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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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

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

What are UX research methods?

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

These methods help:

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

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

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

The most common types of user research

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

Here’s a quick overview:

Qualitative vs. quantitative

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

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

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

Attitudinal vs. behavioral

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

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

Generative vs. evaluative

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

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

Remove the guesswork from product decisions

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11 Best UX research methods and when to use them

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

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

1. User interviews

Tl;dr: user interviews.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why you should:

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

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

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

When to conduct user interviews

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

2. Field studies

Tl;dr: field studies.

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

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

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

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

When to conduct field studies

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

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

3. Focus groups

Tl;dr: focus groups.

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

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

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

Focus groups can help you better grasp:

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

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

Here’s some things to consider:

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

When to conduct focus groups

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

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

4. Diary studies

Tl;dr: diary studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When to conduct diary studies

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

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

TL;DR: Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make sure your questions:

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

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

When to conduct surveys

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

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

6. Card sorting

Tl;dr: card sorting.

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

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

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

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

There are three types of card sorting:

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

Card sorting type comparison table

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

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

When to conduct card sorting

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

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

7. Tree testing

Tl;dr: tree testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When to conduct tree testing

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

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

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

8. Usability testing

Tl;dr: usability testing.

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

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

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

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

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

The tasks you create for usability tests should be:

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

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

✨ Product tip

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

When to conduct usability testing

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

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

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

9. Five-second testing

Tl;dr: five-second testing.

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

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

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

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

Product tip 💡

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

When to conduct five-second testing

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

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

10. A/B testing

Tl;dr: a/b testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When to conduct A/B testing

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

11. Concept testing

Tl;dr: concept testing.

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

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

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

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

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

When to conduct concept testing

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

Which is the best UX research type?

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

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

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

How to choose the right user experience research method

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

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

Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal

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

Define the goals and problems

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

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

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

Understand the design process stage

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

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

Consider the type of insights required

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

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

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

Build a deeper understanding of your users with UX research

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

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

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

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

Get valuable insights from real users

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

Frequently asked questions

How do you choose the right UX research method?

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

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

What is the best UX research method?

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

When to use which user experience research method?

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

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

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

What results can I expect from UX research?

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

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

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How to conduct effective user interviews for UX research

User interviews are a popular UX research technique, providing valuable insight into how your users think and feel. Learn about the different types of user interviews and how to conduct your own in this guide.

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User interviews are a popular UX research technique, providing valuable insight into how your users think and feel. Learn about the different types of user interviews and how to conduct your own in this guide. 

User research is fundamental for good UX. It helps you get to know your users and design products that meet their needs and solve their pain-points. 

One of the most popular UX research methods is user interviews. With this technique, you get to hear from your users first-hand, learning about their needs, goals, expectations, and frustrations—anything they think and feel in relation to the problem space.

But when should you conduct user interviews and how do you make sure they yield valuable results?

Follow this guide and you’ll be a user interview pro. We explain:

What are user interviews in UX research?

What are the different types of user interviews, when should you conduct user interviews, what data and insights do you get from user interviews, how to conduct effective user interviews for ux research: a step-by-step guide.

• What happens next? How to analyse your user interview data

First things first: What are user interviews?

[GET CERTIFIED IN USER RESEARCH]

Interviews are one of the most popular UX research methods. They provide valuable insight into how your users think, feel, and talk about a particular topic or scenario—allowing you to paint a rich and detailed picture of their needs and goals. 

interviews take place on a one-to-one basis, with a UX designer or UX researcher asking the user questions and recording their answers. They can last anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour, and they can be done at various stages of a UX design project. 

There are several different types of user interviews. They can be:

• Structured, semi-structured, or unstructured
• Generative, contextual, or continuous
• Remote or in-person

Let’s explore these in more detail.

Structured vs. semi-structured vs. unstructured user interviews

Structured interviews follow a set list of questions in a set order. The questions are usually closed—i.e. there’s a limit to how participants can respond (e.g. “Yes” or “No”). Structured interviews ensure that all research participants get exactly the same questions, and are most appropriate when you already have a good understanding of the topic/area you’re researching. 

Structured interviews also make it easier to compare the data gathered from each interview. However, a disadvantage is that they are rather restrictive; they don’t invite much elaboration or nuance. 

Semi-structured interviews are based on an interview guide rather than a full script, providing some pre-written questions. These tend to be open-ended questions, allowing the user to answer freely. The interviewer will then ask follow-up questions to gain a deeper understanding of the user’s answers. Semi-structured interviews are great for eliciting rich user insights—but, without a set script of questions, there’s a high risk of researcher bias (for example, asking questions that unintentionally lead the participant in a certain direction). 

Unstructured user interviews are completely unscripted. It’s up to the interviewer to come up with questions on the spot, based on the user’s previous answers. These are some of the trickiest types of user interviews—you’re under pressure to think fast while avoiding questions that might bias the user’s answer. Still, if done well, unstructured interviews are great if you have very little knowledge or data about the domain and want to explore it openly. 

Generative vs. contextual vs. continuous user interviews

Generative user interviews are ideal for early-stage exploration and discovery. They help you to uncover what you don’t know—in other words, what insights are you missing? What user problem should you be trying to solve? Which areas and topics can you identify for further user research? Generative interviews are usually unstructured or semi-structured. 

Contextual user interviews take place in a specific context—while the user is carrying out a certain task, for example. This allows you to not only observe the user’s actions/behaviour first-hand, but also to ask questions and learn more about why the user takes certain actions and how they feel in the process. Contextual interviews tend to be semi-structured. 

Continuous user interviews are conducted as part of continuous UX research. While traditional user research is done within the scope of a specific project, continuous UX research is ongoing, conducted at regular interviews (e.g. weekly or monthly) with the goal of continuous product improvement. Continuous interviews are like regular check-ins with your users, giving you ongoing insight into their needs, goals, and pain-points. 

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Remote vs. in-person user interviews

A final distinction to make is between remote and in-person interviews. 

In-person user interviews take place with the user and researcher in the same room. A big advantage of in-person interviews is that you’re privy to the user’s body language—an additional insight into how they feel. 

Remote user interviews take place via video call. Like any kind of remote work, they’re more flexible and may be more accessible for research participants as they don’t require any travel. 

User interviews provide value at various stages of a design project. You can use them for:

• Discovery and ideation —when you want to learn more about your target users and the problems they need you to solve.
• UX testing and product improvement —when you want to get user feedback on an existing design concept or solution.
• Continuous UX research —you can run regular interviews as part of a continuous UX research framework. 

Let’s take a closer look. 

User interviews for discovery and ideation

User interviews can be useful right at the beginning of a UX project, when you don’t know much (or anything) about the domain and don’t yet have a design direction. At this stage, everything is pretty open and your user interviews will be exploratory. 

Conducting user interviews early in the process will help you to answer questions such as “Who are our target users?”, “What problems do they need us to solve?” and “What are their goals and expectations in relation to the problem space?”

Here you’ll be focusing on generative user interviews (i.e. finding out what you don’t know), and they’ll likely be unstructured or semi-structured.

User interviews as part of UX testing and product improvement

User interviews also come in handy when you have an idea or concept you want to evaluate, or even a working product you want to test. 

At this stage, you might present the user with a prototype and ask them questions about it. If you’re further along in the design process, you can run user interviews as an add-on to UX testing —having the user interact with a working prototype (or the product itself) and asking them questions at the same time. These are the contextual interviews we described earlier. 

Conducting user interviews at this stage will help you gain insight into how your users feel about a concept/product/experience and to identify pain-points or usability issues within the existing design. 

User interviews as part of continuous UX research

User interviews are also valuable as part of a continuous UX research framework. Here, there is no project-specific goal—rather, you’re interviewing users regularly to gain ongoing user insights. This enables you to maintain a user-centric design process and to evolve your product continuously as you learn more about your users. 

You can learn more about the importance of continuous UX research here .

User interviews allow you to hear from the user, in their own words, how they think and feel about a particular problem space/experience/task. This provides rich insights into their thoughts, beliefs, experiences, problems, goals, desires, motivations, and expectations, as well as the rationale or thought process behind certain actions. 

As such, user interviews generate qualitative data . That is, data which tells you about a person’s thoughts, feelings, and subjective experiences. It’s the opposite of quantitative data which is objective, numerical, and measurable. You can learn more about the difference between quantitative and qualitative user research data here .

Note that user interviews generate self-reported data . Self-reported data is based on what the user chooses to share with you (you’re not observing it; rather, you’re hearing it from the user). It’s how they report to be feeling or thinking. 

If you conduct contextual user interviews, you’ll gather a mixture of observational data (based on what you observe the user doing) and self-reported data. 

After conducting user interviews, you’ll end up with lots of data in the form of interview transcripts, audio or video recordings, and your own notes. We’ll look at how to analyse your user interview data in the final section of this guide. 

First, though, here’s a step-by-step plan you can follow to conduct effective user interviews. 

Ready to conduct your own user interviews? Follow our step-by-step guide to get started.

• Determine what type of user interviews you’ll conduct
• Write your user interview script (or guide)
• Set up the necessary tools
• Recruit your interview participants
• Perfect your interview technique

Let’s walk through our plan step by step. 

1. Determine what type of user interviews you’ll conduct

Earlier in this guide, we outlined the different types of user interviews: Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured; generative, contextual, and continuous; and remote and in-person. 

The first step is to determine what format your user interviews will take. This depends on:

• What stage you’re at in the project/process
• What your research goals are

If you’re at the very early stages of a design project, you’ll likely want to keep your user interviews open and exploratory—opting for unstructured or semi-structured interviews. 

Perhaps you’ve already got a design underway and want to interview your users as they interact with it. In that case, structured or semi-structured contextual interviews may work best. 

Consider what you want to learn from your user interviews and go from there. 

2. Write your user interview script (or guide)

How you approach this step will depend on whether you’re conducting structured, semi-structured, or unstructured user interviews.

For structured interviews, you’ll need to write a full interview script—paying attention to the order of the questions. The script should also incorporate follow-up questions; you won’t have the freedom to improvise or ask additional questions outside of your script, so make sure you’re covering all possible ground. 

For semi-structured interviews, you’ll write an interview guide rather than a rigid script. Come up with a set list of questions you definitely want to ask and use these—and your users’ answers—as a springboard for follow-up questions during the interview itself. 

For unstructured user interviews, you can go in without a script. However, it’s useful to at least brainstorm some questions you might ask to get the interview started. 

Regardless of whether you’re conducting structured, semi-structured, or unstructured interviews, it’s essential that your questions are:

• Open-ended . These are questions that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. They require more elaboration from the user, providing you with much more insightful answers. An example of an open question could be “Can you tell me about your experience of using mobile apps to book train tickets?” versus a closed question such as “Have you ever used a mobile app to book train tickets?”
• Unbiased and non-leading . You want to be very careful about how you word your questions. It’s important that you don’t unintentionally lead the user or bias their answer in any way. For example, if you ask “How often do you practise app-based meditation?”, you’re assuming that the user practises meditation at all. A better question would be “What are your thoughts on app-based meditation?” 

It’s worth having someone else check your questions before you use them in a user interview. This will help you to remove any unintentionally biased or leading questions which may compromise the quality of your research data. 

3. Recruit your interview participants

Your user interviews should involve people who represent your target users. This might be existing customers and/or representative users who fit the persona you would be designing for. 

Some common methods for recruiting user research participants include:

• Posting on social media
• Working with a dedicated agency or platform which will connect you with suitable participants
• Recruiting from your own customer or user database

The good thing about user interviews is that you don’t need loads of participants to gather valuable data. Focus on quality over quantity, recruiting between five and ten interviewees who closely match your target group. 

4. Set up the necessary tools

Now for the practical matter of getting your user interviews underway. If you’re conducting in-person user interviews, you’ll need to choose an appropriate setting—ideally somewhere quiet and neutral where the user will feel relaxed. 

For remote user interviews, you’ll need to set up the necessary software, such as Zoom , dscout , or Lookback . Consult this guide for more UX research tools . 

You’ll also need to consider how you’re going to record the user’s answers. Will you use good old fashioned pen and paper, a simple note-taking app, or a recording and transcription software? 

Make a list of all the tools you’ll need for a seamless user interview and get everything set up in advance. 

5. Perfect your interview technique

As the interviewer, you have an important role to play in ensuring the success of your user interviews. So what makes a good interviewer? Here are some tips to help you perfect your interview technique:

• Practise active listening . Show the user that you’re listening to them; maintain eye contact (try not to be too distracted with taking notes), let them speak without rushing, and don’t give any verbal or non-verbal cues that you’re judging their responses.
• Get comfortable with silence . In everyday conversations, it can be tempting to fill silences. But, in an interview situation, it’s important to lean into the power of the pause. Let the user think and speak when they’re ready—this is usually when you elicit the most interesting insights.
• Speak the user’s language . Communication is everything in user interviews. Don’t alienate the user by speaking “UX speak”—they may not be familiar with industry-specific terms, and this can add unnecessary friction to the experience. Keep it simple, conversational, and accessible.

Ultimately, the key is to put your users at ease and create a space where they can talk openly and honestly. Perfect your interview technique and you’ll find it much easier to build a rapport with your research participants and uncover valuable, candid insights. 

What happens next? How to analyse your user interview data 

You’ve conducted your user interviews. Now you’re left with lots of unstructured, unorganised qualitative data—i.e. reams of notes. So how do you turn all those interview answers into useful, actionable insights? 

The most common technique for analysing qualitative data is thematic analysis . This is where you read through all the data you’ve gathered (in this case, your notes and transcripts) and use ‘codes’ to denote different patterns that emerge across the dataset. 

You’ll then ‘code’ different excerpts within your interview notes and transcripts, eventually sorting the coded data into a group of overarching themes. 

At this stage, you can create an affinity diagram —writing all relevant findings and data points onto Post-it notes and ‘mapping’ them into topic clusters on a board. This is a great technique for physically working through your data and creating a visualisation of your themes, allowing you to step back and spot important patterns. 

With your research data organised and categorised, you can review your findings in relation to your original research objectives. What do the themes and patterns tell you? What actions can you take from your findings? What gaps still need to be filled with further UX research?

As a final step, you might write up a UX research report and present your findings to relevant stakeholders. 

Learn more about UX research

We hope you now have a clear understanding of what user interviews are, why they’re such a valuable UX research method, and how to conduct your own user interviews. If you’d like to learn more about user research, continue with these guides:

• A complete introduction to card sorting: What is it and how do you do it?
• What are UX personas and what are they used for?
• What’s the future of UX research? An interview with Mitchell Wakefield, User Researcher at NHS Digital
• user interviews
• ux research

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In this guide

The complete guide to user interviews.

Whether you’re designing a new flow in your product experience or reimagining your website, it’s important to collect  user feedback to ensure you’re building the best possible solution for your users. There are many different methods for gathering and understanding your users’ perspectives. In this guide, we’ll explore one of the most widely-used and effective UX research techniques: user interviews.

This guide will cover: 

• How user interviews improve the product development lifecycle
• The different types of user interviews

When to conduct user interviews 

• How to run a successful user interview
• How UserTesting can help you get the answers you need with user interviews

To get us started, let’s dig into what user interviews are. Even though it might seem obvious, there are subtle differences between user interviews and other forms of UX research that are important to note. 

What are user interviews?

User interviews are a form of  UX research that helps you gather user perspectives on a certain topic, understand how they navigate a digital experience, gain context into their behaviors and habits, and more. It’s a flexible tool that helps teams get to the why behind their product’s performance. 

