying essentially the same thing. Both are expressions of outcomes from the customer perspective, and both are grounded in market research methodologies.

They are using different lenses to look at the customers. UX is very much deep in the trenches studying micro-interactions with products and marketing channels, while CX is kind of floating above trying to get an integrated macro view of all the interactions which is what businesses with a mature market research function like consumer-packaged goods, like Procter & Gamble, the Unilevers of the world have been doing for years.

Market Research vs. UX Research

If we look at the current state of the research methods used in product development, for example, where the bulk of the UX function operates and compare it to how market research approaches product development, you can see there is a lot of overlap despite the use of different labels.

For example, if we go from product idea, benefits identification, marketing strategy, and final product usage, in market research we use qualitative research methods across all the stages.

I use the term qualitative research to include many different methods, not just user interviews. User interviews and stakeholder interviews, which are sometimes perceived as unique UX methods, are just what we call in-depth interviews but relabeled based on the people you are interviewing.

Data that comes through customer support tickets for example is considered Secondary research since this is not generated for research purposes but it’s very valuable data. When we are doing product research, we may see different adaptations of the same techniques depending on the products we are studying.

For example, think of usability testing for a digital product where you give the participants a task in a particular scenario and observe what they are doing, what they will do, and ask them to think out loud about what they are doing or did.

The equivalent in the physical world is at-home product testing which is pretty standard in market research. We send the product to people, ask them to use it for different purposes, then we observe how they do it, ask them questions via interviews or surveys about the product experience, or in person if we have someone in the house watching, and nowadays we can use digital ethnography based on videos to capture experiences and feedback.

Personas research is another UX adaptation that really comes from market segment profiling.  The problem there is that many times persona development is just an internal, opinion-based workshop exercise without the actual market segmentation data behind it.

Working in Silos

Currently, many companies that have a UX team and a market research or insights team, tend to work in silos. Often the leadership doesn’t see the connection between them.

Also, because many who come to the UX field have mostly a background in designs and software development and not in research or marketing, new terminology has flourished and contributed to the idea that UX research is something new and disconnected from market research, so unfortunately each team sometimes is researching the same thing, and even if they come from a different perspective, they are not exchanging notes and finding knowledge synergies.

We are running in parallel lanes and sometimes competing with each other and even being hostile and territorial which doesn’t help the company to get a full understanding of different aspects of the customer experience in an integrated way.

The CX Clock

 Once you have a product, any product decisions the UX team makes to improve the customer or user experience at a micro-interaction level will continue to have an impact on all the phases of the journey from non-customer to customer both on the external interactions with customers as well as the internal systems, employees, resources needed to support those interactions.

This clock model is just a reminder of the potential touchpoints that will vary from company to company, of course, in which we need integrated market research and UX research.

When I was a research manager at Match.com and the Director of Research at Blockbuster Online before founding Relevant Insights, I had a very small team and a selected number of external research partners who will support my research operation.

However, I had an integrated team. There was no division between market research and UX research. We just did research. The UX term was unheard of, of course.

In both companies, I set up a usability lab in-house and run it with the support of specialized research partners. I was involved in the research design of all the studies including usability testing and information architecture, etc. I made sure that this research was providing complementary insights to the research we were doing related to branding and pricing and marketing strategy to help grow the business.

Research Integration

This is a fun example. This is kind of a baby I had at Blockbuster Online.

I had the opportunity to support the launch of a very successful product based on a lot of research that you would now separate in UX and market research, but I firmly believe our success was due to research integration.

We started with a large two-step market segmentation study that included a pilot survey and allowed us to identify a huge market opportunity. This was time this was the time when Netflix was only 5 million subscribers. Not long ago but it feels like a long ago.

Once we found a couple of segments that still have unmet needs, we started to explore product ideas with both qualitative and quantitative research. We did a lot of interviews and focus groups and quantitative concept testing not just for the product idea but for the branding and the positioning because those have to be coordinated across channels since we had the online service at the stores.

At that time, we did a lot of prototype testing and pricing research. We did research to design the marketing collaterals including the mailer. Also, this was the time where we send DVDs by mail. We tested email messages, direct mail messages, and we also set up a quarterly customer satisfaction and brand health tracker that would monitor trends and our competitors. That’s the CX realm nowadays.

We did a lot of research with a team of two and a small army of research suppliers working in coordination and guided by clarity about the business outcome we needed. We were able to grow 1.5 million subscribers in nine months. It was like giving birth, believe me.

Market Research Problem Clarity

Across all the research we did, we kept the market research problem in mind which was to gain insights into the needs, attitudes, perceptions, behaviors of current and potential customers in the context of a lot of factors that influence the decision to become a customer and stay a customer.

Then, we have to translate all of those insights into business implications for the strategy, for the operations, the organization, the leadership decisions. 

Implementation of insight is often hard as I said because there are other factors to consider, so the more you tailor the market research problem to the business problem, the higher the probability your research would be valuable.

Value of Research Erosion

On that point, in my experience the value of research, it doesn’t matter if you call it UX or market research, erodes over time if

• It’s not connected to a business problem
• It’s driven by methods and tools rather than by information needs
• You are not able to translate data into action actionable insights even if you are doing it in the context of a business problem.

Useful Knowledge Areas

We all come to research with different backgrounds, so to be able to collaborate effectively, we need to have common areas of knowledge and terminology. For example, market researchers would benefit from learning about principles of visual design and interaction design even if they don’t plan to become designers or developers.

At the same time, UX designers, developers, product managers would benefit from learning some of the research fundamentals so they can participate as observers and interpreters of results in more effective ways, even if they don’t become researchers.

In my humble opinion, if you have you have people in your team with deep expertise in areas like research design, development, project management who are at least familiar with the basics of areas from other team members you are more likely to have a productive team that can work together, produce quality work, and is also less prone to burnout.

So, these are some areas, knowledge areas, I have been cultivating over the years to help support UX research and market research needs to solve business problems. I am a specialist in some, and I’m a generalist in others.

Learning Opportunities

If you are interested in acquiring a good foundation in research either to become a researcher or at least being able to contribute to the research process, here is a list of known organizations in our industry that offer training,, conferences and a lot of useful content. 

The Insights Association is the former Market Research association that represents both in-house researchers and research suppliers, but if you really want to geek out on survey methodology check AAPOR.

AAPOR is the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Many marketing, I’m sorry, many academic and government institutions and large commercial market research agencies are members and do a lot of research on research to see what works, and a lot of that is presented at their conferences and webinar. They have big guiding papers they publish on their website.

And on that note, I wanted to leave you with some of the books that I have found helpful in my work as a researcher they have helped me to expand my knowledge and enable me to support UX and marketing teams.

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UX Research and Market Research: Know The Difference

The product & marketing manager can use UX research facts to create digital marketing strategies to target the right audience and in the right place. Before we jump into the topic, it is crucial to know the difference between UX research and market research.

Difference Between UX research and Market Research

UX research is a study of users that provides critical insights into their behaviors, requirements, and expectations. It helps to answer three main questions: What people need? What do people want? And can they use the product? User experience research is on a much smaller scale. A study from the  Nielsen Norman  group points to a sample size of five participants uncovering most usability issues. Goals of user research are:

• Evaluate behavioral needs
• Define personas and user journey
• Test designs
• Determine features
• Build information architecture

Read more on UX Research-  Everything You Need to know About UX Research

The marketing team's goal is to know and understand the customer so well that the product fits him and sells itself. It is the art and science of identifying, attracting, retaining, and growing customers. To achieve customer value, carrying market research is essential. Market research conducts on a much larger scale than user research to reach statistical significance and gather comprehensive insights. Market research is generally quantitative since you're continually determining conversion rates, market size, market segmentation, number of visitors, etc. The goals of market research are:

• Determine market size
• Understand market trends
• Define pricing
• Test concepts
• Understand products loyalty

Market research uncovers customer segments and customer opinions, whereas  UX research  focuses on the users' observed behavior. The relationship between the two is complementary means that there should be many opportunities to work closely with marketing people.

Products/services generally go through a life cycle with predictable sales and profits. Research occurs across three phases of product development — pre-design (Introduction), development (growth), and post-development (Maturity). In any stage of product development, motivate all research activities by a specific research goal. Specific research goals focus on

• Defining or refining a problem statement
• Identifying and understanding a target market
• Specifying the scope of initial product releases

The synergy between UX research and digital marketing

Let us go through the research journey for an  Online  Medical Care App from the introduction phase to the maturity phase.

Pre-Design Stage

In the Introduction or the pre-design phase, the initial research starts with market research. The main goal of the initial investigation is to:

• Validate the business idea and understand the digital health market/industry
• Find out customers' thoughts, needs, and pain points, existing successful health care apps (competitors)
• Market share
• Market opportunities
• Identifying emerging market trends and dynamics

To carry out this research, conduct an extensive survey of a random sample household across the country. The results indicate that 80% of the city dwellers' respondents are open to digital medical care app.

The next step is to conduct one-on-one interviews to dive into what frustrates the individuals with current medical service. You find that they don't want to wait to get doctor's appointments for small diseases like cold, cough, fever, etc. These sessions create persona and customer journey maps, which is user research's goal; that's enough validation to start wireframing.

Once wireframes complete, it is essential to test them via interviews and unmoderated sessions. Through user, research modifies the design until they meet all the requirements of the users. At this stage, it is vital to determine the primary call to action.  Digital marketing  tools like email signups, free trials, content marketing, social media promotions, paid banner ads, and several other SEO activities help create awareness of the brand. To move through the introduction stage and catalyze growth, identifying a go-to-marketing-led strategy is essential. It requires secure communication and data-sharing between marketing and sales teams—actual demand generation.

Growth Stage

Results post-launch show that people are downloading your app, but few are booking a consultation appointment, resulting in a low conversion rate. At this point, the product is in the growth stage of the development stage.

By this stage, begin building marketing strategies based on consumer experiences with the product, rather than consumer attitudes or behaviors. A/B testing (user research) on to new mock-ups determines which design provides the best medical experience. The test results show that mock-up B is the most successful because of its soothing colors.

Learn more on how to pick the right UX Research strategy for greatest business impact- A Guide to UX Research Strategy

Next, people have complained that they can't find the right doctor because there is no categorization according to the insurance provider. Perform card sorting and make corrections in the product. The results show an increase in the conversion rate. Through your website analytics, it seems that there are high and low seasons of appointments. Therefore launch a user research journal study to observe the behaviors of your participants. As a result, you find that participants book more appointments during flu season.

With the increase in conversion rate, the medical care app is more advanced than competitors. It is in the best position to earn a dominant market share. Thus push more resources into current campaigns. The demand for the product rises, and the marketers' focus is to reap the demand. Promote products and services via:

• Customer review video feeds
• Informative articles
• PPC campaigns
• Social media optimization through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
• Tailor quotes or case studies to make a persuasive case to that audience

Post-Development Stage

Growth transitions to the Maturity stage because of the rise in sales levels out. In a mature market, the key is to understand the catalysts that lead to the Decline. In a mature market, conduct user research by third parties to suggest where the market heads. That research may include which demographics are likely to drop off first or stay the longest. As a result, it helps to steer marketing campaigns toward higher-value consumers. An NPS score of 50 means the product is hitting it out of the park.

At this point, the medical care app is in the maturity stage. Therefore, conduct a market research survey to current customers asking how you're doing. The maturity phase's length depends on how long-lasting marketing can sustain the product's dominant market position. Implement Highly effective digital marketing strategies to lengthen the maturity period. Differentiate the product on the brand. Create a balance between persuasive vs. descriptive marketing. Identify new demographics and new uses for the product. Focus on the brand yield because a greater focus on influential marketing—campaigns that make an  emotional impact  appeals to consumers.

In today's hyper-competitive age, the ability to deliver a more meaningful customer experience will be the key differentiator for companies.

It takes expertise and experience to get it right, so vet your app design agency candidates carefully. Fortunately, here at Designial, we deliver on all counts. Get in touch with us  today to learn more about how we can help you.

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Market Research vs. UX Research: Understanding the Key Differences

What is Market Research?

Market research focuses on the how, what and when a product or service should be brought to the public. Market research helps enable companies to identify gaps with their go-to market strategies so they can fix them before they invest the money of launching the initiative. Often market research is conducted by marketing teams to help hone their campaign and branding strategies.

Examples of Market Research

• Focus Groups - getting a group of people together to gauge sentiments on a topic. This works well for identifying a particular group's thoughts and attitude towards a new idea, like a commercial or redesign.
• Surveys / Questionnaires - gathering demographic information on potential or current customers. This helps determine things like potential messaging, pricing models, and target audience.
• Interviews - gaining insight into market needs for particular target groups. This is commonly used to create user profiles for marketing teams to try and reach.

What is UX Research?

UX research, short for user experience research, focuses on how a user will engage when interacting with a product or service. The goal of UX research is to understand and uncover how a user interacts with the product, and if there's anything unexpected about their behavior. UX research is usually run by members of a product team to determine and validate potential user friction.

Examples of UX Research

• User Interviews - watching how specific users interact with the product to identify any unexpected behaviors or bugs. There are two primary types of user interviews, including moderated (meaning with an interviewer) and unmoderated (letting a user figure it out on their own). User interviews work well when there is not enough numerical data from analytics to identify issues with normal quantitative means.
• Prototype Testing - having users interact with a potential solution for a problem that is not fully functional yet. This is best for MVP testing and getting initial reads on product effectiveness.
• Card Sorting - giving people topics on cards and having them sort them into the most logical categories. This is great for creating page and item hierarchies.

The Key Differences between Market Research and UX Research

Market research exists to gauge attitudes and sentiments towards an initiative or brand. It often takes place in focus groups or interviews, with the primary goal of honing and identifying strategies to effectively reach target audiences. A good way to think about market research is it's used to identify how users feel .UX research on the other hand is focused on how users behave .

UX research is normally conducted with user interviews, and has the goal of identifying user friction or feature prioritization within the existing product.

When to Use Market Research

Market research is an important tool that can help organizations identify potential markets and customers, test sentiments towards new initiatives, and discover any issues with their brand or messaging before releasing them to the public. Some of the key situations when market research is particularly useful include:

Goals of Market Research

• Identifying potential markets and customers: Market research can help organizations gain a better understanding of their target audience and identify potential new markets for their products or services. This can be especially valuable for companies that are looking to expand into new areas or are considering launching new products.
• Testing sentiments towards new initiatives: Before launching a new initiative, it's important to understand how it will be received by the market. Market research can help organizations test the waters by gauging public opinion and identifying any potential roadblocks or issues that need to be addressed.
• Discovering any issues with brand or messaging before releasing to the public: Market research can help organizations identify any issues with their brand or messaging that may negatively impact their reputation or success. By identifying these issues early, organizations can make changes and adjustments to their branding or messaging before they are released to the public, which can help ensure that they are well-received and effective.

By using market research in these and other situations, organizations can make informed decisions and maximize the impact of their initiatives. Whether you're launching a new product, expanding into new markets, or simply looking to improve your brand or messaging, market research can provide valuable insights and help ensure your success.

When to Use UX Research

UX research is a crucial aspect of product design and development that can help organizations identify the most common product interactions, find solutions for usability problems, and discover any bugs on unexpected behavior. Some of the key situations when UX research is particularly useful include:

Goals of UX Research

• Identifying most common product interactions: UX research can help organizations understand how users interact with their products, including what actions they take, how they navigate the interface, and what they find most challenging. This information can be used to optimize the user experience and improve the overall design of the product.
• Finding solutions for usability problems: UX research can help organizations identify any usability problems with their products, such as confusing navigation, unclear instructions, or frustrating user journeys. By understanding these issues, organizations can implement changes and improvements to make the product easier to use and more user-friendly.
• Discovering any bugs on unexpected behavior: UX research can also help organizations discover any bugs or unexpected behavior in their products that may negatively impact the user experience. By discovering these issues early, organizations can take action to resolve them and ensure a positive user experience.

By using UX research in these and other situations, organizations can create products that are user-centered, easy to use, and free from bugs and usability issues. Whether you're launching a new product, making updates to an existing one, or simply looking to improve the user experience, UX research can provide valuable insights and help ensure your success.

Market research and UX research are two important tools that organizations can use to make informed decisions and improve their products and services. Market research can help organizations identify potential markets and customers, test sentiments towards new initiatives, and discover any issues with their brand or messaging. UX research, on the other hand, can help organizations identify the most common product interactions, find solutions for usability problems, and discover any bugs on unexpected behavior.

By using both market research and UX research, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their target audience and the market, and make informed decisions that will help ensure their success. Whether you're launching a new product, expanding into new markets, or simply looking to improve your brand or messaging, market research and UX research can provide valuable insights and help you reach your goals.

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UX Research

What is ux research.

UX (user experience) research is the systematic study of target users and their requirements, to add realistic contexts and insights to design processes. UX researchers adopt various methods to uncover problems and design opportunities. Doing so, they reveal valuable information which can be fed into the design process.

See why UX research is a critical part of the UX design process.

• Transcript loading…

UX Research is about Finding Insights to Guide Successful Designs

When you do UX research, you’ll be better able to give users the best solutions—because you can discover exactly what they need. You can apply UX research at any stage of the design process. UX researchers often begin with qualitative measures, to determine users’ motivations and needs . Later, they might use quantitative measures to test their results . To do UX research well, you must take a structured approach when you gather data from your users. It’s vital to use methods that 1) are right for the purpose of your research and 2) will give you the clearest information. Then, you can interpret your findings so you can build valuable insights into your design .

“I get very uncomfortable when someone makes a design decision without customer contact.” – Dan Ritzenthaler, Senior Product Designer at HubSpot

We can divide UX research into two subsets:

Qualitative research – Using methods such as interviews and ethnographic field studies, you work to get an in-depth understanding of why users do what they do (e.g., why they missed a call to action, why they feel how they do about a website). For example, you can do user interviews with a small number of users and ask open-ended questions to get personal insights into their exercise habits. Another aspect of qualitative research is usability testing , to monitor (e.g.) users’ stress responses. You should do qualitative research carefully. As it involves collecting non-numerical data (e.g., opinions, motivations), there’s a risk that your personal opinions will influence findings.

Quantitative research – Using more-structured methods (e.g., surveys, analytics), you gather measurable data about what users do and test assumptions you drew from qualitative research. For example, you can give users an online survey to answer questions about their exercise habits (e.g., “How many hours do you work out per week?”). With this data, you can discover patterns among a large user group. If you have a large enough sample of representative test users, you’ll have a more statistically reliable way of assessing the population of target users. Whatever the method, with careful research design you can gather objective data that’s unbiased by your presence, personality or assumptions. However, quantitative data alone can’t reveal deeper human insights.

We can additionally divide UX research into two approaches:

Attitudinal – you listen to what users say—e.g., in interviews.

Behavioral – you see what users do through observational studies.

When you use a mix of both quantitative and qualitative research as well as a mix of attitudinal and behavioral approaches, you can usually get the clearest view of a design problem.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Use UX Research Methods throughout Development

The Nielsen Norman Group—an industry-leading UX consulting organization—identifies appropriate UX research methods which you can use during a project’s four stages . Key methods are:

Discover – Determine what is relevant for users.

Contextual inquiries – Interview suitable users in their own environment to see how they perform the task/s in question.

Diary studies – Have users record their daily interactions with a design or log their performance of activities.

Explore – Examine how to address all users’ needs.

Card sorting – Write words and phrases on cards; then let participants organize them in the most meaningful way and label categories to ensure that your design is structured in a logical way.

Customer journey maps – Create user journeys to expose potential pitfalls and crucial moments.

Test – Evaluate your designs.

Usability testing – Ensure your design is easy to use.

Accessibility evaluations – Test your design to ensure it’s accessible to everyone.

Listen – Put issues in perspective, find any new problems and notice trends.

Surveys/Questionnaires – Use these to track how users’ feel about your product.

Analytics – Collect analytics/metrics to chart (e.g.) website traffic and build reports.

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Whichever UX research method you choose, you need to consider the pros and cons of the different techniques . For instance, card sorting is cheap and easy, but you may find it time-consuming when it comes to analysis. Also, it might not give you in-depth contextual meaning. Another constraint is your available resources , which will dictate when, how much and which type of UX research you can do. So, decide carefully on the most relevant method/s for your research . Moreover, involve stakeholders from your organization early on . They can reveal valuable UX insights and help keep your research in line with business goals. Remember, a design team values UX research as a way to validate its assumptions about users in the field , slash the cost of the best deliverables and keep products in high demand —ahead of competitors’.

User research methods have different pros and cons,and vary from observations of users in context to controlled experiments in lab settings.

Learn More about UX Research

For a thorough grasp of UX research, take our course here: User Research – Methods and Best Practices

Read an extensive range of UX research considerations, discussed in Smashing Magazine: A Comprehensive Guide To UX Research

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of UX research tips: UX Research Cheat Sheet

Here’s a handy, example-rich catalog of UX research tools: 43 UX research tools for optimizing your product

Questions related to UX Research

UX research is a good career for those who enjoy working with a team and have strong communication skills. As a researcher, you play a crucial role in helping your team understand users and deliver valuable and delightful experiences. You will find a UX research career appealing if you enjoy scientific and creative pursuits. 

Start exploring this career option; see the User Researcher Learning Path .

Studies suggest that companies are also willing to pay well for research roles. The average salary for a UX researcher ranges from $92,000 to $146,000 per year.

In smaller companies, user research may be one of the responsibilities of a generalist UX designer. How much can your salary vary based on your region? Find out in UI & UX Designer Salaries: How Much Can I Earn .