The most successful user interviews are those that are strategically designed to uncover information about a specific question. While this is certainly not an exhaustive list, here are some great use cases for user interviews: 

• Uncover  customer insight s from target users or prospective users about your website’s messaging and navigation
• Question users during the discovery phase of a product design project to get a deeper understanding of their behaviors, problems, and needs
• Test prototypes that are difficult to understand without context or where users may need extra guidance from the interviewer
• Offer  concept testing to get feedback on designs that have reached the development stage
• Have users compare your digital experience against your competitors to evaluate which they like best and why

The more familiar you get with the insights that come out of user interviews, the more creative ways you’ll be able to apply them to your specific line of work or situation. 

In case you need more persuasion, let’s dig into why user interviews are so important in  user experience (UX) design and the product development lifecycle (PDLC) in general.

User interviews: an important part of the product development lifecycle

User-centric product design is the process of designing (digital or physical) products that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with for users. It’s about enhancing the experience that people have while interacting with your product, and making sure they find value in what you’re providing.

From surveys,  customer reviews , and support calls, to metrics like traffic, conversion, and NPS, there are plenty of different data that can give you a level of human insight. However, in order to maximize the efficiency and impact of your PDLC, it’s best if you can really see and hear how your users interact with the product throughout its development. This ensures the product is tailored specifically to real human needs and is why user interviews are such an effective tool. Otherwise, you risk building something that no one wants or needs.

Insights from user interviews can help your team:

• Fill in knowledge gaps on what users need
• Speak the language of the target user
• Answer UX questions that are blocking progress
• Pave the way to new ideas for features or products
• Improve larger business decision-making and strategy
• Validate hypotheses and align stakeholders around a design vision
• Allocate resources to the right business areas and avoid rework

Challenges of user interviews

Now that we’ve emphasized the value of user interviews, let’s look at a few challenges that come along with this UX research method. 

User interviews take time

User interviews require careful preparation. Once the interviews have been conducted, they need to be transcribed, analyzed and organized for sharing amongst the organization. It’s important to have the right platform to streamline this process so that everything from interviewing to analysis can happen in one place.

Moderators need training

Interviewing is a skill and moderators need to be able to ask the right questions to properly engage with participants. It’s important to make sure your interviewers are trained in how to make participants comfortable, give them space to talk, and ask thoughtful questions.

Participants need to be vetted

Vetting participants is vital for any research project. While UserTesting can do the heavy lifting of participant recruiting, those without a human insight solution must be careful to recruit a group of participants that truly represent the user. It’s important to interview a wide variety of customers so that the data isn’t too narrow.

At the core, user interviews are a method for extracting user insights. But it can be tricky to know the best time to use them. It’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint when a user interview or a different approach—like unmoderated usability testing—is the best course of action.

Let’s clear this up.

It helps to think of user interviews as a form of a moderated usability test or a real-time conversation that you’re having with a user. Unmoderated usability tests aren’t monitored or guided, which allows for faster, larger studies but can sometimes lack depth. Think  surveys ,  tree testing, or card sorting . In essence, the primary difference between the two is the presence of a researcher (or person conducting the interview).

User interviews work best when you need a high level of interaction between you and your user. For example, if you want to study a prototype with limited functionality, or a complicated process or concept, moderated testing provides you with the interaction you’d need to guide a user through the study. 

It's also an excellent way to understand the  customer journey , discover pain points, and react to what interviewees say in real time. Additionally, user interviews allow you to observe body language and facial expressions, and pick up on subtle behaviors and responses that you might not get in an unmoderated test. Throughout the interview, you can give users more context when they seem to get stuck or confused or dig deeper in your questioning to understand why they’re responding a certain way. Interviewing users also develops a rapport with them that helps establish trust. This can lead to candid feedback that might not have been possible with other  qualitative research methods .

User interview styles: Unstructured, semi-structured, and structured

When conducting a user interview, UX teams typically employ varied levels of structure to their approach to get different kinds of responses. We can separate these approaches into three buckets: Unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews, and structured interviews. While it may be surprising to hear that having less structure in an interview could be a good thing, there are specific use-cases for that call for each.

Unstructured user interviews

Unstructured interviews involve asking very open-ended questions without a strict outline or guide, allowing the user to direct the conversation. Interviews like these are useful for gathering extensive information and are ideal for identifying pain points and problems within a product area. In an unstructured user interview, it’s important to ask neutral, non-leading questions that might influence the user's responses. This type of interview can be challenging for those new to user interviewing as it lacks control over the type of information collected. Unstructured interviews are most useful at the beginning of a project during initial ideation while researchers or designers have limited knowledge.

Semi-structured user interviews

Semi-structured interviews strike a balance between structure and flexibility. Researchers create a discussion guide or test script to steer the conversation toward valuable insights for the design team, often including scenarios or tasks to prompt participant action or thought. While the discussion guide maintains focus, it also allows for unique and creative ideas to emerge. Semi-structured interviews are most effective when researchers are familiar with user personas and have a prototype for participants to interact with.

Structured user interviews

Structured interviews follow a fixed set of questions for every participant, aiming to control the type of insights obtained. These questions are often closed-ended, sometimes requiring multiple-choice or scaled responses. The main advantage of structured interviews is their efficiency and cost-effectiveness, making them suitable for gathering large amounts of comparative, quantitative data from many participants. Of course, their downside is that they offer little room for detailed explanations. Structured interviews are most appropriate towards the end of a project when the product is nearing release or has just been launched.

Types of user interviews: Generative, Contextual, and Continuous

The three most common types of user interviews are: generative, contextual, and continuous interviews. Each type of user interview serves a unique purpose in the design and development process.

• Generative user interviews: Explores new insights and generates ideas early in the design process
• Contextual user interviews: Observes and understands user behavior in natural settings to answer specific ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions
• Continuous user interviews: Maintains ongoing user contact to gather continuous feedback, supporting agile and user-centered development

Generative user interviews

Generative interviews are primarily used to uncover new insights about user behavior, challenges, and expectations. They’re especially useful in the early stages of the design process, when the goal is to explore opportunities and generate ideas.

These conversations are aimed at gathering detailed information to answer broad research questions. Unlike brainstorming sessions, generative interviews focus on gathering actionable insights through clear, specific questions. A researcher might ask a variety of participants about their daily routines and the challenges they face with existing products. This helps to identify unmet needs and areas for innovation.

Contextual user interviews

Contextual interviews provide deep insights into how users interact with products in their natural environment. They combine observation and interviewing to understand the context of user behaviors.

These semi-structured interviews are conducted in the user’s environment, making the setting feel more natural than a lab or virtual interview. Researchers observe users as they complete tasks and ask questions to understand their behavior and reasoning. A researcher might shadow a user in their workplace or at home to see how they interact with a new software tool, asking questions about their actions and decisions throughout the process.

Continuous user interviews

Continuous interviews are conducted regularly to maintain ongoing contact with users and gather continuous feedback.  This approach is valuable for keeping the design and development process aligned with user needs over time.

By setting aside time each week to connect with users, researchers can gather ongoing insights. These interviews are open-ended, allowing for a broad range of feedback that may be more varied than focused research. A product manager might schedule weekly check-ins with users to discuss their experiences and gather feedback on new features, ensuring that the product evolves in line with user needs.

By understanding and applying these different types of user interviews, researchers and designers can gather a comprehensive range of insights to inform and improve the user experience.

13 tips for conducting user interviews

Keep these tips in mind while you’re conducting your interview:

1. Clarify your goals

Before you plan on conducting any user interviews, it’s important to  know what you’re trying to get out of the process . This helps guide your questions and the conversation.

Maybe you’re looking to understand how customers feel about your site’s new design. In that case, you need to ask open-ended questions like, “What do you think of our new site design when compared to our previous version?” If you want to find out if participants find your checkout page to be intuitive, ask questions like, “How did you feel about the navigation experience of our checkout page?”

2. Compose a conversation script and questions

As with any conversation, the discussion should be organic and take its own shape. However, it’s still helpful to have a general script of what you’d like to say outlined and available, including critical questions you must ask. Having your questions and a general idea of what you’d like to say handy will keep you and your user on track. Use your script as the framework for taking notes during each interview.

3. Test your tech

Make sure all the technology you’ll be using for your interview is operational and updated in advance. Check that you and your user have a reliable internet connection and working webcam and microphone at the start of your user interview.

4. Have your materials ready

Prepare any visuals, links, or  other materials that you’d like your user to interact with ready to share, either via video or by sharing your screen. We recommend pulling up ahead of time any files, images, or browser tabs you’d like to share on your desktop. And take caution to hide anything confidential.

5. Test your interview questions

Test your questions on teammates and ask for feedback on whether your questions are straightforward. Are you getting the answers you were hoping for? Do people understand what the questions mean? Your users’ responses should give you a clear idea of what needs to be changed or improved moving forwards. 

6. Keep it casual

Make your interview feel like a casual conversation. Start out by breaking the ice with something simple, such as “Hi, I’m Jane. How are you doing today?,” “Where are you currently based?,” or something similar.

7. Push through the initial awkwardness

Getting to know someone new, especially virtually, almost always comes with an uncomfortable silence, a stutter here and there, or reading questions that sound like they were written by a therapist. Here’s the good news: feeling a little awkward usually means you’re on the right path. Don’t get hung up on the discomfort. Proceed with the general script and trust in your prep work. This part will almost always get easier the more user interviews you have.

8. Let the conversation warm up

Allow a little time for your contributor to warm up before you jump into a single line of questioning or pursue a specific topic. Asking your contributor to share a little bit about themselves and offering up a bit about yourself in return will build a foundation of knowledge from which you can decide where to take the conversation.

9. Parrot your contributors 

A great way to keep your contributors talking, without putting words in their mouths, is to simply parrot back whatever they just said. For example, if they say, “I dunno, this page just looks weird....” you can wait a few seconds and then repeat, “the page looks weird...” and just trail off without actually asking a question. This usually gives them time to gather their thoughts and helps reinforce that you’re listening to them, even if they may not think that they’re saying much or adding much value.

10. Take five

A good rule of thumb is to slowly count to five in your head before responding to anything your contributor says or does. This technique gives you an easy measure to ensure you’re giving a contributor the right amount of time to respond.

11. Avoid leading questions

Leading questions can subtly and inadvertently persuade contributors to provide the answer you hope to receive, but not necessarily the one that will provide fuller, more objective insight. There are many  examples of leading questions you should avoid. “What did you like about the homepage?” implies the contributor must have liked something. Instead, leave questions open-ended. It’d be better to ask, “Was there anything you liked or disliked about the homepage?”

12. Remove bias

It’s easy to accidentally influence customers’ answers without intending to. Take care with how you phrase each of your questions to make sure you’re not accidentally influencing their responses. 

The key is to collect valuable, actionable feedback that isn’t shaped by your organization’s expectations or agenda. So, always ask users open-ended questions and avoid leading questions that influence participants’ answers. 

Read up on other  examples of leading questions so you know what to avoid.

13. Say thank you

Make it a priority to thank your customers for their time, so they feel appreciated. You could also provide incentives as a way of saying thank you to participants. For example, you could automatically enter participants into an Amazon gift card giveaway. 

How UserTesting’s Live Conversation makes user interviews easier

User interviews can be conducted in person or remotely, whichever is most convenient for you and your user. A major challenge with user interviews and in-person focus groups is the high cost—both in terms of time and money. Traditional user interviews and focus groups can take weeks or months to organize, schedule, recruit, and complete. Most teams need feedback much faster to align with agile sprints and product development processes.

With  UserTesting’s Live Conversation test format, the logistical challenges are removed making it possible to conduct fast, remoteuser interviews with real people to inform your product development with confidence. With self-service scheduling using the  UserTesting’s diverse Network , teams only need one business day’s lead time to get the rich insights only aface-to-face user interview can provide—without the logistical hassle and cost associated with traditionalin-person user interview methods. 

A final word on user interviews 

Whether you’re new to user interviews or have been conducting them for decades, it’s a skill that can always be refined. Customer needs change with culture and connecting with your audience will always be an evolving process. 

Following the steps mentioned in this guide will help you tie your digital experiences to a firm foundation of user-centricity so that you can create products that resonate. The next time you set out on designing a new product or experience, consider how user interviews with  UserTesting might help you uncover valuable insights.

Ready to give user interviews a shot?

Run a free test right now or visit our template gallery to get some testing inspiration. 

Frequently asked questions about user interviews

User interviews are a qualitative research method used to gather in-depth insights directly from users about their experiences, needs, and challenges. They're crucial for informing product development and improving user experience.

What types of user interviews exist?

The three primary types of user interviews are: generative (for exploring new ideas), contextual (for understanding user behavior in real environments), and continuous (for ongoing feedback during product design and development).

How should one prepare for a user interview?

Preparation for user interviews involves defining clear objectives, creating an interview guide, selecting diverse participants, and ensuring the interviewer is well-trained in conducting interviews.

What are some best practices for conducting user interviews?

Best practices for user interviews include active listening, asking open-ended questions, avoiding leading questions, creating a comfortable environment for participants, and systematically recording and analyzing responses.

How can the insights from user interviews be utilized?

Human understanding. Human experiences.

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The Ultimate Guide to Conducting User Research Interviews

What are user research interviews, 6 types of user interviews for ux research, why conduct user research interviews, when should you conduct user interviews, what data do you get from user interviews, phase 1: how to prepare for user interviews, phase 2: how to recruit participants for user interviews, phase 3: how to create effective user interview questions, phase 3: how to conduct user interviews, phase 4: how to analyze user interview data, augment your ux research methods with fullsession, fullsession pricing plans, install your first website feedback form right now, faqs about user interviews.

Sometimes, the best way to find out if your product is good is to just ask the person using it.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it sounds. User interviews can give you detailed, honest, and nuanced insights about what you offer, but only if done right.

So, how can you make sure your interviews uncover data you can actually use to improve your UX?

In this guide, we'll explain:

• What are user research interviews?
• What are the different types of user interviews?
• Why should you conduct user interviews?
• When should you conduct user interviews?
• How to prepare for user interviews
• How to find interview participants
• How to write effective interview questions
• What to do with user interview data

User research interviews are like having a good chat where you really get to know someone—only in this case, you’re getting to know how people feel about a product or service.

These interviews help you dig deep to understand what users like, what frustrates them, and what could make their experience better. They revolve around asking open-ended questions that let the person you’re talking to open up about their experiences.

This method of user research is incredibly useful because it gives you valuable insights straight from the users. You're not just collecting numbers or checking boxes; you're listening to stories and gathering rich details that show you how to make your product hit the mark.

When it comes to user research interviews, there’s a whole menu of types you can choose from, each with its own flavor and purpose. Here’s a rundown of the different types of user interviews you might use, depending on what you need to find out:

1. Structured Interviews

From the name itself, structured interviews require you to stick to a specific set of questions. You ask everyone the exact same questions in the same order. It’s simple, straightforward, and great for when you need to compare answers directly across a group of people.

2. Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews are more laid-back. There’s no strict list of questions you have to follow. You start with a topic, and then let the conversation flow naturally based on what the participant says. This way, you can stumble upon insights you might not have thought to look for.

3. Semi-Structured Interviews

A semi-structured interview is a mix of both. You have some questions planned, but you’re also ready to follow the conversation wherever it goes. It gives you the structure you need to get specific information and the flexibility to explore new topics that come up during the chat.

4. Contextual Interviews

Contextual interviews are all about seeing things in action. You conduct these in the user's own environment, whether that's at home, at work, or any other place they normally use your product or service.

Watching someone interact with your product in their natural setting can give you a real-world perspective that's hard to capture in a lab or office setting. This method of conducting user interviews is excellent for understanding how everyday distractions, habits, and the physical environment influence the way people use your product.