Research is one part of the overall UX design process. UX research helps inform the design strategy and decisions made at every step of the design process. In smaller teams, a generalist designer may end up conducting research.

A UX researcher aims to understand users and their needs. A UX designer seeks to create a product that meets those needs.

A UX researcher gathers information. A UX designer uses that information to create a user-friendly and visually appealing product.

Learn more about the relationship between UX research and UX design in the course:

User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide

If we consider a very broad definition of UX, then all user research is UX research.

However, in practice, there is a subtle difference between user research and UX research. While both involve understanding people, user research can involve users in any kind of research question, and some questions may not be that directly connected to user experience.

For example, you might do user research relating to a customer’s experience in relation to pricing, delivery or the experience across multiple channels.

Common UX research methods are usability testing, A/B testing, surveys, card sorting, user interviews, usage analytics and ethnographic research. Each method has its pros and cons and is useful in different scenarios. Hence, you must select the appropriate research method for the research question and target audience. Learn more about these methods in 7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques .

Get started with user research. Download the User Research template bundle .

For a deep dive into usability testing—the most common research method, take the course Conducting Usability Testing .

Having a degree in a related field can give you an advantage. However, you don’t need a specific degree to become a UX researcher. A combination of relevant education, practical experience, and continuous learning can help you pursue a career in UX research. Many UX researchers come from diverse educational backgrounds, including psychology, statistics, human-computer interaction, information systems, design and anthropology.

Some employers may prefer candidates with at least a bachelor’s degree. However, it does not have to be in a UX-related field. There are relatively fewer degrees that focus solely on user research.

Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX

User Research – Methods and Best Practices

Every research project will vary. However, there are some common steps in conducting research, no matter which method or tool you decide to use: 

Define the research question

Select the appropriate research method

Recruit participants

Conduct the research

Analyze the data

Present the findings

You can choose from various UX research tools . Your choice depends on your research question, how you're researching, the size of your organization, and your project. For instance:

Survey tools such as Typeform and Google Forms.

Card sorting tools such as Maze and UXtweak.

Heatmap tools such as HotJar and CrazyEgg

Usability testing (through first-click testing and tree-testing) tools such as Optimal Workshop and Loop 11

Diagramming applications such as Miro and Whimsical to analyze qualitative data through affinity diagramming.

Spreadsheet tools such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel for quantitative data analysis

Interface design and prototyping tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch and Marvel to conduct usability testing.

Presentation tools such as Keynote, Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Many of these tools offer additional features you can leverage for multiple purposes. To understand how you can make the most of these tools, we recommend these courses:

There are relatively fewer degrees that focus solely on user research.

While there are no universal research case study formats, here’s one suggested outline: 

An overview of the project: Include the problem statement, goals and objectives.

The research methods and methodology: For example, surveys, interviews, or usability testing).

Research findings

The design process: How the research findings led to design decisions.

Impact of design decisions on users and the business: Include metrics such as conversion and error rates to demonstrate the impact.

Optionally, include notes on what you learned and how you can improve the process in the future.

Learn how to showcase your portfolio to wow your future employer/client in the How to Create a UX Portfolio course.

While AI can help automate tasks and help UX researchers, it will not completely replace them. AI lacks the creativity and empathy that human designers bring to the table.

Human researchers are better at understanding the nuances of human behavior and emotions. They can also think outside the box and develop creative solutions that AI cannot. So, AI can help researchers be more efficient and effective through data analysis, smart suggestions and automation. But it cannot replace them.

Watch AI-Powered UX Design: How to Elevate Your UX Career to learn how you can work with AI.

Agile teams often struggle to incorporate user research in their workflows due to the time pressure of short sprints. However, that doesn’t mean agile teams can’t conduct research. Instead of seeing research as one big project, teams can break it into bite-sized chunks. Researchers regularly conduct research and share their findings in every sprint.

Researchers can involve engineers and other stakeholders in decision-making to give everyone the context they need to make better decisions. When engineers participate in the decision-making process, they can ensure that the design will be technically feasible. There will also be lower chances of errors when the team actually builds the feature. Here’s more on how to make research a team effort .

For more on bite-sized research, see this Master Class: Continuous Product Discovery: The What and Why

For more practical tips and methods to work in an agile environment, take our Agile Methods for UX Design course.

User research is very important in designing products people will want and use. It helps us avoid designing based on what we think instead of what users actually want.

UX research helps designers understand their users’ needs, behaviors, attitudes and how they interact with a product or service. Research helps identify usability problems, gather feedback on design concepts, and validate design decisions. This ultimately benefits businesses by improving the product, brand reputation and loyalty. A good user experience provides a competitive edge and reduces the risk of product failure.

Learn more about the importance of user research in the design process in these courses:

Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide

Literature on UX Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on UX Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about UX Research

Take a deep dive into UX Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

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Market research isn’t enough; Understand your customers with UX research

Crystal Gee

Senior UX Researcher

User experience research and market research can be easily confused since the two types of research involve studying the user of the product or service. It also doesn’t help that many research methods, including diary studies, focus groups, data analysis, and more, are facilitated by both user experience researchers and market researchers. Thankfully, there is a need for both to make the most out of the product or service.

The difference between market and user experience research

Market research is an investigation into understanding the market to identify the target audience, as well as their needs, values, and purchasing behaviors, with the intended purpose of marketing or selling the product or service to the customer. A large number of participants or base is needed as a sample of the population to reflect the diversity of demographics and wide variety of thought. This large base of potential or existing customer opinions defines market size, demographics, and attitudinal and behavioral distinctions that ultimately create target groups known as segmentations. If the research objective is to assess the value proposition or determine viability in the market, the business should invest in market research.

User experience (UX) or user research focuses on exploring user behaviors and discovering their unmet needs, values, and expectations to identify opportunities to create or improve the product or service for optimal utilization by the user.  UX research requires a smaller base of potential or existing users in order to get a more in-depth examination or observation into the nuances of user behavior. The smaller base allows researchers to investigate behavioral quirks and decision-making, goals, and pain points that can inform archetypes to eventually make empathetic recommendations for design updates and considerations for creating new offerings. If the research objective is to understand user behaviors or evaluate the product or service’s functionality, the business should invest in UX research.

For even more confusion, there are segmentations, archetypes, and personas, which are all used to better understand the customer or user. Below are the differences between each:

Segmentations

In market research, segmentation uses commonalities in demographics, purchasing behaviors, and psychographics to create groups within the target market to approach with specific messaging that encourages purchasing or triggers the usage of a product or service.

In UX research, archetypes incorporate user behavior, attitudes, motivations, and pain points gathered qualitatively and quantitatively to create abstract user types for UX researchers and designers to consider while developing, improving, validating, and prioritizing experiences within a product or service.

In both UX research and market research, personas are the personification of the data. Practitioners may personify the segmentations or archetypes to create a fictional biography of the user that represents a segment or archetype. This usually helps clients relate to the customer and make them “real” as they consider how to market to the customer. Personas can also help researchers and designers empathize with the user and see them more clearly as a human with needs and goals while making recommendations for a product or service.

Market research: a complement, not a substitute

Both types of research use many of the same quantitative and qualitative methods, making it difficult to understand why multiple surveys ask the same or seemingly similar foundational questions. Ultimately, market research focuses on the opinions of the customer, while UX research focuses on the actions of the user. Therefore, the insights from each type of research will vary greatly, even if similar quantitative surveys or focus groups are being conducted. 

The motivations of the research distinguish where the findings can be appropriately applied, but some of the data can be complementary in other kinds of studies. For example, a survey to determine which messages resonate with one segment of the target audience over another segment is great for marketing. Where the customers are asked to react to one message that features puppies and another that features textbooks and learn that the youngest and oldest generations enjoyed the nostalgic feelings of the puppy ad, while the middle generations enjoyed the trustworthy nature of the textbooks ad more. However, this information will not help improve the product or service. A user research study might use that same segmentation to determine who to include if there is not an established user database, but their study would dig into how each of those user types are using the product, what features are working well or not well, opportunities for new offerings, unexpected experiences, motivations for using the product, and more. 

Businesses that have previously conducted market research and want to improve their product or services through UX research don’t always have to start from scratch. If the raw data is healthy, UX researchers might be able to determine the following before even starting a new study:

• Who is the target audience?
• When do they use the product or service?
• Why do they use the product or service?
• How do they use the product or service?* 

*UX research will further investigate

Benefits of UX research

Incorporating research throughout the design process is necessary to understand how users engage with the product or service. We have broken down the four major iterative design research stages : Discover, Explore, Test, and Listen. Below we’ll share how each stage aligns with market and/or user experience research.

This stage is about learning about the market, validating the idea, and identifying opportunities—market research. Once that initial research is complete, UX researchers can do a deeper dive qualitatively into the expectations and needs that the product or service will fulfill. Those findings can help inform the wireframing of the design, assisting with the overall actualization of the product or service.

During this stage, the idea or challenge becomes more defined. Let’s say there have been several customer complaints about not being able to find a page on a website. A UX researcher might conduct a card sorting activity to determine a more practical location to meet the user’s expectations and reduce time waste and bounce rates.

While testing, the idea undergoes different scenarios to assess feasibility and intuitiveness. Any new offering needs to be tested before launching. UX researchers want to ensure that the product or service works as intended and meets the needs and expectations of the user. Consequently, the product or service becomes even more valuable and competitive in the market.

Over time users will have feedback on the product or service, and the business should listen for areas to improve, challenges users are facing, and opportunities to expand offerings. UX researchers can set up feedback surveys to stay abreast of users’ sentiments to help build a relationship with the user and trust in the company.

Don’t stop at market research; understand your customers’ needs with UX research 

The motivations of market research and user experience research are very different, but as we’ve shown can complement each other nicely. Our team’s design decisions are always grounded in extensive design research to ensure our client’s customers or employees get the right solutions and best experiences. When you’re thinking about your product, whether it’s new or an iteration, you can’t rely solely on the opinion of “what will sell it,” you need to ensure you understand “what users want and need” from your product. UX research will ensure you’re providing value to your customers.  

Are you looking to improve your digital products and services? Our UX Researchers can help you understand what improvements your customers want and need. Chat with our experts today!  

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Comparing market vs. ux research.

When businesses already have a general market research plan in place, they often rely on these existing insights rather than conducting new user research to inform design decisions. After all, both market and UX research leverage customer access to incorporate feedback into strategic processes.

However, as impressive as agile MR can be, businesses that don’t implement a separate user research plan are missing out on integral customer insights. From targeted behavioral data to usability, UX research informs product decisions on a deeper, more direct level than general MR. Here are the ways that market and UX research intersect , as well as the key differences that necessitate the inclusion of both in a holistic research plan.

Comparing Market and UX Research

Market research seeks to enhance the messaging and sales of a product. By evaluating the general market that interacts with their product or service, businesses can use agile market research to predict audience attractors. These can then be implemented into a marketing or sales strategy to drive engagement and promote awareness within their target market.

User Experience (UX) research , on the other hand, looks inward to eliminate barriers and streamline product use for the individual. By utilizing behavioral measures to identify not only product attractors, but the reasons why these features streamline usability, UX researchers seek to understand a user’s holistic experience. These findings are implemented to improve the product itself or inform future design initiatives.

The Research Umbrella 

Overall, MR can be seen as the umbrella of research initiatives – with UX as one of its subsets. When the right tools are used, market and UX research can be conducted in a similar manner to save time and resources. Both forms of research benefit from agile implementation and intimate user interactions, and both are integral to strategic business decisions. After all, market and UX research are key elements of the research umbrella that develop critical insights for businesses to leverage.

Businesses looking to implement a UX research plan are often unfamiliar with its methodologies. There’s a common misconception that market researchers cannot branch into the UX space because of their differing objectives, but this is far from the truth. Since UX is a subset of general MR, anyone with the right tools and a solid research background can easily implement a UX research plan.

Fuel Cycle’s Solution

Enter communities and panels for research development. With customizable functionalities, templated surveys, and one-off as well as ongoing research capabilities, Fuel Cycle has the research toolkit for your strategic needs. Whether you’re looking to conduct UX research with live product testing or forecast customer behavior using insights from your target market, Ignition can be leveraged to optimize your business’ brand and user experience.

Looking to streamline your digital UX and market research processes? Check out our webinar on the  intersection of market and UX research  to discover the best practices and solutions for each methodology. 

Author: Victoria Shakespeare

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User experience (ux) research: definition and methodology.

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

What do we mean by user experience?

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

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

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

Free eBook: The essential website experience & UX playbook

What is user experience (UX) research?

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

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

Why is UX research important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

UX research helps brands and organizations to:

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

What’s the ROI of performing UX research?

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

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

Number of people who took your desired action

—————————————————————       x 100

Total visitors/users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User experience research methods

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

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

Attitudinal and behavioral

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

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

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

Qualitative and quantitative methods

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

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

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

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

Qualitative UX research methods

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

1. Participatory design

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

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

2. Card sorting

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

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

3. Diary studies

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

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

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

Context-of-use

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

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

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

Types of user research tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

When to conduct user experience research

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

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

Five basic steps to conducting UX research

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

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

Qualtrics makes UX research simple and easy

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

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

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

Free eBook: The essential website experience & UX playbook

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Market Research vs. UX Research: A Comprehensive Guide (2023)

The article emphasizes how excelling in customer experience is linked to exceeding business goals in the digital era. It compares market research, focused on product viability and target markets, with UX research, which delves into user behaviors and experiences, advocating for their combined use in informing strategic decisions.

In the fast-paced digital age, understanding your audience is more critical than ever. Recent statistics reveal that companies identified as CX leaders were 3x more likely to exceed their top business goals. However, why is this number so significant? Market and UX research—though distinct in their methods and objectives—come together to form a holistic view of what a customer truly desires. 

In this comprehensive guide, we promise to illuminate the intricate synergy and differentiate between market and UX research, arming you with the knowledge to make strategic decisions that resonate. 

What is Market Research?

Market research is the process of evaluating the viability of a new product or service through profound research conducted with potential clients. To eliminate most of the doubt that your business idea will succeed, market research should be at its core. It provides first-hand opinions from those who will be using the product or service, giving you insights into the demand and need.

Market research focuses on understanding the dynamics, preferences, and behavior of a given market or customer segment. Market researchers collect data to determine the potential demand for a product or service, analyze current market trends, and identify potential competitors. This is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions about their offerings and target the right audience effectively.

What is UX Research?

UX research, or user experience research, delves into understanding users' needs, behaviors, experiences, and motivations. It's about ensuring the products or services resonate with the users. UX researchers employ various UX research methods and tools to get insights, forming the backbone of the UX design and research process. It is done by observing your users, conducting interviews, running usability tests, and more. The tools and methods used depend on the project and what exactly you want to find out. 

UX research is all about gathering feedback and data from real people in relation to a particular service or product. Usually, it is done with your already existing customers or with your target audience. For example, if you are designing a dating app for single parents to find love, then you should focus your research on single parents who own a smartphone. However, if you are updating the design of an eCommerce website, the research will be on using real customers.

Market Research vs. UX Research - What's the Difference?

There is no doubt that there's an intersection between market and UX research because they are both crucial in understanding audiences and ensuring the product or service is a success. However, they serve distinct objectives.

Market research is centered around understanding the broader market. It is mainly about business needs: determining product viability, competitive analysis, and segment targeting. The ultimate goal is to make informed business decisions, such as entering a new market, launching a product or service, or targeting a specific audience segment. Market research seeks to understand the purchasing habits of users. For this, information such as demographics and attitudinal needs to be gathered. Also, it aims to address whether there is actually a need for that product or service in the market, who will be the buyers, and how to reach them. 

UX research, on the other hand, hones in on the user, aiming to improve the user experience. It delves into the specifics of how users interact with a product or service. So, there is no better way for you to understand users' needs, pain points, motivations, and overall experience than through UX research. Unlike market research, its primary focus is to enhance and optimize the user's experience with a product or service, ensuring it's intuitive, user-friendly, and meets user needs. UX researchers employ various qualitative and quantitative methods, from data analytics to moderated interviews and usability testing, to identify ways in which people are using a product and their pain points. Using the data, the product is molded through iterative testing to meet the user's expectations. 

Think of it this way: market research tells you what people might buy, while UX research tells you how they'd like to use it.

When to Carry Out Research?

Both types of research are essential at different stages. In the initial phases of product development, market research can guide you on product feasibility. As you move to design and prototype, UX research and strategy become vital to ensure the product aligns with user expectations and needs. However, it is not standard for every company, as people can decide to incorporate UX or market research at any stage of their development cycle.

Now, let's dive into when these different research types are used. 

Most often, at least a rudimentary prototype needs to be available for UX research to take place. However, this is not written in stone, as some companies can even do UX research without having a product. But how can that be? Well, different UX research methods can be applied at certain product development stages. So, as soon as the following questions come up, market research needs to be done: 

• How do individuals engage with the product daily, and what aspects do they find pleasing or bothersome?
• How do the product's features influence the user's efficiency in task completion?
• How might users react to a redesign of the product or service, and what are the primary concerns to be aware of?
• Which demographic interacts with the product in a unique manner or holds distinct expectations compared to others?
• What existing solutions and behaviors reveal opportunities for new product development?

In contrast, market research almost always precedes a product launch or major update. Also, one of the core purposes of market research is to make key business decisions, which is why it should be done when the following questions need to be answered:

• Which demographics and market segments have the highest sales potential?
• How does an advertising campaign influence the audience's perception of the brand and their buying intentions?
• What are the target audience's sentiments towards the brand's core mission?

Market research is often more prevalent in the initial and strategic phases of product development. In contrast, UX research is continuous, becoming especially crucial as the product moves from concept to design and post-launch stages. Ideally, they should overlap, with insights from one informing the other to ensure a product that's both market-ready and user-friendly.

Addressing Your Top Objections to UX Research

Many argue against investing in UX research due to budget constraints or time. However, overlooking the UX research process can be costly in the long run. Mistakes that could've been avoided through proper research can lead to redesigns, customer churn, or worse, product failure. And Lazarev has been in the industry long enough to see many clients make this mistake. That is why we can't start the design process without doing UX research. Here are some of the most common objections people have to performing UX research:

UX research is too expensive

It is no news that startups work on a tight budget and jump at every opportunity to cut expenses. So, they turn to avoid any process that seems unnecessary, and unfortunately, UX research, more often than not, becomes one of the scapegoats. This occurs because every entrepreneur thinks their idea is the best and will be an instant hit in the market. It is only after launching that they get a reality check because people are not using their product, or there is significant churn. The truth is that the decision to skip UX research can come back to haunt you, as the business will need to spend double in terms of time and money. 

While there's an upfront cost to UX research, the long-term savings are considerable. Identifying and resolving issues early in the process is much cheaper than fixing them post-launch. Additionally, a product aligned with user needs can lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention, which translates to higher revenue. Note that every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return . This is an average figure, but it's an ROI of an impressive 9,900%.

We don't have the time for research

This misconception is often grouped in the same category as the previous. Time-to-market is a huge determining factor for the success of a product or service. That is one of the reasons why some startups may choose to skip UX research as they want to beat their competitors to the market. Yes, UX research can stretch the initial phase of product development because it requires time to understand users; needs and motivations.

However, investing time in UX research can actually accelerate product development. By understanding user needs and pain points early, teams can avoid unnecessary iterations and rework.

We already know what our users want

It is true that before an entrepreneur embarks on a project, they have already done lots of research regarding their potential customers. However, in most cases, this research can be biased, or they often turn to A/B testing and analytics to define their user personas. While there is nothing wrong with this, it does not provide 360 information on the user. Knowing what the users want is not enough to keep them. You need to dig deeper and find out the motivations behind their choices, and that will be the key to offering them relevant solutions.

Counter: Assumptions can be dangerous. Without solid data, you might be designing for a user that doesn't exist. UX research offers evidence-based insights that ensure you're on the right track.

For instance, we're currently working on our SaaS product, Upfeed. It's a smart RSS reader for freelancers and agencies that work on freelance platforms. Upfeed empowers users to monitor, filter, and get a list of automatically prioritized job opportunities. 

And here's a thing — we created this tool based on our own needs thinking our target audience faced identical challenges. That's when we sidetracked the whole project — our team prioritized the wrong features over those that brought actual value. And the biggest failure was that the product solved a problem irrelevant to our potential users. 

So we had to go back to the drawing board and redo a major part of the user flow. But that time, UX research was a priority — our team ran user interviews and moderated usability tests. And you know what? It all paid off with information and insights that helped us discover our target audience's needs, see how they interacted with the product and what we had to improve. 

UX research is your go-to tool for fishing objective information about your target audience and their needs from the sea of preconceived assumptions.

We can rely on market research

As we have already seen above, market research provides different insights used to make overall business decisions. It does not give you information on how customers will interact with the product and their experience. People often confuse the capabilities of market and UX research and often use the terms interchangeably. It is understandable why someone may think doing just one of them will suffice. 

While market research provides valuable insights into the broader market dynamics, UX research delves deep into user interactions with your specific product. Both are essential but serve different purposes.

Choosing Between Market Research and UX Research

Choosing between market and UX research isn't always a matter of one over the other. Rather, they complement each other. Both types offer distinct insights, and depending on your objectives, one might be more appropriate at a given moment. Here is a guide to help you decide:

Define your objectives

For strategic business insights: For those trying to understand their market size, demand, competition, or demographic segments, market research is the route to go. It provides a macro view of the business environment. In this case, market research will help you estimate what amount of profit you may be making. 

For User-Centric Product Insights: If your focus is on the user experience, understanding pain points, motivations, and the user journey with your product, then UX research is more appropriate. Using UX research, you will get a micro view centered on user interactions.