5. Generative Interviews

Generative interviews are used primarily in the early stages of product development when you're looking to come up with ideas and possibilities that could shape the development of a new product or feature.

During these interviews, you're encouraging participants to think outside the box and brainstorm with you. It's a collaborative process aimed at sparking creativity and uncovering potential innovations that haven't been considered yet.

6. Group Interviews

Group interviews, often referred to as focus groups, involve bringing together multiple participants to discuss their thoughts and opinions simultaneously. This setup allows for a dynamic exchange of ideas, where participants can agree, disagree, and inspire each other, providing a broad range of insights in a single session.

Group interviews are particularly useful when you want to explore how people perceive and talk about a product or concept in a social context, as it highlights consensus areas and points of contention among users.

There's no better person to ask about your product or service than the one who's using and paying for what you offer. So, how can their feedback help you achieve [insert business goal here]?

Direct User Insights

User research interviews give you direct access to the user's perspective. You hear firsthand about what they appreciate, what frustrates them, and what they believe could be improved.

More often than not, this kind of direct feedback is exactly what you need to gain a deeper understanding of the user experience from a personal perspective.

Identifying Pain Points

Through these conversations, you can discover specific areas where users struggle with your product. Whether it's a confusing interface, lack of essential features, or poor performance on certain tasks, knowing these pain points allows you to prioritize development efforts to address them ASAP.

Overall, identifying these issues allows you to target improvements, improve user satisfaction, and potentially increase loyalty.

Testing Assumptions

It’s natural to make assumptions about user behavior, but these can lead to misguided decisions.

User interviews help validate these assumptions by confronting them with real user data. This validation process ensures that every design decision and feature addition is informed by evidence. As a result, you can better minimize risks and align the product more closely with user needs.

Encouraging Innovation

Users often provide insights into how they use the product in ways you might not have anticipated, or they might express needs that no existing product adequately meets.

These insights offer unique opportunities to innovate by developing new features, refining existing ones, or even creating entirely new products designed for better product-market fit . Such innovations can set your company apart from competitors and even position you as a leader in user-centered design.

The qualitative data you get from user interviews can make or break the launch of a new product or service, or even a re-launch of an existing offering. So, when should you bring user interviews into the mix?

During the Early Concept Stage

Right at the start, when your product ideas are still taking shape, user interviews can be incredibly helpful. They provide clarity and validation on whether your initial concepts resonate with potential users.

This stage revolves around making sure that the path you’re considering is in tune with what users actually need and want. It'll help you avoid costly detours and focus on viable product directions!

Before You Develop Your Product

Just before you dive into the heavy lifting of development, it’s a good time to fine-tune the details of your product based on user feedback. Lock down which features to include and figure out the best ways they could function from the user's point of view.

The insights you gather now can influence major decisions about how your product is built, which helps make sure that it looks good and works well for your target audience.

Once You Have a Prototype

When you have a working prototype, user interviews can test how well it performs in real-world scenarios. This is your chance to see your product in action and get feedback on its usability and appeal.

Users might point out glitches or suggest improvements that could make the product more user-friendly. Addressing these issues and suggestions at this stage can save you a lot of time and trouble down the line.

When Conducting Usability Tests

As you refine your prototype, integrating usability tests becomes crucial. These are more structured sessions where you observe how users interact with your product in specific ways to assess its functionality and ease of use.

The feedback you gain at this stage may pinpoint areas where users struggle and help refine the user interface to be more intuitive and effective.

After Launching

Even after your product hits the market, user interviews should continue. Now, you can learn how your product stands up in the everyday lives of your users.

This feedback can help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and what could make your product even better in future iterations.

User interviews give you a rich mix of qualitative data, including both self-reported and observational insights.

From the self-reported side , you'll gather direct feedback where users explicitly share their likes, dislikes, and frustrations, along with their motivations and needs. This type of data is invaluable for understanding how users perceive your product and what they believe could be improved.

Alongside self-reported data, observational data plays a huge role. During the interviews, especially if they are conducted in a contextual setting where users interact with the product in their usual environment, you can observe how they actually use the product.

Observational data can sometimes reveal discrepancies between what users say they do and what they actually do. For example, a user might claim they find an application easy to use, but struggles observed during the interview can tell a different story.

Combining these two types of data provides a comprehensive understanding of the user experience and can offer clear directions for making meaningful improvements to your product.

Getting ready for user interviews helps you make sure they run smoothly and give you the insights you need. Here are key steps to take during Phase 1:

Identify Your Goals

First up, be clear about what you want to find out. Set specific goals—maybe you want to dig into how users feel about your product, see how they actually use it or get feedback on a new feature.

Knowing exactly what you’re after will help shape your questions and keep the conversation on track.

Build Your Interview Guide

Put together a guide that outlines the key topics and questions you plan to cover. This doesn't mean you can’t go with the flow during the chat, especially if something interesting comes up, but having a guide will help you make sure you don’t miss anything important.

Mix in open-ended questions to encourage detailed answers and some direct ones to zero in on specifics.

Set the Interview Environment

Decide if you’ll do face-to-face interviews, phone calls, or video chats. Make sure the setting is comfy and quiet to help people open up.

If you’re doing remote user interviews, double-check that everyone has the tech they need and that it all works smoothly.

Have all your tools ready—whether it’s recording devices, notes, or video gear. Test everything beforehand to dodge any tech hiccups during the interviews.

Of course, you can't just go about interviewing anyone . You need to get those insights from the people that matter. In this case, it's your ideal user. We've compiled a few effective strategies to help you find the best interview participants.

Identify Your Target Audience

First, clearly define who your ideal users are. Knowing who your target audience is will help you focus your recruitment efforts on the right group. Consider these important factors:

• Usage habits
• Product relevance
• Tech proficiency
• Previous experience with similar products or services
• Other relevant demographic factors (income level, education, family status, etc.)

Use Screening Questionnaires

Create a short questionnaire to help screen potential participants. This should include questions that confirm whether someone fits into your target audience, like their familiarity with your type of product, relevant behaviors, or specific needs that your product aims to meet.

Leverage Existing Channels

Use channels where your potential users are likely to be, such as your company's email list, social media platforms, or your website. Posting on forums or platforms that are popular with your target demographic can also be effective.

Offer Incentives

People are more likely to participate if there’s something in it for them. Offering incentives like gift cards, discounts, or access to exclusive content can encourage more sign-ups.

However, you need to make sure the incentive is appropriate and attractive to your target audience.

Consider Practical Logistics

Think about the logistics of your interviews when recruiting. If you need to conduct interviews at a specific location or online, mention this upfront. Also, consider the best times for interviews that fit into your participants' schedules.

Get the Word Out

Spread the word through as many channels as possible. Apart from digital outreach, consider leveraging partnerships with other companies or communities that align with your target market.

The more visibility your call for participants gets, the better your chances of attracting qualified individuals!

Good questions are what make effective user interviews. Follow these strategies to make sure you get rich, reliable, and nuanced interview data:

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions let participants talk freely about their experiences, giving you a lot more color and detail than simple yes/no answers.

When you ask open-ended questions , you're inviting participants to share their full stories and insights. This approach digs into not just what they do, but why they do it, how it affects them, and what specific elements really stand out.

For instance, instead of just finding out if someone likes a feature (where they might just say "yes" or "no"), asking "What do you think about this feature and why?" opens up the floor for them to talk about what's really working or what bugs them. They might point out something surprisingly useful or a frustrating flaw that could lead to a really valuable tweak in your product.

Plus, these questions can pull out how users see the pros and cons of what you’re offering, how it slots into their daily lives, and what adjustments could make it better. Instead of asking, "Is this tool easy to use?", you could say, "Can you tell me about a time when this tool was either a big help or a bit of a hassle?"

Questions like this not only add context but also shine a light on real user experiences and potential sticking points. You can include a few close-ended questions , but make sure to throw in follow-up questions to understand their reasoning.

Stay Neutral and Avoid Leading Questions

Keeping your questions neutral is an absolute must if you want to get honest, unbiased feedback during your user interviews. Ask questions that don't push participants towards any specific answer. This way, you're more likely to get honest feedback on what they think.

For example, if you ask, "How difficult is it to use our product?", you're kind of hinting that there might be some difficulty involved. This can lead people to focus more on the negatives.

A better way to phrase it would be, "What’s been your experience using our product?" This phrasing opens up the floor for them to talk about the good and the bad without any nudging. They can share what they genuinely like and what might be a bit of a struggle and give you a fuller picture.

By framing your questions without any bias, you encourage participants to share their true thoughts and experiences. Non-leading questions you gather more accurate and valuable insights because you're hearing what users really think, not just what they believe you want to hear.

Keep the Interview Simple

Prioritizing simplicity when writing user interview questions helps make sure everyone can easily grasp what you’re asking without getting tangled up in fancy jargon or technical terms. By sticking to plain language, you help participants feel more comfortable and confident in their responses, which means you’ll get clearer and more useful insights.

For instance, instead of asking, "What are your thoughts on the user interface’s navigational affordances?" you could simplify it to, "How easy is it to find your way around our app?"

A more straightforward approach makes the question more accessible and encourages participants to provide detailed, candid feedback. That’s exactly what you need to really understand user experiences and make smart improvements.

Now that you have your ideal interview participants, your questions, and your setup ready, it's time to conduct your interviews. Everyone will have their own technique based on the type of information they want to get, but in general, here are a few tips that can help everyone:

Listen Actively and Be Comfortable with Silence

Active listening is a must during any user interview. Pay close attention to what is being said, and equally important, to what is not being said. This can help you pick up on non-verbal cues or underlying messages that may need further exploration with follow-up questions.

Don't rush to fill silence—sometimes participants need a moment to think, and these pauses can lead to thoughtful responses.

Take Detailed Notes

Whether you’re recording the session or not, taking detailed notes is essential. Jot down key points, interesting quotes, and your own observations about the participant’s behavior and emotions. These notes will be important when you analyze the data later.

Use Your Interview Guide

While it’s important to let the conversation flow naturally, keep your interview guide handy as a roadmap. Your guide should outline the key topics you want to cover to make sure you don’t miss anything crucial.

However, be flexible—allow the conversation to deviate somewhat if the participant is sharing valuable insights.

Avoid UX Speak

It's easy to slip into using industry-specific terms or acronyms that are second nature to you but might be confusing for others.

To make sure your interviews are as accessible as possible, avoid using technical language related to user experience (UX) or any other specialized field. Instead, focus on using plain language that anyone can understand.

• Instead of saying: "How intuitive do you find the navigational structure?"
• Say: "How easy is it to find what you're looking for?"
• Instead of saying: "Do you feel the onboarding process facilitates user engagement?"
• Say: "What was it like when you first started using the product? Did you feel welcomed?"

If you must use a specific term for clarity or relevance, take a moment to explain what it means in a simple way!

Provide Context

When asking about specific aspects of your product, provide a little context to help frame the question in a way that’s relatable.

For example, instead of asking directly about the "usability" of a feature, describe the feature briefly and ask about their experience using it.

If you've made it this far, you're so close to getting the actionable insights you need! The next step is to turn raw feedback into insights you can use to guide your product development . However, this can be easier said than done, especially if you have massive amounts of data to work with.

Here’s an easy step-by-step approach to process and make sense of the information you gather:

Transcribe the Interviews

Start by turning your recorded interviews into written text. Having everything written down makes it a lot easier to sift through the data. If you’ve taken detailed notes, mix these in with the transcripts to capture everything said.

Organize the Data

Arrange the data either by themes related to your questions or by specific topics you're exploring. Doing so should help you spot patterns and compare responses easily.

Tools like spreadsheets or qualitative data analysis software can be super helpful for sorting and visualizing the data.

Identify Key Themes

Go through your transcripts and notes to pick out recurring themes or patterns. Look for common phrases, ideas, or feelings that pop up across several interviews. These can point out what users really need, what’s bugging them, or what they love about your product.

Categorize the Findings

Group your findings into categories like what’s working, what’s not, potential opportunities, or any risks. This setup helps you focus on different aspects of the feedback and makes it easier to process.

Validate with Quantitative Data

If you can, add in some hard data like survey results or usage stats. This can back up the trends you’ve spotted in the interviews and give you a fuller picture of what’s going on!

Create User Personas

From the insights you’ve gathered, sketch out user personas. These are profiles that represent different types of users for your product, showing their needs, behaviors, and preferences. Personas are great for keeping your user in mind as you make design choices.

Act on the Findings

Now, take what you’ve learned and use it to make decisions—whether that’s tweaking the design, planning your next moves, or setting up more research. Prioritize these actions based on how much they’ll improve user experience and meet your business goals.

Finally, you can draw up a UX research report and present it to relevant stakeholders!

As useful as user interviews are, they're not enough to draw a full picture of what users feel about your product or service. Plus, interviews take a lot of time to do, and the data you want to collect may be time-sensitive.

That's why you need to supplement your interview data with FullSession's UX research tools:

• Behavioral Analytics : Get the lowdown on user interactions to pinpoint any usability issues or interesting trends.
• Heatmaps : See hotspots on your pages where users click, scroll, and linger, helping you tweak your layout and content.
• Session Replays: Watch real-life actions on your site to understand how users move through and interact with your pages.
• A/B Testing Support : Try out different designs and see which ones really click with users, based on actual behavior.
• Accessibility and Usability Enhancements : Use data to make your site more inclusive and easy for everyone to navigate.

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides two paid plans—Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.

• The Starter plan costs $39/month or $32/year and allows you to monitor up to 5,000 monthly sessions with up to 6 months of data storage.
• The Business plan costs $75/month or $60/year and helps you to track and analyze up to 100,000 monthly sessions with up to 12 months of data storage.
• The Enterprise plan has custom pricing and offers customizable sessions plus full access to all features.

Book a demo today .

It takes less than 5 minutes to set up your first website or app feedback form, with FullSession , and it's completely free!

How long should a user interview last?

Around 30 to 60 minutes is usually just right. It's long enough to dig deep but not so long that it tires out your participants. Think of it like a friendly chat over coffee—aim for engaging and productive!

Can user interviews be conducted remotely?

Definitely! Thanks to video call tools like Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet, you can run interviews from anywhere. These tools are great because they let you chat face-to-face, even if you're oceans apart, and they have handy features like screen sharing and recording.

How many user interviews are necessary?

It varies, but you'll likely need between 5 and 10 per user group. Once you start hearing the same comments over and over, you’ve probably got enough to go on. This is your cue that you've collected enough chatter to see the patterns clearly.

What should I do if a user interview goes off track?

It happens! If the conversation starts to wander, gently nudge it back to the topic at hand. You want to stay focused but also be flexible enough to let your participants express themselves. A simple, "That’s super interesting, but let's circle back to [specific topic]" should do the trick.

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The Complete Guide to User Interviews

User interviews are a fundamental user research method that provides valuable qualitative insights directly from the source—real users. Sitting down for open conversations allows UX researchers to better understand user needs, motivations, pain points, and thoughts.

Conducted properly, interviews uncover both explicit and implicit requirements to inform design decisions. They are a key part of the iterative design process.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk through everything you need to know to conduct effective user interviews, from preparing research goals to analyzing findings.

What are User Interviews?

A user interview involves having a purposeful, one-on-one conversation with a person representative of your target users. During the semi-structured interview, the researcher asks open-ended questions related to the research objectives and allows the conversation to flow naturally.

The interviewer listens closely to the responses, asks follow-up questions to dive deeper, and takes notes on insights uncovered. The goal is to understand user perspectives and experiences in depth.

Benefits of User Interviews

There are many UX research methods to choose from. What makes interviews so valuable?

Gain Direct User Perspectives

Interviews allow you to have authentic conversations with real users. This provides direct feedback based on their experiences, rather than making assumptions. The qualitative insights are invaluable.