Consider Your Product Stage

Conceptualization & Ideation: At this stage, market research can help validate if there's a potential demand for your product idea and if it's commercially viable. It gives you a reality check on how valuable your product will be. 

Design & Development: As you design and refine your product, UX research is crucial to ensure it's user-friendly and meets the needs and expectations of its end-users. You do not want to design a product that users find difficult to use. Even if the idea is great, people would rather look for alternatives than continue using your product.

Assess Resources and Time

Short-Term vs. Long-Term: Market research often offers quicker, broader insights suitable for immediate strategies. UX research, while it can be longer, provides in-depth insights that can shape product design and refinement over time.

Understand the Nature of Your Data

Quantitative vs. Qualitative: Market research often leans towards quantitative data, providing statistical insights about the market. UX research, especially with methods like interviews and usability tests, offers rich qualitative insights into user behaviors and feelings.

Competitive Edge

Differentiating Factor: If you're looking for insights that could give you a competitive advantage in terms of product positioning or market strategy, market research can be key. For a competitive edge in user satisfaction and product usability, UX research is essential.

The ideal scenario for many businesses, especially those in the tech and consumer product sectors, is to integrate both market and UX research. This holistic approach ensures that while the product meets market demand, it also provides an optimal user experience. However, if constraints demand a choice, aligning the research method with your immediate objectives is the best strategy.

Applications and Goals: Understanding the Objectives

As we have mentioned countless times, the application and goals of market and UX research often overlap. Businesses that can understand the objectives of each find themselves leaders in their respective industries. 

Once you have understood the objectives, it is important to start every research endeavor with a clear UX research plan. Tools like UX research templates and UX research plan examples can help in structuring the research. Always remember the goal is to gather insights, whether about the market or the user, that inform better decision-making. Let's delve into their respective applications and goals:

Market research applications

• Market Assessment : It evaluates the size and potential of a particular market segment or industry.
• Competitive Analysis : Examines competitors' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Product Positioning : Determines how a product should be presented to target the desired audience.
• Customer Segmentation : Identifies specific segments within the larger market based on shared characteristics.
• Price Elasticity : Assesses how sensitive consumers are to price changes.

Market research goals

• Business Strategy : Inform decisions related to entering new markets, mergers, or expansions.
• Risk Reduction : Minimize financial risks by validating product concepts before large investments.
• Targeting : Ensure advertising and promotional efforts are directed at the right audience.
• Forecasting : Predict future market trends and consumer behaviors to stay ahead.

UX research applications

• Usability Testing : Evaluates how easy and intuitive a product is to use.
• User Interviews: Gathers qualitative insights about user needs, motivations, and pain points.
• Surveys : Collects data about users' opinions and behaviors at scale.
• Journey Mapping : Visualizes the user's end-to-end experience with a product or service.
• A/B Testing : Compares two or more product versions to determine which performs better in terms of user engagement.

UX research goals

• Product Refinement : Ensure the product design and functionalities align with user needs and expectations.
• User Satisfaction : Maximize user satisfaction, leading to higher retention and referrals.
• Reduced Redundancy : Minimize costly design iterations and feature developments that don't resonate with users.
• Informed Design : Equip designers and developers with actionable insights that guide product development.

Understanding the objectives of both ensures that a company can strategically navigate the business landscape while crafting products that resonate deeply with its users. In a well-integrated approach, market insights inform UX strategies and user insights feed back into broader business strategies, creating a cycle of informed decision-making.

Market Research vs. UX Research Methods

Market and UX research serve different but complementary purposes. Both are essential for a well-rounded understanding of a product or service in its market, but they use varying methodologies.

There are various methods used in both domains. Qualitative UX research methods include interviews or usability testing. Market research might utilize surveys, focus groups, or observational studies. The chosen method should align with the research's objectives. Here is a comparison of their methods:

Market Research Methods

Surveys : Standardized questionnaires given to a large sample size to extract statistical data on consumer behaviors, preferences, and demographics.

Focus Groups : Moderated discussions with a select group of individuals to gather qualitative insights on feelings, perceptions, and opinions about a product, concept, or ad campaign.

Field Trials : Testing products or services in their natural environment, usually over an extended period.

Observational Research : Directly observing customers in a real or simulated environment to understand behavior.

Brand Awareness Studies : Measuring the percentage of the target audience familiar with and positive about a brand.

Market Segmentation : Analyzing and categorizing the market into distinct segments based on shared characteristics.

SWOT Analysis : Evaluating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the market context.

UX Research Methods

Usability Testing : Direct observation of real users as they interact with a product, app, or website to identify usability issues and areas of improvement.

User Interviews : Detailed conversations with users or stakeholders to understand their needs, preferences, and experiences.

Ethnographic Studies : Immersive research where researchers study users in their natural environment to deeply understand user behavior and context.

Heatmaps : Visual representations of where users click, scroll, and hover on a web page, helping in understanding user behavior.

Card Sorting : Participants organize topics or tasks into categories, assisting in structuring information architecture or content.

Prototyping and Wireframing : Creating early-stage representations of a product to gather feedback and iterate before development.

Task Analysis : Evaluating the steps users take to complete a task identifying potential bottlenecks or complexities.

Note that methods like Surveys, Focus groups, and Field studies can also be used in UX research. 

In theory, it is advisable to perform all these various types of research to better understand the value of your product and user experience. However, in real life, this can be severely restricted due to funds. A good way to decide which of the methods to use is to start by considering your goals 

Implementing UX and Market Research

Collaboration is key. UX researchers should be in tune with market researchers and vice versa. Their combined insights can lead to a product that's not only in demand but also offers an outstanding user experience. As we have seen above, there is a huge overlap between UX and market research. So, it will not make sense to completely separate them. In fact, doing so will result in double expenditure and inefficient workflow. Talking about inefficiency, the customers' journey becomes disjointed when you allocate one part of the research process to designers and the other to marketers. 

As UX and market research evolve, an even bigger overlap is inevitable. It opens the door to a better understanding of the reason why customers interact and stick with a particular product or brand. Once you hack these secrets, it becomes easier to know exactly where to invest and why you are succeeding.

Why You Should Never Skip UX Research

User research isn't just a checkbox. It's fundamental for ensuring a product's success. Products designed without user input risk misaligning user needs, leading to poor adoption and negative feedback. We have seen many companies rise, and neglecting UX research was among the precipitating factors. Neglecting UX research can have far-reaching consequences for businesses, products, and services. Here are some of the reasons why you should think twice before skipping UX research:

Understand your users

Without UX research, there is no way to know what your users actually want. So, businesses turn to make assumptions. However, these assumptions can be off the mark by miles, leading to products that don't align with user needs or solve any real problems.

Financial implications

Poor user experience often results in lost sales or users abandoning your platform. Correcting issues post-launch is typically more costly than addressing them during the design phase through proper UX research. 

Brand reputation

A product with poor usability can harm your brand's reputation, and honestly, you don't want that. Your brand name is your identity. If the brand has a poor reputation among users, your business is in jeopardy. Furthermore, your competitors will use every opportunity to make themselves look better using your flaws. Users are more vocal than ever before, and negative reviews or word-of-mouth can deter potential customers. 

Increased Support Costs

Products that aren't user-friendly lead to increased customer support inquiries. This not only raises costs but can also frustrate users further.

Longer Time to Market

Without understanding the user's needs from the onset, iterations and redesigns can delay product launches. This is a problem because you are not making any profits when the product is out of the market. Also, your competitors are using this time to solidify their presence.

Lower User Satisfaction

If users find it hard to navigate or achieve their goals using your product, their overall satisfaction diminishes, affecting retention rates. This also ties in with low profit because people are not using your product or service. 

Missed Opportunities

UX research can uncover user needs that weren't initially evident, leading to innovative features or products that cater to these needs. This is actually one of the reasons why in-depth UX research is done. Uncovering these needs and solving them puts them in the category of pioneers, and users will always trust your brand. 

Inefficient Resource Allocation

Without clear insights from UX research, teams might spend time and resources on features that don't resonate with users while neglecting more impactful ones.

Competitive Disadvantage

In today's digital age, user experience is a significant differentiator. Neglecting UX research can put you at a disadvantage compared to competitors who prioritize their users' experiences.

Reduced ROI

The return on investment (ROI) is often higher for products that cater to user needs and provide a seamless experience. Neglecting UX research can lead to a decreased ROI as users abandon the product or platform in search of better alternatives. For example one of our clients - Bluwalk came to us with a rough MVP of their product and we had to conduct in-depth research and revitalize its UX/UI design. For those who don’t know, Bluwalk is an app that helps people enter the gig economy. It connects users with companies that offer transport and delivery services. Long story short, after careful research we discovered some issues like long site load times, buttons missing links and filters that didn’t work, which were contributing factors to their reduced ROI. Once we worked our magic, the new version doubled its conversion rate from 9% to 20% . 

Legal and Accessibility Issues

Proper UX research includes understanding the diverse needs of all users, including those with disabilities. Neglecting this can lead to accessibility issues, potentially resulting in legal repercussions.

After everything has been said and done, market research and UX research are the two crucial steps that can't be overlooked in the product development lifecycle. Together, they form a symphony of insights, where one informs you about the 'who' and 'what,' while the other tells you 'why' and 'how.' With the ever-evolving demands of consumers and the fast-paced nature of technology, skimping on either form of research is akin to setting sail without a compass. Businesses that understand the intrinsic value of both market and UX research are the ones that steer clear of unseen icebergs and navigate successfully toward the horizon of success.

To truly captivate your audience, your product must resonate with them on every level. It should meet a market need, yes, but it should also deliver an experience so intuitive and delightful that it becomes irreplaceable in the eyes of your users. This is where the expertise of Lavarev comes into play.

Call to Action

Don't leave your product's fate to chance. Leverage the power of detailed insights and strategic foresight with Lavarev. We specialize in bridging the gap between market research and UX research, offering a comprehensive suite of services illuminating every corner of the consumer landscape. Whether through meticulously crafted UX research templates or cutting-edge market analysis, Lavarev is your partner in creating products that don't just exist but thrive.

Contact Lazarev today , and let's transform insights into action. Your journey toward an unmatched user experience begins here.

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Top 15 UX Research Tools in 2024: Complete Guide

Imagine your product is doing great—sales are up, revenue is flowing, but there’s a catch. More and more users are leaving your site without buying, carts are being abandoned, and people are complaining about bugs. What do you do? To keep your customers happy, you need to figure out what’s causing these issues and fix them. However, doing this kind of research can be tricky and time-consuming. That’s where UX research tools come in—they’re like super-powered helpers that make the whole process easier.

These tools automate boring tasks, find important information, and make it easy to share with your team. But with so many options out there, it’s hard to know which ones to choose. That’s where you come in! 

In this blog, we’ll show you the 15 best UX research tools and how they can make your job easier. Let’s dive in and make your customers even happier.

What is UX Research?