Uncover Emotional Drivers

The personal nature of interviews lets you connect with users on a deeper level. You can understand their feelings, motivations, pain points, and learn what drives them emotionally.

Discover Unexpected Insights

The conversational flow of interviews means they often touch on user needs you didn’t consider. Users may bring up frustrations, desires, or use cases you weren’t aware of.

Dive Deeper into Topics

Interviews let you explore interesting topics more fully through follow-up questions. You can keep probing until you thoroughly understand a concept.

Access Low Tech Users

Interviews work well for people without easy technology access or digital literacy. You gain insights without asking them to use unfamiliar devices or apps.

Quick and Flexible

Interviews are relatively quick and easy to conduct compared to more complex research. When time or budget is limited, they provide fast qualitative insights.

Interview Formats

There are three primary structures interviews can take:

Structured interviews use a predefined script of set questions asked in the same order for each session. This standardization provides consistency across all user interviews.

Semi-Structured

Semi-structured interviews use an interview guide with questions tied to research goals. The moderator follows the guide but can ask additional questions to probe topics more deeply. This flexibility allows customization based on the conversation flow and who is being interviewed.

Unstructured

Unstructured interviews have no set script – just a general agenda. The moderator allows the conversation to unfold naturally, letting user responses drive the questions asked. This format provides very rich, unprompted insights.

Choose an interview format based on your study goals, the time available, and the abilities of the people you are interviewing. Often a combination of formats is used.

Before the Interview: Preparation

Proper planning and preparation are crucial to conducting insightful interviews that provide clear user requirements to drive design. Here are the key steps:

Set Research Goals

First, explicitly define what you want to learn from user interviews. Outline the insights you are hoping to uncover. For example:

• Understand reasons users abandon online checkout flows
• Identify major pain points in the account creation process
• Learn how users organize travel plans and shopping lists

This focuses on the interview questions and conversation. Be as specific as possible when articulating research objectives.

Create an Interview Guide

An interview guide provides an outline of the structure, questions, and flow you want to cover in the session. It ensures consistency across interviews while allowing flexibility in the conversation.

Include these elements:

• Introduction  – Briefly explain the purpose, format, timeline, and confidentiality policy.
• Warm-Up Questions – 2 to 3 easy questions to build rapport. E.g. “Tell me a little about yourself.”
• Main Questions – 5 to 10 primary questions tied directly to research goals. Use open-ended wording focused on the “what”, “how”, and “why” of behaviors and perceptions.
• Wrap-Up – 2 to 3 closing questions like “Anything else you’d like to add?”
• Thank Participant – Express gratitude, explain the next steps, and provide contact information.

Recruit Participants

Identify and recruit 5 to 8 participants that represent your target users. Leverage screening criteria. Offer incentives. Ensure you have consent.

Choose Location

Select a comfortable, quiet location without distractions. For in-person, use a conference room or office. For remote, pick a space with a strong internet connection.

Set Up Equipment

Gather materials needed:

• Audio recorder
• Notepad and pens
• Laptop/device for taking notes
• Printed research materials like interview guide, consent forms, NDA if needed

Pilot the Interview

Test the draft interview guide with 1 to 2 pilot participants. Time the full interview. Refine questions that don’t work well.

During the Interview: Moderation Techniques

Your moderation and conversational skills greatly impact interview quality. Here are techniques to conduct an effective session:

Make Participants Comfortable

• Build rapport with casual small talk
• Remind them there are no right/wrong answers – you want their honest perspectives and experiences
• Explain they can skip uncomfortable questions

Ask Open-Ended Questions

• Avoid yes/no and leading questions
• Use “what”, “how”, and “why” wording to encourage discussion
• Follow up with prompts like “tell me more about that”

Use Strategic Silence

• Don’t immediately fill gaps after the participant finishes speaking
• Allow time for the user to gather thoughts with “mhmm” and “uh huh”

Avoid Answering Questions

• Tactfully deflect questions about your opinions or company
• Politely refocus on their thoughts and experiences

Take Thorough Notes

• Capture key insights, compelling quotes, emotions, body language etc.
• Supplement audio recordings – don’t try to transcribe everything

Watch the Clock

• Schedule 45-60 minutes for in-person interviews
• 30 minutes for phone interviews
• Take breaks as needed if longer

After the Interview: Synthesizing Insights

You gathered great qualitative data from users. Now it’s time to make sense of it all through analysis and synthesis:

Transcribe Recordings

Transcribe audio recordings word-for-word manually or use a transcription service. Review the video to note emotions and body language.

Analyze Data

• Identify themes, patterns, and outliers in user responses
• Tag insights by research questions
• Create empathy maps summarizing major insights from each interview

Share Findings

• Create a slide deck highlighting key themes
• Pull compelling interview quotes to illustrate insights
• Include short audio clips that convey specific user emotions

Tips for Asking Good Interview Questions

Asking thoughtful, strategic questions is key to uncovering deep user insights during interviews. Here are 6 tips:

1. Use Open-Ended Wording

Ask “what”, “how”, and “why” questions that encourage discussion rather than short yes/no answers.

2. Follow the Conversation

Build on what the participant says by asking relevant follow-up questions to probe deeper.

3. Ask About Specific Experiences

Get examples of real scenarios rather than general opinions. E.g. “Tell me about a time when…”

4. Watch for Cues

If they express frustration, confusion, etc. ask questions to further explore those emotions.

5. Avoid Jargon

Use simple, clear language that participants will understand. Define unfamiliar terms.

6. Remain Neutral

Don’t agree/disagree or ask leading questions nudging them to respond a certain way.

The goal is to have a natural, insightful conversation focused on understanding user perspectives – not just running through a rigid script.

How to Moderate User Interviews Like a Pro

Effectively moderating interviews takes practice. Here are 8 techniques to immediately improve your user interview skills:

1. Build Rapport

Make small talk to make the participant comfortable. Find common interests you can bond over.

2. Set Expectations

Explain the format, reassure them there are no right/wrong answers, and they can skip questions.

3. Pay Attention to Body Language

Note frustration, uncertainty, excitement etc. Adjust your approach accordingly.

4. Ask Follow-Up Questions

Dig deeper into interesting insights with prompts like “tell me more” and “why do you feel that way?”

5. Paraphrase Responses

Restate what you heard in your own words to confirm your understanding. E.g. “So you’re saying…”

6. Manage Time

If they veer off track, politely interject and re-focus the discussion on key topics.

7. Show Active Listening

Use cues like “mhmm”, nodding, and eye contact to show you’re engaged.

8. Close on a Positive Note

End by summarizing key points and thanking them sincerely for their time and insights.

With practice, you’ll gain confidence and learn to have insightful, natural conversations that uncover real user needs and perspectives. Mastering interview moderation is an indispensable skill for UX researchers.

Tips for Remote Moderated User Interviews

Remote moderated testing is growing in popularity. Here are 5 tips for effectively conducting remote interviews:

1. Choose the Right Technology

Select a web conferencing platform with screen sharing, recording capabilities, and reliability. Test beforehand.

2. Mimic In-Person Interviews

Position the webcam at eye level. Use a neutral background without distractions.

3. Observe Body Language

Look for visual cues through the webcam like facial expressions, posture, and fidgeting.

4. Keep Participants Engaged

Use warm-up questions and periodically summarize. Over video, it’s easier for people to disengage.

5. Have a Backup Plan

Get the participant’s phone number in case you need to switch to audio-only due to tech issues.

With the right tools and preparation, remote interviews can uncover just as many insights as in-person sessions. Use video best practices to help participants feel comfortable opening up from a distance.

User Interview Best Practices

Keep these tips in mind throughout the user interviewing process:

• Listen more than you speak
• Remain neutral – don’t agree or disagree with responses
• Treat participants as experts, not subjects
• Go off script to explore unplanned but relevant tangents
• Probe on interesting topics if it aligns with research goals
• Watch for signs of frustration, confusion, excitement etc.
• Thank the participants sincerely for their time and insights!

Key Takeaways

Well-executed user interviews provide incredibly valuable qualitative data directly from the source. With proper preparation and moderation focused on building rapport and trust, you gain deep insights into user perspectives, emotions, and needs.

To conduct effective interviews:

• Clearly define research goals upfront
• Recruit representative participants
• Create an interview guide
• Use strategic moderation techniques
• Take thorough notes
• Synthesize findings across interviews

The rich insights uncovered through user interviews lead to more innovative solutions that align with real user needs and desires. They are an indispensable UX research method.

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Partha Chakraborty

Partha Chakraborty is a venture capitalist turned entrepreneur with 17 years of experience. He has worked across India, China & Singapore. He is the founder of Tactyqal.com, a startup that guides other startup founders to find success. He loves to brainstorm new business ideas, and talk about growth hacking, and venture capital. In his spare time, he mentors young entrepreneurs to build successful startups.

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The Complete Guide to Conducting UX Research Interviews

Forbes says that every dollar invested in UX yields $100. That’s an impressive 9,900% ROI . However, you can’t create a product for the user if you don’t know what they need. One of the best ways to get data that improves product design is to ask the user.

UX research interviews help researchers, product teams , and UX designers to create better user experiences. The insight you gather helps you understand the needs, wants, and pain points of your target audience.

So, how do you determine who will use your product? Which demographics should you target? How do you design questions that generate the most insight for you? These are some of the questions we’ll be answering.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• What is a UX research interview?
• When and why to conduct user interviews
• How to recruit participants for user interviews?
• How to prepare for a user interview
• How to conduct user interviews?
• Framing interview questions to uncover insight
• Turning interviews into research findings

What is UX research?

UX research is the study of user interaction to obtain insights that improve the design process. With UX research, you can create products and solutions that cater to a user’s needs. The primary goal of UX research is to build products for the end-user based on real data not what you think the user wants.

For example, United Airlines increased online ticketing by 200% and doubled the number of daily sessions by conducting UX research to better understand their audience.

UX researchers employ various research methods to gather data and uncover design opportunities. Most researchers start the UX research process with qualitative measures to determine the user’s needs and motivations. However, they also use quantitative methodologies to test their findings.

What Is A User Interview?

UX interview is a qualitative UX research method performed with prospective users of a product during early concept development. It’s a popular technique that allows researchers to cover related topics around the user’s motivations, feelings, and even how they use various products.

During user interviews, the UX researcher asks participants questions around behavior, use of a system, and habits to learn more about a specific topic.

Whereas multiple users are interviewed at once in focus groups, user interviews are one-on-one sessions, usually with several interviewers.

To ensure success, you must define the topic of the interview and choose the right participants for your target group.

When Should You Conduct User Interviews?

Exploration.

According to Interaction Design Foundation , organizations that invest in UX during a project’s concept phase reduce product development cycles by 33 to 50%. Also, the cost of fixing errors after development is 100x more than before development.

Conduct user interviews at the start of the project before you have a clear concept. Data from UX interviews provide a better understanding of different aspects of your user’s daily lives as it relates to the project.

User interviews can also be used when you have an early model. You learn flaws in the product and use the feedback to improve the user experience.

In this scenario, context shows how the product will be used in the user’s domain such as the office, workstation, or daily routine. The insight could form the basis for future user research such as questions to ask in larger surveys.

Observations

After launch, you can combine interviews with observing user actions to see how users interact with your product. Interviews don’t always provide sufficient insight because it’s difficult for users to explain how to use your solution in daily activities.

Contextual inquiry integrates observation and interviews. You ask participants a question and observe them perform an activity with your product. The participant also walks you through their interaction so you can ask follow-up questions after.

Why Should You Conduct User Interviews?

The User Knows Best

According to Acquia, 53% of consumers feel that brands do not meet their experience standards. Dozens of UX research methods are focused on validating ideas, concepts, and designs with a goal to answer the question; “Does this product work?”

The answer is based on a deep understanding of the human psyche, previous knowledge of the problem, and rationality.

However, interviews are more flexible and informal. The structure ensures that you’re getting answers from users to inform product design.

Also, user interviews help you to plug knowledge gaps in your product. Finding information that you weren’t necessarily looking for (good or bad) could make all the difference in a successful product launch.

Gain Deeper Insights Into Topics

If you have a problem that requires further research, user interviews help you to understand the user’s experience or opinion about a concept or product.

It’s a more intimate setting to listen to your target audience talk about an issue and gain a deeper understanding of the topic. They highlight the best features of the product and areas of improvement.

More than just words, you’re listening for clues around how they express themselves when talking about pain points, wishes, and needs.

Humanize Your Product

One of the key steps in conducting user research interviews is to create personas. Each user segment is represented by a name, face, job, and other key demographics you associate with your ideal user.

Each time you conduct an interview, you can check if personas accurately represent your target audience or if there was an important feature you left out when considering demographics.

More importantly, you connect with your audience as humans and understand how the problem affects their daily lives. The insight from such personalized interactions leads to better product integration in their lives.

How to Recruit Participants For UX Research Interviews

1. Decide Whom to Recruit

As a rule of thumb, you should recruit participants that represent your end-users. Characteristics could be as narrow or broad as the scope of the project. However, it’s crucial to have a diverse group and to consider accessibility, such as how disabled users would interact with your design.

To prevent bias, avoid recruiting your colleagues, family members, or close friends. They may feel obliged to say nice things about the product which defeats the purpose of the research.

Also, avoid recruiting many participants from one profession. Interaction Design describes this risk as deformation professionelle .

For example, if you’re creating a robot vacuum and you only invite women 35 and older, you risk alienating men or younger people who may have a need for the product. This demographic provides feedback based on their knowledge of similar solutions and it could lead to dysfunctional products that are unable to please. Make sure you’re capturing participants across all segments of your audience.

However, none of this would be possible if you haven’t mapped out buyer personas to guide recruitment.

2. Build Research Panels

Building a database of prospective research participants requires time investment. However, it creates a sustainable process for finding research candidates quickly. A research panel also ensures that you’re contacting people who are interested in your product.

Use the following research methodologies to help:

3. Through Customer Support

Since customer support teams have direct interactions with customers, they can help you identify participants for research projects. They regularly get feedback from customers who want to suggest future product improvements or complain about features that aren’t working for them.

4. Live Intercepts

Live intercept is an affordable way to capture users in real-time as they’re doing tasks. You can use tools like Ethnio to identify and screen website uses who may be a good fit for your research.

Neilsen Norman used this technique to recruit participants for a moderated usability study aimed at evaluating the success of their content.

Image Source: NNN Group

If users qualify, you can schedule a conversation and include other researchers to observe remotely .

5. Social Media

Social media is a great way to show your target audience that you’re invested in improving product experience as well as promoting the role of research in your company.

If you have a decent to a large following on social media platforms, ask your followers if they would like to participate in your research project.

For example, if your target audience is a group of mums with toddlers, you could search Facebook for relevant communities. Here’s a sample result

Conversely, if the product is for SaaS founders, you could find participants both on Facebook and LinkedIn communities.

Where does your target audience hang out? That’s where you want to be.

6. Search Online communities

Similar to social media, online communities like Reddit and Slack channels have ready-made participants waiting for you.

If you’re creating software to improve product design, you’d want a group of product designers for your user interview. I searched Google for “product design Slack” and this featured snippet came up.

How to Conduct User Interviews?

Before the interview

Screen participants.

At this stage, you have a list of participants, but not everyone is going to be a great fit for your project. Screening user research participants help you find candidates who represent your ideal target audience.