UX research, short for User Experience research, is a systematic investigation method used to understand users’ behaviors, needs, motivations, and preferences when interacting with a product or service. 

The primary goal of UX research is to gather insights that inform the design and development process, ensuring that the final product meets the users’ expectations and provides a positive experience.

UX research involves various methods and techniques, including surveys, interviews, usability testing, user observations, and analytics analysis. By employing these methods, UX researchers aim to uncover pain points, identify areas for improvement, validate design decisions, and ultimately create user-centered solutions that enhance the overall experience.

User research plays a crucial role in guiding product development by helping teams empathize with users, understand their needs, and ultimately deliver intuitive, useful, and enjoyable products.

What are UX Research Tools?

UX Research Tools are software applications, platforms, and services designed to assist UX researchers in understanding how users interact with digital products. They help researchers gather feedback, analyze data, and interpret user behavior to inform design decisions. These tools encompass a wide range of functionalities, including:

• Survey platforms for collecting feedback, 
• Usability testing software for evaluating interface usability, 
• User interview tools for conducting qualitative research, 
• Analytics and data visualization tools for analyzing user data, 
• Prototyping and wireframing tools for testing design concepts. 

Additionally, feedback collection systems, participant recruitment platforms, and remote user testing platforms play essential roles in streamlining the research process. By leveraging these tools, UX researchers can gather actionable insights and create user-centered products that meet the needs of their target audience.

Why do UX Research Tools Matter?

• Getting to Know Your Users: User research software helps companies learn all about their users—what they like, what they don’t, and what makes them happy. 
• Making Things Easier to Use: user research tools help find those frustrating bits by watching how people use products and pointing out where things could improve. This helps companies fix problems and make products easier to use for everyone.
• Coming Up with Cool Ideas: UX research software helps companies develop new ideas for improving products. By listening to users and examining other companies’ actions, they can generate cool new features or ways to improve things.
• Avoiding Mistakes: UX research tools help avoid those mistakes by checking if ideas are good before spending lots of time and money on them. This saves companies from making big blunders and helps them make smarter choices.
• Working Together: UX research tools help teams collaborate by sharing what they find and discussing ideas. This way, everyone can be on the same page and make products that users will love.

What tools do UX Researchers Use?

UX researchers utilize diverse tools to facilitate user experience research, each serving specific functions tailored to uncover insightful data and enhance UX. Below are some commonly used tools:

• User and Usability testing tools: A usability testing tool assists in evaluating the ease of use of products and features.
• User interview tools: These enable live interviews to gather direct feedback from users.
• Participant recruitment tools: These aid in finding suitable participants for research interviews.
• Information architecture testing tools: These assess website layout and user navigation expectations.
• Product analytics tools: These provide data on user interactions with websites.
• User survey and feedback tools: These allow for creating surveys to gather user feedback and insights.

Top 15 UX Research Tools for Your Research Design

User experience (UX) research is crucial for creating products and services that meet the needs and expectations of users. Having the best user research tools is essential to conduct effective UX research. Here, we’ll explore the top 15 UX research tools that can streamline your research design process:

1. QuestionPro

QuestionPro is a versatile and best UX research tool that empowers researchers to gather valuable insights from users to enhance product experiences. With its advanced survey logic and customizable templates, QuestionPro simplifies the process of creating surveys tailored to specific research objectives. Despite some advanced features requiring additional payment, QuestionPro remains a powerful tool for conducting comprehensive UX research.

Why it is unique:  

• QuestionPro stands out for its advanced survey logic, customizable templates, and real-time analytics, making it ideal for gathering detailed feedback.
• Powerful data analysis capabilities help decision-making.
• Advanced reporting options for in-depth analysis.
• Collaboration features for team research projects.
• Multilingual surveys for global reach.
• Mobile app for on-the-go survey management.
• Advanced features may require more effort and resources to be effectively used.

Pricing: 

• QuestionPro offers various pricing plans, starting at $99 monthly. Higher-tier plans offer additional features and customization options, and pricing is adjusted accordingly.

2. Typeform

Typeform is known for its visually appealing and interactive survey forms. With features like a conversational form interface and conditional logic, Typeform allows researchers to create personalized user interactions.

Why it is unique: Its seamless integration with various tools and platforms, extensive customization options for branding, and analytics dashboard for tracking responses make it a preferred choice for researchers.

• Higher pricing for advanced functionalities.
• Visual style may not suit all use cases.
• Advanced logic for personalized interactions.
• Seamless integration with various tools and platforms.
• Extensive customization options for branding.
• Analytics dashboard for tracking responses effectively.
• Interactive question types for engaging surveys.
• The basic plan starts at $25 per month.

3. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that provides various tools for user research, survey creation, and data analysis. Its customizable survey templates and robust data analysis tools make it a favorite among researchers.

Why it is unique: The platform offers advanced survey logic and customization options to tailor surveys to specific research objectives. SurveyMonkey also provides robust data analysis tools, enabling researchers to gain valuable insights from survey responses.

• Customization options may be limited.
• Support resources could be more comprehensive.
• User-friendly interface for survey creation.
• Diverse template library for various research needs.
• Advanced survey logic enhances data quality.
• Integration with other productivity tools.
• Powerful data analysis capabilities aid decision-making.
• The Premier Annual plan starts at $99 per month.

4. Lookback

Lookback specializes in remote user research, interviews, and usability studies. It’s remote usability testing capabilities and screen and audio recording provide comprehensive insights into user behavior.

Why it is unique: Lookback offers real-time observation for live feedback and collaboration features for team projects.

• Higher pricing compared to some competitors.
• Customer support response times may vary.
• Remote testing with screen and audio recording.
• Real-time observation for live feedback.
• Unlimited participants for broader insights.
• Collaboration features for team projects.
• Integration with various prototyping tools.

Pricing:  

• Starts at $25 per month for the Basic plan.

5. Userzoom

Userzoom offers an enterprise-level user research platform with tools for usability testing, surveys, and analytics. Its comprehensive suite of UX research tools, including user testing and benchmarking, makes it ideal for large-scale projects.

Why it is unique : The platform offers journey mapping for visualizing user experiences and advanced analytics for in-depth insights.

• Enterprise-level pricing may not be feasible for small-scale projects.
• Initial setup and training may require time and resources.
• Moderated and unmoderated usability testing with real users.
• Journey mapping for user experience visualization.
• Advanced analytics for detailed insights.
• Integration with popular analytics platforms.
• Contact sales for pricing details.

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool that allows teams to create, prototype, and collaborate on designs in real-time. Its real-time collaboration, prototyping, and design systems make it a valuable tool for UX researchers and designers.

Why it is unique: Figma’s cloud-based platform enables easy access and design sharing, while its integrations with other tools enhance workflow efficiency.

• Prototyping features facilitate iterative design processes.
• The cloud-based platform allows for seamless access and design sharing.
• Integrations with other tools enhance workflow efficiency.
• Version history and commenting streamline feedback.
• Responsive design capabilities for multiple devices.
• Limited offline functionality compared to some desktop design tools.
• Performance may lag with large and complex designs.
• Custom pricing based on business size and needs.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that enables teams to collaborate, plan, and organize projects and tasks. Its customizable workspace, database management, and collaboration tools make it ideal for organizing research materials and findings.

Why it is unique: Notion provides a flexible and customizable solution for researchers to effectively organize, collaborate, and manage their UX research projects.

• Versatile task management capabilities streamline project management.
• Document sharing and editing for team collaboration.
• Limited formatting options compared to dedicated document editors.
• Performance issues with large databases or complex projects.
• Mobile app functionality may be limited for some features.

8. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a behavior analytics and user feedback tool that helps researchers understand how users interact with their websites. Its features, such as heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, provide valuable insights into user experience.

Why it is unique: Hotjar offers invaluable insights into user experience through a range of features, including heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys.

• Feedback polls prompt users for input on specific elements or actions.
• Integration with other analytics tools enhances data analysis capabilities.
• Visitor recordings
• Limited functionality for complex UX analysis.
• Data privacy concerns may arise with session recordings and user feedback.
• The business plan starts at $80 per month.

9. Userlytics

Userlytics is a user testing tool that enables researchers to conduct remote usability tests and interviews. Its screen recording, webcam recording, tree testing, and task-based testing features make it easy to gather feedback from users.

Why it is unique: Userlytics offers an analytics dashboard for insights into user behavior and feedback and mobile device testing for comprehensive insights. 

• Remote testing capabilities facilitate access to diverse user demographics.
• The Analytics dashboard offers insights into user feedback.
• User testing on mobile devices for comprehensive insights.
• Pricing may be prohibitive for small-scale projects or individual researchers.
• Limited customization options for test setup and execution.

10. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a comprehensive experience management platform that offers tools for conducting online surveys, gathering feedback, and analyzing data. Its advanced survey logic, customization options, and powerful data analysis tools make it popular among researchers.

Why it is unique: Qualtrics offers a versatile solution for researchers to gather actionable insights and improve product experiences.

• Integration with CRM and other systems streamlines data management.
• Powerful data analysis capabilities enable in-depth insights and reporting.
• Text and sentiment analysis for qualitative data.
• Limited support for complex survey designs or experimental setups.
• Customization options may be restricted for certain features or question types.

Maze is a user-testing platform that allows researchers to create and run usability tests on prototypes and live websites. Its analytics dashboard, user insights, tree testing, and collaboration features make it easy to gather actionable feedback from users.

Why it is unique: Maze offers streamlined setup processes for creating and launching usability tests and customizable test flows for different user scenarios.

• The streamlined setup process for creating and launching usability tests.
• Customizable test flows for different user scenarios.
• Unlimited projects and collaborators for scalability.
• User journey mapping for a holistic understanding.
• prototype testing
• Limited support for advanced testing methodologies.
• Support documentation may be lacking for troubleshooting.
• Starts at $99 per month for the Starter plan.

Loop11 is a remote user testing tool that enables researchers to conduct usability tests, surveys, and card sorting studies. Its robust analytics, customizable tasks, and participant recruitment features make it a valuable UX research platform.

Why it is unique: Loop11 offers collaborative analysis for team collaboration, benchmarking against industry standards, and card sorting studies for information architecture testing.

• Collaborative analysis for team collaboration.
• Benchmarking against industry standards.
• Card sorting studies for information architecture testing.
• Limited customization options for test setups and participant recruitment.
• Some features may require upgrading to higher-tier plans.

13. UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub is a remote user testing platform that offers tools for conducting quick design feedback tests, preference tests, and first-click tests. Its fast turnaround time, diverse panel of participants, and intuitive interface make it easy to gather user insights.

Why it is unique: UsabilityHub offers researchers a convenient solution for gathering valuable feedback and improving product experiences.

• Quick and easy setup for running design feedback tests.
• A diverse panel of participants ensures access to varied demographics.
• Multilingual support for global research.
• Some features may be restricted to higher-tier plans.

14. User Interviews

User Interviews is a platform for recruiting participants for user research studies and interviews. Its diverse pool of participants, customizable screening criteria, and scheduling tools make it easy to find and schedule research participants.