A few tips to help ensure screening success include:

• Define the attributes you want to see in participants such as behaviors, psychographics, and demographics
• Ensure you have a diverse pool of candidates
• Write down your screener questions based on the attributes above
• Ask qualifying questions at the beginning of the survey
• Use a survey tool to build a library of screening questions
• Use accessible language and avoid jargon-speak
• Limit the number of open-ended questions
• Keep the screener short and precise
• Start broad and get narrow as you progress

Determine Incentives for Participants

Incentives are a great way to entice participants for UX research. When determining incentives, make sure it’s commensurate with the time and efforts of participants or you’ll risk a low response rate.

Ensure that people aren’t signing up just for the money or their responses might not be as insightful. An NN Group research found that 63% of incentives are monetary, 13% received a mix of monetary and non-monetary incentives and 9% didn’t receive an incentive.

However, non-monetary incentives tend to be the norm for remote interviews. An Amazon gift card or prepaid visa card ensures participants show up and are engaged during the interview process.

Set Clear Goals

It’s crucial that you have a clear purpose for each interview project.

A few questions to guide you here include:

• What information do I need from our users?
• How will the knowledge inform the UX design process?
• What do stakeholders want to learn from the research?

Make sure stakeholder goals are realistic. Broad goals make it impossible to get feedback that is relevant to your UX design needs.

Prepare for the Interview

Allocate sufficient time for each interview and prep time between interviews. You’ll need to go through your interview guide to feel confident when starting the interview.

Write Down Your UX Research Interview Questions

Never go into a user interview without a discussion guide. This is not the place to “wing it”. A discussion guide is a document that contains a list of questions to ask research participants. It must be tied to the purpose of the research and chosen according to your learning goal.

Preparing a list of questions ensures that you will:

• Include your team’s feedback in the interview process
• Write clear and concise question
• Cover all the questions you wanted to ask, which wouldn’t be possible on the spot

Here are Some User Interview Questions to Get the Most Insight

Discovery Questions

• Tell us about yourself and your background?
• How did you feel before this product?
• What are the problems you want this product to solve for you?
• How did you feel after you started using this product?
• If this company went out of business, what alternative would you use instead?
• What do you like about the product?
• What do you dislike about the product?
• What apps do you use regularly for the tasks?
• What is the hardest part of completing the task?
• Please describe your experience with… or how you use the product?
• How much do you know about this topic?
• How often do you use similar products?
• What exactly do you use the product for?
• Why do you use the product?
• What could be done to make the product better for you?

Questions to Gather User Behavior

• How would you describe your current or past experience with the product, app or website?
• What is the most important task you need to perform with the product?
• How do you navigate to the product? If it’s a website or app, do you use search engines, enter the URL directly or bookmark the site?
• What do you often look for that's missing or hard to find when using this product or application?
• If you had a question about this product do you know who to contact? If yes, whom would you contact?

Question About Past and Future Use

• Can you recall a past situation when you faced a challenge with this problem? What did you do?
• What’s your most memorable interaction with the product?
• If you could picture it, what does the ideal product experience look like?
• What are the most important features of the product?
• How do you usually access the product? Via desktop, tablet, or mobile? (If the product is a software or website)
• What would make you stop using this product?

Specific Task Questions

• Could you show me how you use the product to perform the task?
• Assume that I’ve never used this product before. How would you guide me so I can do it myself next time?
• Walk me through your process for using the product to complete a task
• Do you include other tools alongside the product?
• If yes, can you show me how you integrate the tools and what functions they perform?

Follow Up Questions

Use follow-up questions to dig deeper into a topic. Most times, the participant won’t be clear enough with their answer, and follow-up questions help you to better understand their point of view.

Use the Five Whys Technique to drill down to the root of the problem by asking “why” five times. Without asking “why” you may misinterpret the motivations for the research participant.

However, it’s also important to know when to stop. You’ve uncovered the problem when the question “why” doesn’t yield any useful response and can’t go any further.

Other examples of follow up questions include:

• You said… can you explain a bit more about that point?
• What do you mean by…
• Interesting, could you give me an example or elaborate to help me understand better?
• To be clear, it sounds like you’re saying… is that correct?
• What was it about the product that made you say…
• Why don’t you like…

Question to Close the Interview

• Would you recommend this product to someone else? If yes, why? If not, why?
• Is there any question we haven’t asked that you think would be valuable to our research?
• Is it okay if I reach out with more questions regarding this project?
• Do you have any questions for me?

During the interview

Make your interviewee feel comfortable.

Take a deep breath and smile before you enter the interview room. According to Psychology Today , a smile is a powerful tool to improve your mood and make you feel happy. Since positivity is contagious, research participants will feel more at ease during the interview.

Also, dress casually rather than wearing a formal outfit so it doesn’t feel like a job interview. Tell them you’re here to test a product, not the participant.

With remote interviews, start with small talk to loosen them up. Introduce yourself, tell them about the research, and summarize their rights and terms of participation.

Use a Semi-Structured Interview Format to Encourage Dialogue

In a semi-structured interview, you don’t follow a formal list of questions. Rather than yes or no questions, you ask open-ended questions that allow for discussion.

A semi-structured interview encourages a two-way conversation that leads to a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Since the interviewee is at ease, they are more likely to expand on experiences and techniques that offer better insight.

Resist the Urge to Educate

Curiosity and an open mind are key ingredients to a good interview. You’re there to learn, not teach. Do not judge or correct your interviewee no matter how silly their answers seem. Your goal is to get as much information during the limited time for the interview.

Build Rapport with Participants

Building rapport encourages participants to share their thoughts and opinions. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. You’re walking into a room to speak with strangers. Subconsciously, you censor your thoughts and withhold information because you’re not sure what to say.

Rapport equals a good connection. If participants trust you, they are more forthcoming in their answers.

A few tips to help you build rapport during UX interviews include:

• Be accommodating
• Keep your body language open at all times
• Remove barriers between you and the participant
• Make eye contact
• Show interest

Avoid Leading Questions that Frame the User’s Answer

Leading questions prompt the interviewee to provide a predetermined answer. The question contains information that leads to a biased answer.

Let participants tell you what they think with their words. Don’t fear the silence that takes longer than normal. Sometimes, people need a minute to gather their thoughts and provide a cohesive answer.

It’s important to have a partner with you during the interview. One person is taking notes and out of camera focus. The second person is asking questions and listening to the interviewee.

Practice asking follow-up questions to show the participant that you’re paying attention. Use smiles and head nods to engage physically.

The space between the note taker and interviewer should be clear. During remote sessions, you could turn off the camera for the note-taker so it’s easier for the interviewer and interviewee to focus on each other.

After the interview

Ask permission to use the recording.

If you’re recording the conversation, make sure participants give consent to being recorded as well as how you plan to use the recording. It’s also important that they know they can stop the recording at any point in the interview if they become uncomfortable.

Say Thank You and Wrap Up

After the interview, leave time for questions and thank the research participant for their time. This is polite and offers them a chance to ask questions. If they have any feedback on how you could better conduct interviews in the future, now’s a good time to ask.

How to Analyze User Interviews with Aurelius

After conducting the interviews with all the participants, the next step is to analyze the research . You probably have dozens of notes, videos, and audio recordings to go through. Qualitative data like this could be overwhelming if you don’t know what to do.

This is where Aurelius shines best. Here are a few ways Aurelius helps you make sense of user interview data:

Turn Spreadsheets, Videos, Audio Files and More Into Notes

Create a new project, upload your research notes , spreadsheets, video, and audio recording with the magic uploader. If you’ve got data elsewhere, use the bulk input feature to copy and paste data.

Transcribe your video/audio recording into notes automatically.

Here’s a video showing you how to get notes into Aurelius

Find Information Quickly With Tags

Make sense of your research data with our powerful project tags . Use this feature to find or describe your user interviews quickly.

A few examples of tags to use include:

• Name of interviewee
• Research goals
• Questions asked during the interview
• Name of product or topic

Look for Patterns With Keywords

Looking for patterns or words that come up repeatedly? Use the keyword feature to highlight patterns and find the most used words across all your user interviews.

Highlight Your Major Findings With Key Insights

Use key insights to write down summaries of what you learned from each user interview. It’s a great way to share high level points of the research without asking stakeholders to read all the data.

Make Suggestions With Recommendations

Want to suggest next steps based on key insights? Use the recommendations feature to capture suggestions, action items, or outcomes. Link key insight to provide more context to your recommendations. Aurelius automatically adds your recommendations to the report.

Share Reports And Presentations with Project Stakeholders

Reporting is a breeze with Aurelius. We automatically turn recommendations and key insights from your project into reports that you can edit, design, and share with teammates and project stakeholders. You can customize your reports with documents, text, boxes, and lines.

You can also share a live link to your report, download a pdf or send it via email.

Done Right, User Interviews Help Design Teams to Build User-Friendly Products

You can't build a product for the user without gathering their input. Conduct user interviews to uncover meaningful answers that improve user experience.

Combine user interviews with other research techniques such as user surveys and usability testing to either disprove or validate your hypothesis. When you’ve gathered sufficient data, use Aurelius to sift through the information, find insight, make recommendations and create shareable reports.

Learn how Aurelius can help you organize research data and analyze information from your UX interviews

Complete Guide to User Interviews: Definition, Benefits, and How to Conduct

11 Min Read User interviews are one of the best ways to gain a comprehensive understanding of your best customers. When conducted effectively, they give you the insights you need to accelerate your business growth.

Written by UserInput Team

Quick navigation.

User interviews are a valuable tool for gaining a comprehensive understanding of your users. When conducted effectively, interviews can provide deep insights into your users’ goals, perceptions, and experiences.

Conversely, conducting interviews poorly can lead to inaccurate information that steers the design of your site in the wrong direction.

In this article, we explore the fundamental principles of conducting successful user interviews.

What is a User Interview?

A user interview is a qualitative research method used to gather information and insights from users or potential users of a product, service, or system. It involves conducting one-on-one conversations with individuals who represent the target audience or user group.

The main objective of a user interview is to understand the users’ needs, behaviors, preferences, and challenges related to the product or service being developed. By directly engaging with users, you can gather valuable feedback, uncover user expectations, and gain a deeper understanding of their experiences and perspectives.

During a user interview, the interviewer typically asks open-ended questions to encourage participants to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The questions can cover a wide range of topics, such as the users’ goals, tasks they want to accomplish, their pain points, satisfaction levels, and suggestions for improvement.

User interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or through video conferencing tools. They can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, depending on the research goals and the level of flexibility needed. The interviews are usually recorded or documented to ensure accurate capturing of the insights and to allow for later analysis.

The findings from user interviews provide valuable input. They help uncover user needs and inform design decisions, leading to the creation of products and services that better meet user requirements and expectations.

Why are User Interviews Important?

User interviews play a pivotal role in the design and development for several reasons.

Deep understanding of your users

User interviews facilitate a deep understanding of your actual users. By engaging in one-on-one conversations, you can gather valuable insights into users’ goals, motivations, behaviors, and challenges. This understanding forms the foundation for creating products and services that align with user needs.

Uncover needs and preferences

By asking open-ended questions and actively listening to users’ responses, user interviews help you identify pain points, unmet needs, and areas where current solutions fall short. This knowledge guides the decision-making process and ensures that the final product addresses the specific requirements of the target audience.

Obtain validation and feedback

By sharing prototypes or design concepts with users, you can obtain firsthand input and validate your original assumptions. This feedback loop enables you to iterate and refine your designs, resulting in more user-centric and effective solutions.

Minimize assumptions and biases

By actively involving users in the design process, you can gain an external perspective and challenge your own preconceptions. This leads to more objective decision-making and reduces the risk of creating products that are based solely on internal assumptions.

Moreover, user interviews foster iterative improvement. By conducting interviews at different stages of the design process, you can gather continuous feedback, test new concepts, and make iterative refinements. This iterative approach ensures that the final product is constantly evolving and improving based on user insights.

Limitations of User Interviews

In contrast to behavioral data, which captures users’ real interactions with a website, interview data is self-reported, reflecting users’ perceptions and emotions. Self-reported data, including interview data, has its limitations due to the following reasons:

• Flawed human memory: People may not fully or accurately recall events, leading to potential gaps or inaccuracies in the information they provide during interviews.
• Selective reporting: Participants may not always know what specific details are relevant to the interviewer, and as a result, they may omit certain information. Minor interactions might be considered insignificant and therefore left out.
• Individual characteristics: Participants differ in their personality traits and tendencies. Some individuals may be proud or private, while others may be shy or easily embarrassed. These factors can influence their willingness to share certain details with a stranger, affecting the completeness and openness of the information provided.

Approach your interview data with a critical mindset and acknowledge its potential limitations. Combining multiple data sources from different research methods can help mitigate these limitations and provide a more comprehensive understanding of user experiences.

When Should You Conduct a User Interview?

Whether you’re developing a site, app, or product, user interviews can offer valuable insights throughout various stages of the development process. However, there are three specific times when they hold particular significance:

• Initial project phase: Before a clear concept has been established, conducting interviews gives you a better understanding of potential users and their wants and needs. Gathering information upfront helps you create potential solutions.
• Early stages of product development: When a product team has a preliminary model or concept, involving users in the process can provide valuable feedback. Sharing the prototype with users allows for user-centered improvements and refinements.
• Post-launch stage:  Interviews conducted after the product has been released can be combined with observation in what is known as a contextual inquiry . These interviews take place within the context of users interacting with the product, offering valuable insights into user behavior and usage patterns.

Each of these interview stages contributes to a holistic understanding of your users and helps you develop user-centric solutions.

How to Conduct User Interviews

We’ve covered the basis of user interviews. Now let’s walk through the steps of conducing one.

1. Find participants who represent your audience

It’s important to find test participants who closely match your actual users, otherwise the feedback you collect won’t be valuable. Conduct a preliminary survey prior to inviting test participants. Make sure their demographics, psychographics, backgrounds, and motivations match your audience.

Here are some great places to find test participants :

2. Put yourself in a positive mood

Before starting the user interview, take a deep breath and put a smile on your face. Psychologically, smiling creates a more positive attitude , and positive attitudes are infectious. If you’re in a good mood, your interviewee will feel better about the experience as well.

3. Set a goal for the interview

Before starting the interview, it’s important to have a goal in mind. Don’t settle on something generic, such as “learn about our users.” That won’t focus your questions on what’s relevant.

Come up with a concise goal that’s related to specific user behavior or attitudes. For instance, you might aim to learn what terms people search for to find products like yours, whether they enjoy using your product customizer, or whether they can successfully follow your return process.

It’s okay to have multiple goals for a user interview, as well, provided you have enough time to address them during the session. Just make sure they are focused and relevant.

4. Choose your interview format

User interviews can be structured, unstructured, or somewhere in between called semi-structured. In a structured interview, all questions are prescription. There is no deviation from the script. In an unstructured interview, there is an open dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee that differs from previous interviews.

Semi-structured interviews are most common. This is where you prepare a set of topics, but have the freedom to change the order of questions and add questions where appropriate. Semi-structured interviews feel more natural and offer the flexibility to dig into topics you didn’t expect to arise.

Focus groups are another possible option, but they usually aren’t suitable for user interviews. One person’s feedback can bias the rest of the group.

Here’s how the different types differ :

5. Build a rapport with interviewee

At the beginning of the interview, it’s important to put the interviewee at ease. You need to earn their confidence and make them feel comfortable so they give you honest information. Here are some tips to quickly build a rapport:

• Greet the interviewee by name and offer a warm welcome. Thank them for their contribution. Engage in some small talk if you think that’s appropriate.
• Use positive body cues, such as maintaining eye contact (but not in a creepy way), smiling, and nodding as they speak. Avoid negative cues, such as crossing your arms, frowning, fidgeting, or seeming distracted.
• Explain the purpose of the interview and how you plan to use the results. Give the interviewee more context about why you need this information and the types of questions you’ll ask. This will make them less confused.
• Stick to the product. You don’t want the interviewee to feel like they are being tested, criticized, or evaluated in some way.

6. Ask permission before recording (video or audio)

While note-taking is the prevailing method of data collection in user interviews, audio or video recording can also be an effective way to gather information. However, it is crucial to obtain the participants’ consent before recording.

Prior to commencing the interview, always ask for permission to record, and be prepared to cease the recording immediately if the interviewee expresses discomfort or refuses. Respecting the participants’ privacy and comfort should remain a top priority throughout the entire interview process.

7. Test your visuals and technology

Before starting the interview, make sure that all of the hardware and applications you plan to use are operational. Ensure that your internet connection is reliable. You may find it helpful to ask a friend to do a quick rehearsal with you.

If you plan to use any visuals, links, or other materials during the user interview, pull them up ahead of time on your computer. Make sure to hide anything confidential.

8. Design your interview questions

Never  start an interview without preparing your questions beforehand! Before the interview, it’s helpful to design a full discussion guide. This document includes all of the questions you might ask.

Your discussion guide should be closely tied to the purpose of your research, and the questions should be selected according to your learning goal. It should also include questions you might ask if you have time, as well as follow-up questions for cases where the test participant gives an unexpected answer.

Discussion guides typically have two types of questions: general and product-specific. A general question might be something like:

• Could you tell me about your habits?
• What does your daily schedule look like?
• How do you typically solve this problem?

Product-specific questions focus on your product, such as your website or app. Here are some examples:

• What did you find hard about [the task]?
• What could we do to make [the task] easier for you?
• How long does it take to use [the feature]?
• How did you feel when using [the feature]?

UX Knowledge Base has a great guide on asking good questions :

Your discussion guide is a living document. Iterate on it over time as you get better at conducting user interviews. For instance, if a test participant provides an especially useful piece of information, you might ask future participants questions on the same topic. It’s also okay to abandon questions that continually fail to work.

9. Focus on problems, no solutions

Generally speaking, users don’t know what they want. They aren’t the right people to ask for suggested features or solutions because they aren’t designers and developers. Think of the possibly apocryphal quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Instead, focus your questions on their problems. What do they want to achieve? What do they consider a “win?” How do they envision their life after making their problem vanish?

10. Ask follow up questions

As your participants answer questions, don’t be afraid to ask follow up questions based on their responses. (This is the major benefit of the semi-structured format.) Try using the Five Whys  technique. Ask “Why?” multiple times (up to five) until you get to the real meat of their answer.

If you aren’t sure what the participant means, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification. An answer you don’t understand is useless to you. Ask for elaboration, context, or even an anecdote to help you understand what they  mean.

If a user mentions something particularly interesting, ask them to show you on their device. For instance, if they report being unable to find your discounted products in your navigation, have them show you what their screen likes and where they looked.

11. Offer some closing remarks

Towards the end of the interview, it is crucial to spend a few minutes wrapping up and allowing for any unexpected information to surface. Invite the user to share anything they haven’t had the chance to mention yet.

Try concluding the interview with a question like, “Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?” This creates an opportunity to uncover new insights that may be valuable for your research. If the user responds with enthusiasm and says, “Yes, I’d love to tell you about this product I use all the time…” it opens up a new source of inspiration for ideation. Providing space for users to share unprompted information allows for unexpected discoveries.

Some effective questions to ask at the end of an interview include:

• “Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?”
• “Is there anything we didn’t discuss today that you think is important?”
• “What’s one thing that I haven’t mentioned yet but you believe I should know about?”

Then, express gratitude to the users for their time. Take a moment to review your notes or jot down any notable observations that stood out during the interview. Ideally, having another person present to assist with note-taking or recording the session for later review is beneficial.

What to Avoid During an User Interview

Now that you know how to conduct a user interview, here’s what not to do.

Don’t judge or educate the interviewee

The purpose of the user interview is to learn from them, not teach them. If they feel judged, they may withhold information. Besides, you have a limited amount of time to conduct the interview. Don’t waste it on activities that don’t help you learn.

Don’t ask leading questions

Leading questions  can influence the interviewee’s response by guiding them towards a specific answer. It is important to avoid the use of leading questions during interviews to prevent bias and ensure more objective results. When questions are framed in a leading manner, there is a risk of only hearing what you want to hear, distorting the outcomes of the interview sessions.

For instance, consider the question, “How often do you watch Hulu?” This question assumes that the interviewee is an active Hulu user, potentially influencing their response. To maintain neutrality and obtain unbiased insights, ask questions in a more neutral manner.

A better approach would be to start with an open and neutral question such as, “Do you have any experience with any video streaming services?” This allows the interviewee to provide their own experiences and opinions without any preconceived assumptions, leading to more genuine and valuable responses.

Don’t be afraid of silence

It’s not uncommon to experience moments of silence during a user interview. Don’t feel like you have to fill this space with unnecessary words. Instead, use these moments as an opportunity to allow the interviewee to provide additional information willingly. By giving them space to gather their thoughts or share more insights, you create a conducive environment for richer and more meaningful responses.

Don’t make assumptions – ask the stupid questions

Asking basic questions is crucial in avoiding the oversight of important information that might be assumed or overlooked. Basic questions also serve as a helpful technique to ease interviewees into the conversation, fostering comfort and engagement.

For example, you might initiate user interviews with a question like, “What does your organization do, and how does your role contribute to it?” Although you may already possess some knowledge of the answers, you’ll often discover additional details and nuances that prove valuable for follow-up inquiries or when constructing user scenarios.

Avoid asking closed questions

Closed questions are questions that elicit a “yes” or “no” response. They don’t naturally solicit any valuable information. For instance, if you ask, “Do you use our product every morning?” the interviewee might respond “yes” without elaboration. A better question would be, “Could you tell me how often you use our product?”

Avoid vague questions

Vague questions are ambiguous and difficult to understand. They tend to confuse your test participants. In some cases, they make interviewees feel guilty for not understanding. To determine if any of your questions are vague, test them on random people to see if they understand the question’s meaning and the kind of answer you’re looking for.

Never mention other users

A quick way to prejudice answers is to compare the interviewee to other users. Here’s an example of a bad question : “A lot of people say our navigation is simple. Do you agree?”

In this case, you just told them that people find the navigation easy. If they find the navigation confusing, they may hold back for fear that you’ll think they’re stupid. People want to fit in,  so they’ll often agree with the crowd, even if they really don’t.

Instead, focus on open-ended questions that don’t assume anything. Here’s a good alternative: “Please describe your experience with the website’s navigation.”

User Interviews Made Easy

User interviews play a vital role in gaining valuable insights into user behavior, preferences, and needs. By conducting thorough interviews and understanding the purpose behind them, we can gather the necessary information to improve our products and designs. Ultimately, user interviews empower us to create better user experiences and drive the success of our projects.

Like most businesses, you don’t have time to conduct your own user interviews. Recruiting people in your target market to provide feedback on your shopping experience is hard.

Let UserInput handle it for you. We let you set up a new research project in just a few clicks, so you can get the input you need while still making progress on your other goals. Our managed customer research service  pairs you with real people in your target market to collect unfiltered feedback about your shopping experience.

The company that understands its customer the best always wins. Our done-with-you research services make sure that company is yours. Start a research project today .

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Customer Research

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Top 20 User Research Interview Questions & Answers

Master your responses to User Research related interview questions with our example questions and answers. Boost your chances of landing the job by learning how to effectively communicate your User Research capabilities.

User research is the cornerstone of creating products that not only meet but exceed user expectations. As someone who delves deep into understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations, you’re on the front lines of helping businesses tailor their offerings to the demands of the market. And when it comes to landing a role in this insightful field, your ability to communicate the value of your findings is just as important as the research itself.

Preparing for an interview in user research means readying yourself to discuss methodologies, share how your insights have influenced decision-making, and demonstrate your empathy for users. To assist you in making a compelling case for why you’re the best candidate for the job, we’ve gathered a collection of typical user research interview questions. These will help you articulate your approach and past experiences effectively, ensuring that potential employers grasp the depth of your expertise.

Common User Research Interview Questions

1. how do you ensure representativeness in your user research sample.

Delving into the demographics and behaviors of a product’s user base is essential for creating solutions that cater to actual user needs and problems. Ensuring representativeness in user research means that the insights gathered will likely reflect the broader population, leading to more inclusive and effective product development. This question reveals the researcher’s knowledge of sampling methods and their commitment to diversity and inclusion, ensuring that the product doesn’t just serve a narrow or biased segment of users.

When responding to this question, highlight your experience with various sampling techniques such as random sampling, stratified sampling, or quota sampling. Explain how you determine the criteria for representativeness based on the product’s target audience and goals. Discuss any tools or frameworks you use to ensure a diverse group of participants and how you adjust your approach when faced with limitations in recruitment or inherent biases in the sample. Share examples from past projects where your attention to representativeness in your sample led to meaningful insights and outcomes.

Example: “ Ensuring representativeness in user research begins with a clear understanding of the target user base and the specific objectives of the research. I employ stratified sampling when the user base is diverse and can be segmented into distinct groups, ensuring that each segment is proportionally represented. For instance, if the product is used by both teenagers and adults, I would stratify the sample to reflect the actual user distribution across these age groups.

In cases where recruitment poses challenges or the population is less defined, I might opt for quota sampling to guarantee that critical user characteristics are represented in the sample. I’ve utilized tools like online panels and recruitment databases that allow for filtering participants based on specific criteria to achieve this. Moreover, I am always vigilant for potential biases such as over-representation of more accessible or willing participants. In a past project, by recognizing and adjusting for a tech-savvy bias in our initial sample, we uncovered crucial usability issues that would have otherwise been missed, leading to significant product improvements that enhanced user satisfaction across a broader audience.”

2. Describe a technique you use to uncover latent user needs.

Delving beyond the surface, user research aims to understand not just what users say they want but also what they actually need, which they might not even be aware of themselves. Techniques to identify these latent needs are essential for creating products that resonate deeply with users, often satisfying desires they hadn’t articulated. This question discerns whether a candidate has the skill set to reveal insights that can drive innovative design and development, ensuring the end product is not just functional but also emotionally engaging and genuinely useful.

When responding, you should outline a specific technique such as ethnographic field studies, diary studies, or jobs-to-be-done interviews. Explain the process of how you apply the method, emphasizing the importance of empathy and observation in understanding user behavior. Illustrate your answer with a concise example from your experience where this technique led to a meaningful insight that informed product design or improvement.

Example: “ One technique I frequently employ to unearth latent user needs is the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework. By conducting interviews focused on the users’ objectives and the context in which they use a product or service, I can identify the ‘jobs’ they are hiring the product to perform. This approach goes beyond superficial feature requests and digs into the underlying motivations and desired outcomes.

For instance, in a recent study, I used the JTBD framework to understand why users were abandoning an online learning platform. Through in-depth interviews, I discovered that users were not just seeking knowledge; they were looking to achieve personal growth and career advancement. This insight led to a pivot in the platform’s feature set, focusing on personalized learning paths and tangible skill accreditation, which significantly reduced churn. The key was to listen not just to what users said, but to interpret the emotional and social drivers of their behavior, aligning product offerings with their true aspirations.”

3. What metrics do you prioritize when evaluating the success of a new feature through user research?

Playing a pivotal role in understanding how well a new feature is meeting user needs, user research prioritizes certain metrics to discern not only the usability and functionality of a feature but also its impact on user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. The metrics chosen often reflect the specific goals of the feature, whether they’re to streamline a process, increase time spent on a platform, or enhance the overall aesthetic appeal. Moreover, these metrics can reveal discrepancies between expected and actual user behavior, providing actionable insights that drive iterative design improvements and strategic decision-making.

When responding, it’s essential to illustrate a comprehensive understanding of various user research metrics, such as task success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time on task, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and system usability scale (SUS). Articulate how each metric can offer a different lens on user interaction and why it’s important for the specific feature in question. Discuss how you would correlate quantitative data with qualitative feedback to form a holistic view of the user’s experience. Demonstrating a thoughtful approach to selecting and interpreting these metrics can show your aptitude for making data-informed decisions that enhance product design and user satisfaction.

Example: “ When evaluating the success of a new feature, I prioritize a blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics tailored to the feature’s objectives. For instance, task success rate and time on task are critical for understanding the feature’s efficiency and effectiveness; users should be able to complete their intended actions with minimal friction. Error rate and abandonment rate provide insights into potential usability issues, signaling where users encounter problems or choose to disengage.

Complementing these, I look at Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) to gauge overall sentiment and satisfaction, which reflect the feature’s perceived value and impact on user loyalty. The System Usability Scale (SUS) offers a standardized measure of usability, which is particularly useful for benchmarking against industry standards or previous iterations of the product.

By correlating quantitative data like NPS with qualitative feedback from user interviews or usability tests, I can form a nuanced understanding of user experience. This holistic approach ensures that decisions are not solely based on numbers but are enriched with context and user narratives, leading to more user-centric feature enhancements and product development.”

4. Walk us through how you’d design a diary study for a mobile app.

Employing diary studies in user research is a method to understand user behavior and experiences over time, particularly effective for mobile apps where user interaction can be frequent, yet sporadic, and influenced by context. This approach assesses your methodological knowledge and your ability to empathize with users, including how you plan to capture the naturalistic use of the app, your considerations for participant selection, your strategies for encouraging consistent and honest entries, and how you’ll analyze the rich qualitative data you collect.

When responding, start by outlining the goals of the diary study and how they align with the overall research objectives. Discuss your process for participant recruitment, ensuring a diverse and representative sample. Explain how you’ll design the diary study template, keeping it intuitive and not overly burdensome for participants. Detail the tools and technologies you’ll use to facilitate the diary entries, considering the mobile platform’s constraints and advantages. Share your plans for maintaining participant engagement throughout the study duration, possibly including incentives or reminders. Lastly, touch on your approach to data analysis, emphasizing how you’ll extract actionable insights while respecting user privacy and the confidentiality of the diary entries.

Example: “ In designing a diary study for a mobile app, the primary goal is to understand user behaviors, experiences, and pain points over a certain period. This longitudinal insight aligns with our research objectives to refine user experience and inform feature development. Initially, I would recruit a diverse and representative sample of users to capture a broad range of interactions and contexts. This entails strategic selection to encompass varying demographics, usage patterns, and expertise levels with the app.

The diary study template would be crafted to be user-friendly and succinct, encouraging regular and honest entries without causing fatigue. I would leverage in-app prompts and notifications, utilizing the mobile platform’s immediacy to facilitate timely diary entries. To ensure a high response rate and quality data, I’d integrate micro-incentives for completed entries and periodic reminders to sustain engagement.

For data analysis, I’d employ a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative thematic analysis to distill patterns and narratives. This would involve coding entries for recurring themes and sentiment analysis, while also respecting user privacy by anonymizing data. The insights garnered would directly feed into iterative design improvements, ensuring that the app evolves in a user-centered manner.”

5. In what ways have you adapted traditional user research methods for remote testing?

Adapting to digital environments has significantly impacted user research, necessitating the adaptation of traditional methods to suit remote contexts. This question highlights a candidate’s innovation and flexibility in applying user research techniques when direct, in-person interactions aren’t possible. It delves into the researcher’s ability to maintain the integrity and efficacy of their methods while overcoming the limitations posed by distance, speaking to their problem-solving skills, their aptitude for leveraging technology, and their commitment to obtaining actionable insights despite logistical constraints.

When responding, focus on specific adaptations you’ve implemented, such as using online platforms for interviews and surveys, employing remote usability testing tools, or harnessing social media for unmoderated research. Share a brief case study that demonstrates how you’ve translated a traditional method into a remote one, including the challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Emphasize the results and how they compared to in-person research to show that your adaptations were successful.