Why it is unique: User Interviews offers flexible participant compensation options, automated email reminders for scheduling, and detailed participant profiles for screening.

• Flexible participant compensation options.
• Participant management dashboard for easy tracking.
• Automated email reminders for scheduling.
• Detailed participant profiles for screening.
• Limited customization options for participant recruitment and screening.
• Participant availability may be limited in certain demographics or regions.

15. Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop is a comprehensive UX research tool designed to facilitate various research methodologies, including card sorting, tree testing, and first-click testing. With its intuitive interface and customizable features, Optimal Workshop streamlines the research process, enabling researchers to gather actionable insights efficiently.

Why it is unique: Optimal Workshop stands out for its comprehensive suite of research methodologies, intuitive interface, and advanced analytics capabilities.

• Card sorting, tree testing, and first-click testing.
• Advanced analytics and visualization features
• Flexible study customization options
• Occasional technical bugs may impact user experience.

How to utilize QuestionPro as Your UX Research Tool? 

Utilizing QuestionPro as your UX research tool offers a versatile platform for conducting a wide range of research activities to enhance user experiences. Here’s how you can leverage QuestionPro effectively:

• Survey Creation: Use QuestionPro’s intuitive interface to create customized surveys tailored to your research objectives. Design survey questions that gather insights into user preferences, behaviors, and satisfaction levels related to your product or service.
• Participant Recruitment: Utilize QuestionPro’s participant recruitment tools to reach your target audience and gather diverse feedback. Implement screening criteria to ensure that participants match the demographics and characteristics relevant to your research.
• Usability Testing: Leverage QuestionPro’s capabilities for conducting usability tests to evaluate the ease of use and effectiveness of your product’s interface. Create tasks and scenarios for participants to complete while observing their interactions with the interface.
• Feedback Collection: Deploy feedback surveys using QuestionPro to gather user input regarding your product’s specific features, designs, or functionalities. To gather qualitative and quantitative data and feedback, utilize various questions, including open-ended, multiple-choice, and Likert scales.
• Custom Reporting: Use QuestionPro’s reporting capabilities to generate custom reports and visualize survey data effectively. Create charts, graphs, and heatmaps to communicate research findings clearly and compellingly to stakeholders and team members.
• Iterative Research: Conduct iterative research cycles using QuestionPro to continuously gather feedback and make iterative improvements to your product or service. Incorporate user feedback into design iterations, allowing for user-centered design principles to guide product development.
• Multilingual Surveys: Expand the reach of your research efforts by deploying multilingual surveys using QuestionPro’s multilingual support. Reach users in different regions and language preferences to gather diverse perspectives and insights.
• Collaboration: Use QuestionPro’s collaboration features to collaborate with team members and stakeholders throughout the research process. Share survey designs, reports, and insights with team members to foster collaboration and alignment on research goals and findings.

These top 15 UX research tools offer a wide range of features and functionalities to support your research design process. Whether you’re conducting usability tests, surveys, interviews, or analyzing user behavior, these tools can help you gather valuable insights and create exceptional user experiences. 

Before making a decision, consider your research needs, budget, and team requirements to find the tool that best fits your project. QuestionPro emerges as an outstanding UX research tool due to its advanced features, seamless integration capabilities, and user-friendly interface.

Whether you’re conducting surveys, usability tests, or market research studies, QuestionPro offers the tools and resources you need to gather valuable insights and enhance user experiences effectively. So, if you are searching for your UX research tool, go for QuestionPro! Contact us for a free trial or further information.

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Mar 27, 2024

Why all businesses should invest in UX research

Need to know the benefits before assigning your budget? Read on for the truth about investing in UX research.

Ella Webber

If you ask most folks around a business whether they think UX research is important, the majority will say yes. But believing in the value of research, and investing in it are two different things—with very different roadblocks to overcome.

While almost all product folks know you should invest in research, securing budget and getting buy-in from around the business is another story.

UX research is how you get inside your user’s mind. It helps you build user-centric designs that meet actual user needs. It’s how you replace intuition with insights to save time, money, and effort when pursuing your business goals.

With 62% of product professionals saying the demand for user research has increased in the past 12 months, and 75% planning to scale research even further next year, the time for sitting on the fence is over.

Ready to better understand your user?

Uncovering user insights is quick and easy with Maze’s extensive research methods and intuitive design.

What types of businesses should invest in UX research?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is all businesses should invest in UX research .

Maybe you’re a founder of a startup taking your first product to market and need to validate product-market fit and ensure your end product adequately meets your target audience’s needs.

Perhaps you’re a small business trying to understand why sales are slowly falling month after month.

Or you could be in a product team at a global enterprise, looking to get stakeholder buy-in before launching new features to outpace your competitors.

UX research unlocks value for all business, regardless of scale, product, or customer. UX research is how you identify what users want, and ensure you design and deploy the right features, rather than wasting time and money on the wrong ones.

It doesn’t need to start big, but it needs to start . No matter the size of your business, if you’re not running UX research you’re missing out on valuable user insights that can help improve decision-making across your organization. From product design to sales and marketing—understanding your users enables you to build user-centric experiences that focus on meeting and exceeding customer needs.

Why all businesses should invest in UX research: Save time, money, and effort

Insights trump intuition, every single time.

In short, UX research saves you time, money, and effort by giving you insights into what users really want, instead of relying on educated guesses. Intuition and ideas are valuable assets to a product team, but they only get you so far. You need data-backed insights to ensure you’re making informed decisions every time.

Investing in UX research can be a big step for businesses, but it’s well worth it. Here are six reasons why investing in UX research should be a priority for your organization.

1. Investing in UX research reduces wasted time and development costs

There’s no denying that the biggest reason for investing in UX research is just how much time and money it can save you. It’s a simple calculation:

• UX research = understand what users want = build what users want = user engagement = profit
• No UX research = not understand what users want = build what you think users want (or, worse, what you want to build) = lack of users = no profit

When you conduct user research upfront, you’re able to validate or reject ideas and designs before spending time, effort, and money developing them. UX research asks users what they want, instead of presuming what they want—saving you valuable resources. Investing early on avoids developing and deploying designs that simply don’t meet user needs.

Depending on the size of your organization and product functionality, building the wrong thing can cost anywhere from several thousand dollars, to several million . Not only is this wasted money, but it’s a huge amount of wasted time that could have been invested building something your users actually want to see.

Without investing in UX research, at least 50% of your development team’s time is spent doing entirely avoidable reworks. Your developers—whether in-house or external—are expensive, and their time is incredibly valuable. Moving un-tested designs into development will cost you more in post-production than if you’d invested in UX research to build the right thing the first time around.

💡 Curious about how much you could save with UX research? This free online Product Waste Calculator shows how much money your organization may be throwing away on the wrong products.

2. Investing in UX research creates and retains loyal customers

Another benefit of investing in UX research is that it’s crucial for creating (and keeping!) loyal customers. Why? Two reasons:

• UX research indicates to users that you care about their wants, needs, and pains
• UX research enables you to continually deliver on those wants, needs, and pains

The result? Users get the products they expect, while feeling they’re involved in the process, and valued by you— improving the customer experience , increasing customer satisfaction and NPS scores .

Let’s say you send out a customer feedback survey , and users repeatedly highlight a new feature they’d like. Not only does this investment in UX research help inform your UX roadmap , but it ultimately helps you create a more user-centered product and increase customer loyalty.

By making decisions and developing features off the back of feedback, you show users they’re valued and listened to, cultivating positive user <> product relationships and nurturing loyalty.

3. Investing in UX research attracts and converts new customers

88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing. In a world of fake news and AI-generated marketing, human-to-human recommendations are gold dust for reaching new users.

While a less direct link than others on this list, investing in UX research unequivocally attracts and converts new users.

We know that UX research boosts to user loyalty, and interwoven with your loyal customers is the much-lauded brand advocate.

If you’re investing in UX research and acting on insights, your existing users become brand advocates , who recommend your product or services to others. This increases acquisition organically, reducing the amount you spend on costly acquisition campaigns.

But, that’s not all—UX research also enables you to investigate and optimize the journey people undertake before converting to new customers. By conducting surveys, interviews, and usability testing, you can ascertain what works and what doesn’t when it comes to attracting and converting new customers.

Your existing customers were all once prospects, meaning they have unique insights into what motivated their conversion to paying customers—and what doubts they had along the way. You can then use these customer insights to improve the acquisition process for future customers.

4. Investing in UX research builds better products and customer experiences

Okay, this one feels somewhat obvious, but we can’t go without mentioning it: the undebatable truth of UX research and design is that it’s the key to building better products, and—by extension—better customer experiences .

User research unlocks value in many ways, from guiding overarching strategic direction and product discovery to delving into the nitty-gritty with specific usability issues.

The plethora of UX research methods that are available to you and your team make uncovering decision-driving insights easy at all stages of the design and product development process . Whether you have a specific focus or are just looking for insights to help guide your decisions, there’s a UX research method to help you.

Just a few ways different methods can help are:

• Product discovery identifies if new features or products could benefit your users
• Concept testing validates ideas with real users before you begin building
• User interviews provides first-hand insights from users and digs into sentiment
• Prototype testing helps assess functionality and confirm your designs are on track
• Card sorting uncovers the way your users think about and understand content
• Tree testing reveals the ideal way to structure your information architecture
• Usability testing reviews usability before and after launch to ensure smooth UX
• UX surveys quickly gather insights and feedback in a versatile technique

Of course, this is just an example. The truth is, UX research methods are versatile, and can be applied at many stages of the UX design process . There’s no rulebook for using UX research methods throughout the product development process—they’re tools to provide guidance and direction as and when you need them.

5. Investing in UX research enables better decision-making across the organization

UX research doesn’t just impact users—it benefits your wider organization by creating a user-centered culture and generating atomic research nuggets you can store in your research repository and use across the team. For example, insights uncovered during user research can help:

• The marketing team adjust their messaging to highlight features that existing customers note as crucial in their decision to convert
• The sales team engage differently with prospects depending on the features and functionalities identified for their use case and pain points
• The support team improve how they handle issues and create documentation on common problems and queries

While UX research and design is a strong asset for crafting wonderful online experiences for our clients, it is also a strong asset to help optimize internal processes and tools.

Geoffrey Crofte , Senior UX Lead at Groupe Foyer

The insights discovered through user research can inform and optimize your day-to-day decision-making, but they also have the potential to shape your entire growth strategy. UX research can guide you toward the best way forward—whether we’re talking about something as simple as updating a button, or as impactful as navigating uncertainty in your business and industry .

✨ Need more reason to invest in UX research? Check out our up-to-date selection of 30+ UX statistics on the state of UX in 2024 .

6. Investing in UX research keeps you competitive

Last, but by no means least, UX research keeps you competitive. One way is by engaging in competitive product analysis to monitor the competition and benchmark your product.

Investing in UX research also ensures you’ve got your finger on the pulse of UX research trends and what customers want next. By continuously talking to users and understanding their needs, you’ll find that you uncover opportunities for innovation that competitors haven’t yet identified.

For example, consider the case of AI . It’s making its way into every industry—and we’re not surprised. AI has the power to automate and optimize tasks like nothing we’ve seen before. But, applying AI to your own products isn’t straightforward. With thousands of applications, knowing where to focus your efforts is crucial for gaining a competitive advantage over others in your industry.

Conducting UX research—like interviewing users and running feedback surveys —helps you identify the ways that you can harness the power of AI in UX design . Of course, user feedback doesn’t tell you exactly what to do—but with this feedback and your team’s knowledge, you’re more likely to build the solutions people need before anybody else does.

💡 Hear from your users with Maze AI . Optimize your surveys with the Perfect Question, effortlessly add Dynamic Follow-Up questions to dig deeper, and get high-level trends to uncover insights faster.

The benefits of UX research, and the number one reason why you should invest in it, boil down to this: it puts your users at the heart of product decision-making . If you don’t build products, features, and experiences that customers actually want, they’ll leave. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow—but when they see that your competitors care more about their experience than you do, they’ll jump ship.

Start small, and let UX research guide you to bigger things

The benefits of UX research can’t be overstated. It takes the guesswork out of building a product and experience that users love, and gets your customers involved in your development and growth, making them more invested in your success.

Getting started can be simple, too. You don’t need a ten-person team or all the UX books and knowledge in the world—you just need the desire to build a user-centric mindset and a UX research tool to begin.

Maze’s suite of UX research methods facilitates all types of UX research, and automated, visual-rich reports make sharing your findings fast and useful for the whole team. There’s an option for every UX team, including a forever-free plan for those who are just dipping their toes into the ocean of UX research.

Frequently asked questions about investing in UX research

Is it worth investing in UX research in 2024?

Absolutely, it’s worth investing in UX research in 2024. Investing in UX research saves you time, money, and energy by giving you an understanding of what users really want. It enables you to act on insights instead of intuition, ensuring you make decisions that align with customer wants and needs.

Why is UX research important?

UX research is how you create products and experiences that your users love. Without user insights, you’re making crucial decisions based on guesswork. UX research helps save on development costs, increase customer retention and acquisition, remain competitive, and guide decision-making.

What’s the ROI of UX research and design?

Forrester previously reported that every $1 invested in UX yields a return of $100. That’s a return on investment of 9,900%. Although this study is old, it gives you an idea of the ROI of UX.

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• Queen Mary University of London
• News stories

Unlocking Insights into Marketing to Mature Consumers: A New Research Synthesis

Research from Queen Mary University of London academic Dr Mina Tajvidi , delves into marketing communications targeted at mature consumers aged 50 and above, addressing definitional inconsistencies and reviewing research published since 1972.

In an era marked by the increasing significance of an aging population, understanding and effectively targeting mature consumers has become paramount for marketers worldwide. A groundbreaking research paper titled ‘What we do know and don’t know about marketing communications on mature consumers’ sheds light on this crucial demographic, resolving long-standing definitional inconsistencies and providing a roadmap for future research and practice in marketing communications.

Authored by a team of esteemed scholars, this paper offers a comprehensive synthesis of existing research on marketing to mature consumers, encompassing individuals aged 50 and above. Drawing from a meticulous analysis of 106 papers published in premier marketing journals since 1972, the study identifies key themes and unveils critical insights into this demographic.

The findings of the paper underscore three primary research themes: the segmentation of mature consumers, their attitudes and behaviours, and effective marketing strategies tailored to this demographic. Furthermore, the research outlines a series of compelling future research directions, urging scholars and practitioners to delve deeper into understanding the complexities of mature consumer behaviour and preferences.

One of the standout contributions of this paper is its proposal for an expanded definition of mature consumers, transcending mere chronological age to encompass biological, psychological, and social dimensions, as well as life events and circumstances. This holistic approach promises to revolutionize how marketers conceptualize and engage with this diverse demographic.

From a practical standpoint, the research emphasizes the importance of personalized marketing approaches for mature consumers, recognizing their unique information processing mechanisms and the varying impact of marketing mix elements on their behaviour. It advocates for the adoption of alternative methodologies to fully capture the nuances of this market segment.

Co-author of the paper, Dr Mina Tajvidi , co-Director of MSc Marketing programme; Lecturer in Marketing, in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, remarked, "Our research underscores the pressing need for marketers to move beyond simplistic age-based stereotypes and embrace a more nuanced understanding of mature consumers. By doing so, businesses can unlock untapped opportunities and forge deeper connections with this increasingly influential demographic. As businesses navigate the evolving landscape of marketing communications, this research serves as a beacon, illuminating the path forward towards more effective and inclusive strategies for engaging mature consumers.”

View the full research paper ‘ What we do know and don’t know about marketing communications on mature consumers’ here .

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Global Smartphone Shipments to See Modest Rebound in 2024 Driven by Premium, Budget-Economy Segments

• / Mar 28, 2024
• / Team Counterpoint
• Global smartphone shipments in 2024 are expected to increase by 3% to reach 1.2 billion units.
• The budget-economy segment ($150-$249) is expected to rebound from a challenging 2023, driven by a recovery in the CALA, India and MEA markets.
• The premium segment ($600-$799) is projected to grow 17% YoY thanks to Apple and Huawei.
• The market seems to have bottomed out, and we expect low-single-digit YoY increases in the longer term.

Seoul, Beijing, Boston, Buenos Aires, Fort Collins, Hong Kong, London, New Delhi – March 28, 2024

Global smartphone shipments in 2024 are expected to record a modest rebound of 3% YoY to reach 1.2 billion units, according to Counterpoint Research’s Global Smartphone Shipment Forecast . The budget-economy segment ($150-$249), which shrank YoY in 2023 due to macroeconomic headwinds, especially in emerging markets, and the premium segment ($600-$799) are expected to drive this rebound.

The budget-economy segment ($150-$249), which experienced a noticeable decline in 2023, is expected to rebound 11% YoY in 2024, primarily driven by India, MEA and CALA (Caribbean And Latin American) markets. As inflationary pressures have eased considerably across Africa, and local currencies have stabilized in many countries, the consumer purchasing power has recovered, benefiting the $150-$249 segment.

Steady investments into the MEA and CALA markets by Chinese OEMs like OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and Transsion Group have intensified the competition, stimulating the demand for budget-economy smartphones. Alongside the recovery of demand for IT devices in emerging markets, the intensified competition between Chinese OEMs will be the main growth driver in the segment.

The premium segment ($600-$799) is expected to maintain steady growth in 2024, rising 17% YoY driven primarily by older model flagships, with flip form factors also enjoying strong YoY growth.  We expect GenAI smartphones and the fold segments to help support demand in ultra-premium, especially towards the latter half of the year.  From a brand perspective, Apple and Huawei are likely to lead premium and ultra-premium segment growth, with emerging markets such as India and MEA driving iPhone growth, and China to continue being a key battleground for both.

For the longer term, we expect low-single-digit YoY increases for global smartphone shipments as the market seems to have bottomed out.

Counterpoint Technology Market Research is a global research firm specializing in products in the TMT (technology, media and telecom) industry. It services major technology and financial firms with a mix of monthly reports, customized projects and detailed analyses of the mobile and technology markets. Its key analysts are seasoned experts in the high-tech industry.

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Global smartphone market set to rebound in 2024, report says

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Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar

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Cpg will reshape marketing strategies in 2024.

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Flat design with people. CPG - Consumer Packaged Goods acronym. business concept background. Vector ... [+] illustration for website banner, marketing materials, business presentation, online advertising

2024 is shaping up to be a year of innovation for marketing activity in the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry says Mediaocean in a new report. Despite macroeconomic headwinds holding over from 2023, optimism pervades the advertising industry. Marketers are gearing up for an active year, expressing their intent to maintain or increase spending in nearly every media channel.

CPG marketing historically has revolved around a focus on the company’s brands. A brand is a name, logo, word, mark, tagline, or any other identifying characteristic that separates a company’s product or service from other competitive offerings on the market. A brand is among the most important assets that a company has because it differentiates the company and helps keep the company in consumers’ minds. Brands are normally protected by using trademarks.

So, it is not surprising that companies invest a lot of time and money to create brand recognition. It is successful when people are able to recognize a brand through visual or auditory cues such as logos, slogans, packaging, colors, or jingles rather than being explicitly exposed to a company’s name. Logos like the Nike NKE swoosh and the Golden Arches of McDonald’s, and taglines like “They’re magically delicious” from Lucky Charms cereal and “I’m a big kid now” from Huggies Pull-Ups diapers all help further brand recognition.

A company’s marketing department works hard to come up with those cues and often conducts market research to determine the success of their brand recognition strategies. These brand recognition strategies are then used in advertising and marketing to drive customer purchases.

In the past, these advertising and marketing plans typically relied on multiple tactics. Popular programs use assorted printed materials (including mailings of all kinds, outdoor signage, etc.) radio messages, product placements, and television ads. As the digital world has advanced, these new platforms have been added to the mix.

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What’s ahead for 2024

Mediaocean recently completed an industry survey among CPG companies that found that brand strategies must evolve; these companies must respond to changing consumer behavior and the advancements in technology that have changed business data and reporting.

Mediaocean noted that CPG companies rated e-commerce as the most critical consumer technology and media trend, a reminder for the CPG industry to focus on omnichannel solutions. These companies must work to optimize their digital presence and leverage data-driven insights. Generative AI, particularly ChatGPT, has captured everyone’s attention, leading to a shift in focus and resources allocation. 2024 promises to be the year that AI moves from speculative use cases to practical day-to-day applications – particularly in the areas of data analysis and market research.

Mediaocean also believes that the importance of measurement and attribution capabilities in advertising investments has steadily increased. CPG marketers today consider it indispensable as part of a full-funnel approach to advertising. Concerns are steadily arising regarding the decline of measuring campaign effectiveness on tech platforms and the open web, highlighting the need for innovative solutions and advanced analytics. As the industry prepares for a cookie less future, marketers are urged to evaluate and test available measurement solutions and proactively adapt before market forces dictate their actions.

Mediaocean concludes that, from an operational standpoint, a prevalent gap between creative and media execution persists. This gap negatively impacts team workflow and messaging relevance, so closing it means an opportunity for brands in a year that will be marked by data deprecation, antitrust regulation, and privacy protection. This sets the stage for adoption of Creative Ad Tech, benefiting all stakeholders in the upcoming year.

POSTSCRIPT: CPG companies represent the bulk of American companies. While the current economic environment has shifted the emphasis of some companies to more private label merchandise, I believe that key marketing principles are basically the same. The brand identification is always valuable to both the customer and the company. The customer looks for quality assurance which is implied in the national brand name and reinforced by the brand’s identity. It is hard to recreate that valuable relationship.

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