Example: “ In adapting traditional user research methods for remote testing, I’ve leveraged online platforms to conduct in-depth interviews and surveys, ensuring that the richness of qualitative data is not lost in the absence of physical presence. For instance, I transitioned what would typically be a face-to-face card sorting exercise into an interactive online session using digital tools that allow participants to drag and drop items, closely mimicking the in-person experience. This adaptation not only maintained the integrity of the data collected but also expanded the geographic diversity of our participant pool.

During a recent project, I employed remote usability testing tools that enabled users to share their screens and think aloud as they navigated our product, which was crucial in identifying usability issues that might not have been as evident through traditional lab settings. The challenge was ensuring that users felt comfortable and uninhibited in this remote setup, which I mitigated by providing clear instructions and building rapport at the beginning of each session. The results were highly comparable to in-person research, with the added benefit of increased convenience for participants and cost-effectiveness for our team.”

6. Share an example where you had to pivot your research strategy due to unexpected findings.

Encountering unexpected findings in user research is a test of a researcher’s ability to adapt and reassess their approach. This question seeks to understand a candidate’s problem-solving skills, their capacity to think critically about data, and their willingness to shift directions when the evidence requires it. It also touches on the researcher’s humility and openness to learning—key traits for anyone dedicated to understanding user behavior and needs.

When responding, provide a clear and concise example that demonstrates your adaptability in the face of unexpected results. Detail the original goals and methods, the surprising findings, and the thought process behind your strategic pivot. Emphasize your analytical thinking, your collaborative approach to problem-solving if others were involved, and the positive outcome or learning experience that resulted from the adaptation.

Example: “ In a recent study aimed at understanding user behavior on a new e-commerce platform, the initial research plan was to conduct a series of structured interviews and surveys to gather quantitative data on user preferences and purchasing patterns. However, early into the data collection phase, it became evident that users were experiencing significant navigation issues that were not anticipated, leading to high abandonment rates.

Recognizing the need to pivot, I shifted the focus to a more ethnographic approach, utilizing usability testing sessions and heuristic evaluations to observe users in real-time and identify the specific pain points in their journey. This change in strategy allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the user experience, revealing that the interface’s complexity was the root cause of frustration. The insights gained led to a redesign of the platform’s navigation system, which resulted in a measurable decrease in abandonment rates and an increase in user satisfaction. This experience underscored the importance of agility in research methodologies and the value of qualitative data in complementing quantitative metrics.”

7. Detail your approach to synthesizing qualitative data from user interviews.

Dealing with qualitative data in user research demands a meticulous and analytical approach, as it is rich in detail but often lacks the straightforwardness of quantitative data. The ability to synthesize this type of information is crucial, involving distilling large volumes of diverse user statements, behaviors, and feedback into actionable insights that can guide the design and development of products. Candidates who can demonstrate a systematic and creative approach to this task ensure that the synthesized data accurately reflects user needs and drives innovation.

When responding, outline a structured method that typically begins with data collection, followed by careful organization of the data into themes or categories. Describe how you interpret patterns and sentiments within the data, possibly using specific frameworks or tools like affinity diagrams or journey mapping. Highlight your attention to detail and the ability to remain unbiased while interpreting user feedback. It’s also beneficial to mention how you prioritize findings and translate them into recommendations that stakeholders can understand and act upon, demonstrating your capacity to bridge the gap between user research and practical application.

Example: “ In synthesizing qualitative data from user interviews, my approach is methodical and iterative, ensuring that the insights gleaned are both comprehensive and actionable. Initially, I transcribe and anonymize the data to preserve user confidentiality and prepare for analysis. I then employ thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns and themes, meticulously coding the data to organize it into meaningful categories. This process often involves creating affinity diagrams to visually map out relationships between different user statements and sentiments.

Once the themes are established, I analyze them to understand the underlying user needs and pain points. I pay particular attention to the frequency and intensity of the sentiments expressed, as these can indicate areas of particular importance or concern for users. I also use journey mapping to contextualize findings within the user’s experience, providing a holistic view of their interactions and emotions throughout their engagement with the product or service.

In the final stage, I prioritize the findings based on their potential impact on user satisfaction and business goals, crafting clear and concise recommendations. I present these insights to stakeholders through compelling narratives and visualizations, ensuring they are accessible and can inform strategic decision-making. My approach is designed to provide a deep understanding of the user experience, driving improvements that are firmly rooted in user research.”

8. What’s your experience with A/B testing, and how do you interpret conflicting results?

Navigating the complexities of data interpretation is a critical skill in user research, especially when employing A/B testing to compare two versions of a product. Results from A/B tests can sometimes be conflicting or counterintuitive, challenging researchers to consider user psychology, environmental variables, and statistical significance. This question assesses the candidate’s ability to reconcile data discrepancies to make informed decisions.

When responding to this question, it’s essential to discuss your systematic approach to setting up and conducting A/B tests, ensuring that they are methodologically sound. Share specific examples where you’ve encountered conflicting results and articulate the steps you took to analyze the data, such as segmenting the user groups, checking for external factors, or running follow-up experiments. Emphasize your critical thinking in discerning the actionable insights from the data and how you used these insights to inform product development or strategy decisions.

Example: “ My experience with A/B testing is extensive, encompassing a variety of contexts from user interface design to feature optimization. When interpreting conflicting results, my approach is to first verify the integrity of the test setup. This includes ensuring that the sample size is adequate, the segmentation is appropriate, and the duration of the test is sufficient to mitigate anomalies such as novelty effects or external events.

Upon confirming the test’s validity, I delve into a deeper analysis. For instance, I segment the results to identify patterns that could explain the discrepancies, such as differences in user behavior across devices or demographics. If the conflict persists, I consider qualitative data to complement the quantitative findings, which may involve user interviews or usability studies to uncover motivations behind the behavior. In cases where the conflicting results remain inconclusive, I may run follow-up experiments with refined hypotheses. The insights gleaned from this rigorous process are critical in making informed decisions that align with user needs and business goals.”

9. Outline a plan for conducting usability tests on a limited budget.

Conducting usability testing allows for direct feedback on how real users interact with a product, which can drive crucial design improvements. It’s a common misconception that usability testing requires a hefty budget. Interviewers are keen to learn if candidates can creatively leverage limited resources to still extract meaningful data, ensuring that even when finances are tight, product development remains user-centered.

When responding, emphasize the importance of prioritizing key functionalities and features to test based on the product’s goals and user needs. Discuss the use of low-fidelity prototypes to minimize costs and the value of recruiting a small but diverse group of participants. Explain how remote testing tools can be cost-effective, and how guerrilla testing methods, like approaching people in coffee shops or public areas, can gather quick and inexpensive feedback. Highlight the importance of a clear testing plan that maximizes the limited resources and time available. Finally, stress the value of iterative testing, starting small and using findings to inform subsequent rounds of more focused usability tests.

Example: “ To effectively conduct usability tests on a limited budget, the first step is to prioritize the most critical features and user flows that align with the product’s core objectives and user needs. By focusing on these elements, we ensure that our limited resources are directed towards areas with the highest impact on user experience and business goals. We can use low-fidelity prototypes, such as paper sketches or wireframes, to test these key functionalities early on, which helps to minimize costs associated with high-fidelity prototyping.

Recruiting a small, diverse group of participants is essential for obtaining valuable insights while keeping expenses low. We can leverage remote testing tools that reduce the need for a physical lab and allow users to participate from their own environments, which can also provide more authentic usage data. Additionally, guerrilla testing methods can be employed to gather quick feedback by informally approaching potential users in public spaces. This approach is not only cost-effective but also allows for immediate and spontaneous reactions to the product.

A clear and concise testing plan is crucial to maximize the efficiency of the testing sessions. This plan should outline specific goals, tasks, and questions for participants, ensuring that every minute is used effectively. After initial testing, we analyze the data to identify patterns and actionable insights. Iterative testing is then conducted, refining the focus based on previous findings to delve deeper into usability issues. This cyclical approach ensures that each round of testing is more targeted, making the most of our limited budget while continuously improving the product’s usability.”

10. How would you balance user feedback with business objectives that seem at odds?

Harmonizing the needs and desires of the user with the strategic goals and constraints of the business is a delicate balance in user research. When faced with feedback that seemingly conflicts with business objectives, it’s essential to demonstrate an ability to critically analyze the feedback, prioritize it based on impact, and integrate it in a way that supports the company’s vision without compromising user satisfaction. This question tests a candidate’s capacity for creative problem-solving and their ability to influence product strategy.

In responding, highlight a structured approach to problem-solving that starts with acknowledging the importance of user feedback. Then, discuss how you would evaluate the feedback’s relevance and potential impact on both the user experience and the business goals. Share a specific example where you faced such a conflict and outline the steps taken to find a solution, such as data-driven decision-making, stakeholder collaboration, or iterative testing. Demonstrating a balance between user advocacy and business acumen will show that you can navigate the tension between these two critical aspects of product development.

Example: “ Balancing user feedback with business objectives requires a strategic approach that aligns user needs with company goals. Initially, I prioritize understanding the user feedback in-depth, categorizing it into themes and assessing its frequency and impact. This analysis provides insight into the user’s pain points and desires. Concurrently, I map these findings against the business objectives to identify areas of synergy and tension. For instance, if users are requesting a feature that seems at odds with current business priorities, I would conduct a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the potential return on investment and the long-term value to user satisfaction and retention.

In a previous situation where user feedback indicated a demand for a customization option that initially seemed contrary to our streamlined product strategy, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop with stakeholders to explore the feasibility and implications. We utilized A/B testing to validate the concept on a smaller scale, which provided empirical data on user engagement and conversion rates. The results revealed that the customization feature not only met user expectations but also increased user engagement, leading to higher lifetime value. By presenting this data to stakeholders, I was able to align the user feedback with the business objective of increasing revenue, thus integrating user-centric innovation within the business framework.”

11. Tell us about a time you used ethnographic research in a tech context.

In a tech context, ethnographic research allows for a deep dive into user behaviors, routines, and the cultural context that shapes their interaction with technology. This question evaluates whether a candidate can skillfully observe and analyze user behavior beyond mere numbers and data points, thus ensuring that products are not only functional but also resonate with users on a personal and cultural level.

To respond effectively, share a specific instance where you employed ethnographic methods—such as participant observation, interviews, or diary studies—to gather rich, qualitative data. Explain the rationale behind choosing this approach, the process of integrating into the users’ environment, and how the insights gained directly informed the design or improvement of a tech product or service. Highlight what you learned about the user experience and how it influenced the project’s outcomes, showcasing your ability to translate human behaviors into actionable design decisions.

Example: “ In a recent project, we were tasked with improving the user experience of a mobile health application designed for elderly users. Recognizing the unique challenges faced by this demographic, I conducted ethnographic research to immerse myself in their daily routines and understand their interactions with technology. I utilized participant observation and in-depth interviews, spending time with users in their homes to observe their habits and the barriers they encountered when using the app.

The insights gained were illuminating. For instance, I discovered that subtle design elements, such as button size and contrast, significantly affected usability for users with diminished eyesight and fine motor skills. Additionally, I found that many users were reliant on family members for initial app setup, which indicated a need for a simplified onboarding process. These findings were instrumental in guiding the redesign of the app, leading to an increase in user engagement and a reduction in support calls. This experience underscored the value of ethnographic research in uncovering the nuanced ways in which users interact with technology, allowing us to create solutions that are truly user-centered.”

12. When is quantitative research more valuable than qualitative, and vice versa?

Blending different methodologies is a requirement in user research to understand user behavior, preferences, and needs. Quantitative research offers solid data that can support or refute hypotheses with numerical evidence, while qualitative research provides the rich context and deep understanding that numbers alone can’t offer. This question ensures that candidates not only know the difference between the two but also understand when to leverage each type to inform design decisions, product improvements, and business strategies.

When responding, it’s important to articulate that quantitative research is valuable when you need to quantify problems or answers and gather data that can be scaled to a larger population, such as through surveys or analytics. It’s particularly useful in A/B testing scenarios or when assessing the prevalence of an issue. Conversely, qualitative research is crucial when exploring new territories without preconceived notions, gathering user stories, and understanding the nuances of user experience, which can be achieved through methods like interviews or observation studies. Highlighting your ability to choose the appropriate methodology based on the research goals, project stage, and available resources will demonstrate your strategic approach to user research.

Example: “ Quantitative research is particularly valuable when we need to measure user behavior, attitudes, and opinions across a large sample size to generalize findings. For instance, when validating a hypothesis such as the effectiveness of a new feature, we might employ quantitative methods like surveys or usage data analysis to statistically ascertain its impact on user engagement or satisfaction. This approach is also indispensable for A/B testing, where quantifiable metrics can definitively demonstrate which version performs better in terms of conversion rates or click-throughs.

On the other hand, qualitative research shines when we aim to delve deep into the user’s psyche to uncover motivations, pain points, and contextual usage scenarios that numbers alone cannot reveal. It’s the go-to approach during the early stages of product development or when addressing complex issues that require a nuanced understanding of user behavior. Methods like in-depth interviews or ethnographic studies enable us to capture the richness of user experiences, providing insights that can guide the ideation and design process in a way that quantitative data cannot. The choice between qualitative and quantitative methods hinges on the specific research questions at hand, and a seasoned researcher knows when to leverage the depth of qualitative insights or the breadth of quantitative evidence to inform decision-making.”

13. What strategies do you employ to mitigate researcher bias in studies?

Minimizing personal biases is a critical aspect of user research, as they can skew data and lead to less effective or even misleading outcomes. This question tests a candidate’s awareness of their inherent biases and whether they have concrete strategies to minimize their impact, ensuring that the research findings are reliable and actionable. It also evaluates a candidate’s commitment to objectivity and their understanding of methodological rigor in user research.

When responding, it’s crucial to demonstrate your understanding of various types of researcher biases, such as confirmation bias or cultural bias. Discuss your familiarity with techniques like triangulation, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, or involving a diverse team in the research process to provide different perspectives. You can also mention employing tools like blind studies or establishing clear protocols for data collection and analysis. Show that you’re proactive in seeking feedback on your research approach from peers or mentors to further counteract potential biases.

Example: “ To mitigate researcher bias in studies, I employ a multi-faceted approach that begins with the acknowledgment that bias can manifest in various forms. To counteract confirmation bias, I ensure that the research design includes a hypothesis-testing approach, where both supporting and opposing evidence for our assumptions is rigorously sought and considered. This involves actively searching for disconfirming evidence and being open to results that may challenge preconceived notions.

I also utilize methodological triangulation, combining qualitative and quantitative data to cross-validate findings and draw a more comprehensive picture of user behavior and attitudes. This not only strengthens the validity of the research but also helps in identifying and mitigating biases that might arise from relying on a single method. Furthermore, I advocate for diversity within the research team, ensuring that multiple perspectives are represented in both the planning and analysis stages. This diversity can provide a check against cultural biases and helps in creating a more inclusive research process.

Lastly, I implement blind study techniques when feasible, especially in user testing scenarios, to prevent biases related to participant selection and treatment. Establishing clear, standardized protocols for data collection and analysis is also crucial, as it minimizes the risk of subjective interpretation of data. I maintain a practice of seeking peer feedback on research plans and findings, which serves as an additional layer of defense against personal biases potentially skewing the research outcomes.”

14. How do you handle sensitive information obtained during user research?

Ethical handling of sensitive information is paramount in user research, which often involves gathering personal, sometimes confidential data from participants. Researchers must be adept at navigating privacy concerns while ensuring the information they collect is secure and used responsibly, impacting the integrity of the research process and the validity of the results.

When responding to this question, address the protocols and measures you employ to protect sensitive information. This can include discussing informed consent, data anonymization, secure storage practices, and adherence to relevant laws and ethical guidelines. Emphasize your commitment to confidentiality and the steps you take to ensure that all team members handle data appropriately. It’s also beneficial to mention any experience you have with ethics committees or institutional review boards, which often oversee research involving sensitive information.

Example: “ In handling sensitive information obtained during user research, I prioritize establishing trust and maintaining ethical standards. This begins with obtaining informed consent from participants, clearly communicating the scope of the research, how their data will be used, and their right to withdraw at any time. I ensure that all data is anonymized or de-identified to protect participants’ identities, employing rigorous data encryption and secure storage solutions to safeguard the information collected.

I strictly adhere to relevant data protection laws, such as GDPR or HIPAA, and ethical guidelines set forth by recognized bodies. I also work closely with ethics committees or institutional review boards to ensure that our research protocols meet the highest standards of confidentiality and integrity. Any team members involved in the project are thoroughly briefed on these protocols, and I regularly conduct audits to ensure compliance with our established practices. This comprehensive approach ensures that sensitive information is handled with the utmost care throughout the research process.”

15. Describe how you’ve integrated user personas into product development cycles.

Integrating user personas in product development humanizes data, guiding product development to align with user needs, behaviors, and pain points. This question assesses the candidate’s ability to translate research insights into actionable strategies that steer product design and functionality. It also evaluates the candidate’s experience with collaborative processes and their influence on cross-functional teams to ensure user-centricity throughout the product lifecycle.

When responding, highlight specific instances where you’ve crafted user personas based on thorough research and how these personas informed the product development stages. Discuss collaboration with design, engineering, and marketing teams, ensuring your examples reflect a clear link between the personas and product decisions. Share metrics or feedback that demonstrate the success of using these personas in achieving a more user-focused end product.

Example: “ In one project, I developed user personas by conducting ethnographic studies, surveys, and in-depth interviews to gather comprehensive user data. These personas were then workshopped with cross-functional teams to ensure a shared understanding of our target users’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. By integrating these personas into our agile development cycles, we were able to prioritize features and tailor the UX design to address the specific goals and challenges of our most critical user segments.

The personas became a touchstone for decision-making throughout the product development process. For instance, when debating feature sets, we referred back to the personas to evaluate which features would deliver the most value to our primary users. This approach not only streamlined our prioritization but also fostered empathy within the team, leading to more intuitive design choices. The impact was measurable; after launch, we saw a 30% increase in user engagement and a significant uptick in positive user feedback, validating the effectiveness of the personas in guiding a user-centric development approach.”

16. How have you measured long-term user satisfaction post-product launch?

Post-launch assessment is vital for continuous improvement and ensuring that the product remains relevant and valuable. This question reveals whether the candidate has a comprehensive approach to user research that includes post-launch assessment, their ability to design research that can capture data over longer periods, and their commitment to iterating on a product based on real-world usage.

When responding, it’s crucial to detail specific methodologies used to track long-term satisfaction, such as follow-up surveys, interviews, usage data analysis, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Discuss any tools you’ve employed to gather and analyze this data, like analytics platforms or customer feedback tools. Highlight a particular instance where this long-term data led to significant product improvements or pivots, showcasing your dedication to the user’s evolving needs and the product’s success.

Example: “ In measuring long-term user satisfaction post-product launch, I’ve implemented a mixed-method approach to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. By deploying longitudinal surveys at regular intervals, I’ve been able to track changes in user sentiment over time, which provides a more nuanced understanding of the user experience as it evolves. I’ve complemented these surveys with in-depth interviews to delve into the reasons behind the satisfaction scores, allowing for a richer interpretation of the data.

I’ve utilized Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as a key metric to gauge overall satisfaction and loyalty, and I’ve monitored usage data through analytics platforms to identify patterns and potential pain points. This combination of methods has been instrumental in identifying trends and informing product iteration cycles. For example, a consistent drop in NPS six months post-launch once highlighted an emerging issue with feature discoverability, leading to a targeted update that improved the user interface and ultimately restored user satisfaction levels. This iterative process, informed by ongoing user feedback, ensures that the product remains aligned with user needs and expectations over time.”

17. Give examples of non-traditional user research methods you’ve found effective.

Innovative approaches beyond standard surveys and focus groups are often required to capture authentic user behavior and feedback. This question assesses whether candidates can think outside the box and adapt their research strategies to meet unique project demands, considering the limitations of conventional techniques.

When responding, highlight specific instances where you’ve implemented creative research methods, such as guerrilla testing, diary studies, or utilizing social listening tools. Explain the rationale behind choosing these methods, how they were executed, and what insights they provided that might not have been uncovered through more traditional means. Discuss the impact these findings had on the project’s direction, design decisions, or product development to underscore your ability to translate unconventional research into actionable results.

Example: “ In exploring non-traditional user research methods, I’ve found guerrilla testing to be particularly effective when needing quick, real-world feedback on prototypes or concepts. For instance, setting up impromptu testing stations in public spaces relevant to the product allowed for immediate user interactions and reactions. This method, while less structured, provided raw and authentic insights into user behaviors and preferences that might have been moderated in a more formal setting.

Another technique I’ve utilized is social listening, which has been invaluable for capturing the unfiltered voice of the customer. By analyzing conversations and trends on social media platforms, I was able to identify pain points and desires that users themselves might not have explicitly articulated in a survey or interview. This approach led to the discovery of a niche user need that was not previously considered, driving a pivot in feature prioritization that significantly increased user satisfaction post-launch.

Lastly, diary studies have proven to be a treasure trove of contextual information. By having users document their experiences over time, I was able to observe the natural usage patterns and the evolution of their interactions with the product. This longitudinal data helped in identifying specific moments of delight and frustration, which informed subtle yet impactful refinements in the user interface that enhanced the overall user experience.”

18. What role does competitor analysis play in your user research process?

Competitor analysis in user research sharpens understanding by highlighting what others in the industry are doing right or wrong, revealing gaps in the market, and helping to position a new product effectively. It also provides a benchmark against which to measure user satisfaction and expectations, informing a more strategic approach to product development.

To respond, outline a systematic approach to competitor analysis within your user research process. Describe how you gather data on competitors, such as through feature comparisons, user reviews, or market trends, and how this information informs user personas, journey mapping, or usability testing. Emphasize how competitor insights help prioritize features, inspire innovation, and avoid common pitfalls. Provide a concrete example of how a past competitor analysis impacted a project, demonstrating an understanding of its strategic value in user-centered design.

Example: “ Competitor analysis is a critical component of user research as it provides a landscape view of where our product stands in relation to the market and user expectations. By conducting a thorough analysis of competitors, including feature comparisons, user reviews, and market trends, we can identify gaps in the market and opportunities for differentiation. This process not only informs the development of user personas and journey mapping by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of competing products but also guides usability testing by pinpointing areas where users may experience friction.

For instance, in a past project, competitor analysis revealed that while our product was superior in performance, competitors were excelling in user onboarding. This insight led to a focused redesign of our onboarding process, which significantly reduced user drop-off rates and increased engagement. By integrating competitor insights into our user research, we were able to prioritize features that delivered real value to users, inspire innovation within our team, and circumvent common design pitfalls that could have hindered user satisfaction.”

19. How do you determine when enough research has been conducted on a specific feature or product?

Determining the ‘enough’ point in user research hinges on understanding the research goals, user needs, and the diminishing returns of additional information. Interviewers look for a nuanced appreciation of research scope—recognizing when the gathered data has reached a point of saturation and are adept at maximizing the value of the research within the constraints of time and budget.

When responding to this question, articulate how you set clear objectives at the outset, employ milestones to evaluate progress, and use interim findings to assess whether the research is yielding actionable insights or if it’s veering into the territory of over-analysis. Discuss how you weigh the potential impact of additional data against project deadlines and resource availability. It’s also essential to mention how you stay attuned to the product development lifecycle, ensuring that research findings are timely and can be integrated effectively into the design and decision-making processes.

Example: “ Determining when enough research has been conducted hinges on the clarity of the research objectives and the actionable insights derived from the data. At the outset, I establish specific, measurable goals that align with the project’s needs, which serve as a benchmark for assessing the sufficiency of the research. As the study progresses, I evaluate milestones to gauge whether the insights are contributing to a deeper understanding of user needs and behaviors, and if they’re informing design decisions effectively.

In parallel, I maintain a keen awareness of the diminishing returns on additional data. This involves a critical assessment of whether further information will have a substantial impact on improving the product or if it’s simply confirming existing knowledge. I balance this against project constraints such as deadlines and resource availability. If the research reaches a point where it’s no longer yielding significant new insights or the cost of further investigation outweighs the benefits, I consider the research phase complete. Throughout, I ensure that the findings are integrated into the product development lifecycle in a timely manner, allowing for the research to have a meaningful impact on the final outcome.”

20. What’s your method for prioritizing user pain points when making recommendations?

Prioritizing user pain points is essential for creating products that deliver a satisfying user experience. A methodical approach to this prioritization signals to employers that you can discern the most impactful problems from the myriad of feedback and data, focusing on what will drive meaningful improvements for the user and the business.

When responding, detail your process, which might include categorizing pain points by frequency and severity, assessing the potential impact of resolving each issue, and considering the resources required. Discuss how you weigh user feedback against business goals and technical feasibility. Use specific examples from past experiences to illustrate how your method has led to successful outcomes. It’s important to demonstrate that your approach is both data-driven and empathetic to user needs.

Example: “ In prioritizing user pain points, I first categorize them based on frequency and severity, as these dimensions often indicate the urgency and potential impact of the issue on the user experience. I employ a mix of quantitative data from analytics and qualitative insights from user interviews and usability testing to validate the prevalence and depth of each pain point. Then, I assess the potential impact of addressing each issue, not only on the user experience but also on business metrics such as conversion rates, retention, and customer satisfaction scores.

I balance this assessment with a consideration of the resources required to address each pain point, including development time, costs, and potential technical constraints. This helps in creating a cost-benefit analysis to prioritize issues that can deliver the most value to both users and the business. Additionally, I align the prioritization with the product roadmap and business goals, ensuring that the recommendations for resolving pain points are feasible within the given constraints and timelines. For example, a high-frequency, high-severity issue that aligns with the business objective of increasing user retention would be prioritized over less critical issues. This method has consistently led to targeted improvements that enhance the user experience while supporting business objectives.”

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The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods

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

By Miklos Philips

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is UX Research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top UX Research Methods and When to Use Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons for Doing UX Research

Here are three great reasons for doing user research :

To create a product that is truly relevant to users

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

To create a product that is easy and pleasurable to use

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

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

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

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

What Results Can I Expect from UX Research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

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

Understanding the basics

How do you do user research in ux.

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

What are UX methods?

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

What is the best research methodology for user experience design?

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

What does a UX researcher do?

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

Why is UX research important?

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

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Miklos Philips

Austin, TX, United States

Member since May 20, 2016

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User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them

Learn the essentials of conducting user interviews, including the best times to do them and their significance in UX design. Improve your product by understanding user needs directly.

User interviews are a must for any product team. They give you an idea of what your customers want and need and how they use your product or service.

By engaging in such conversations, you can identify areas that can be improved upon so that the team may better serve its clients. Furthermore, this feedback can also tell you what features work well for people and why future developments should occur.

User interviews are a legitimate platform for participating in consumer research projects and focus groups with numerous participants and reputable partners.

Knowing when and how to conduct user interviews is crucial if one wants their UX design done right . This piece will address why effective user interviews are important, the best time to prepare for them, and tips on making yours successful.

What Are User Interviews and Why Do They Matter

User interviews form an integral part of every product development cycle. These user interviews are a qualitative research method involving talking directly with end-users about their requirements, expectations, and desires regarding a given application or system.

Through this, companies can know how people interact with systems and what could improve their functionalities. In other words, user interviews help gather consumer input. Still, it does not stop there because organizations also need insights into usage patterns to create new elements, fix existing ones, adjust pricing models, and pack according to demand patterns.

Source: Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Depending on its complexity, size, and mission, conducting many interviews at different stages during a project may be necessary. Therefore, as time goes by during projects, these conversations should provide numbers together with qualities that can guide decisions relating to design method testing strategy prioritization features, among other things.

The data collected from user interviews can vary in quality depending on the interviewer's skill, and it is crucial to avoid leading questions to maintain validity.

Additionally, once analyzed, user surveys and interviews highlight bottlenecks or unique opportunities that might have been missed otherwise. Conversing with real people throughout development allows teams to use their feedback to determine where the product should go, ensuring its success within the market.

In general, user interviews remain vital steps in any successful product life cycle such as this since they give you a clue about what works and what doesn’t, enabling your team to optimize its products accordingly.

Advantages of Conducting User Interviews

There are various benefits to interviewing users within a product development setting, the most notable being that it provides direct input, which is invaluable in understanding their needs and wants.

Recruiting and engaging interview participants is crucial to ensure a representative sample of users and gather meaningful insights. The information gathered during these sessions can help organizations learn more about usability feature prioritization.

Another advantage of this approach is that you can test different concepts or prototypes before launching them as products/services. When users participate in interviews, companies can obtain feedback on potential ideas for improvement to adapt before release, especially where several versions have been developed over time.

Participants in user interviews can earn varying pay rates depending on the study and their specialization, with payment options including cash and gift cards.

Source: Sigmund on Unsplash

Finally, user interviews can help firms gain customer loyalty through developing user relationships. Product groups can establish valuable connections that contribute to the betterment of their products and increase customer satisfaction levels by talking to them during all the phases of development, from idea generation to launching.

When to Conduct User Interviews

The timing of user interviews is key to ensuring their success. Different types of user interview studies are conducted at various stages of product development. User interviews studies can be conducted at different stages of product development, from initial concept testing to post-launch feedback.

To get the most out of these conversations, planning for them strategically and conducting them at key points in the product development cycle is important. That way, teams can get the data they need to make informed decisions about future development.

Effective user interviews can be invaluable tools for any product or user research team . They allow you to gain insight into what your users want and need and provide feedback on existing features and products to make informed decisions about future development. In addition, such interviews present opportunities for building customer relationships and ensuring market success by testing ideas before launch.

8 Types of User Interviews

Source: IxDF

User Interview, User Research & UX: A Qualitative Research Method

User interviews are vital for any UX team because of their ability to give direct feedback from the end users. User interviews are one of the many research methods used in user research. Talking with real people who use a product or service team gives insights about how they interact with it and what should be improved. User interviews should be held at various development stages, from the idea stage to the post-launch phase. This will enable designers to choose elements of design usability testing strategies, among others, based on feedback received through different channels during these periods.

A user interview review highlights the platform's earning potential, with participants making between $50 to $150 per hour, and discusses its pros, cons, and legitimacy.

One method used in UX research is user interviews, which help understand users' needs and motivations. This involves gaining a deep understanding of users’ experience with a product or service, where they use it, when they use it, why they don’t like it, etc.

This provides information on desirable/undesirable features according to them, what works and does not work currently (status quo), and opportunities for improvements and new feature requirements, if any. Thus, it indicates whether current solutions meet customers' demands. Such an approach allows designers to develop solutions tailored to user experience.

Source: Austin Distel on Unsplash

Through direct contact between researchers and consumers during research processes, the user research team can easily identify areas where improvement could be realized within the company. Therefore, businesses can determine what works to optimize their products based on customers’ responses from these sessions.

Additionally, qualitative data like customer sentiment may be difficult to measure using traditional analytics. Still, this information is easily obtained through user interviews, making it necessary for organizations to engage in them often.

User interviews also help foster stronger relationships between customers and businesses, leading to higher retention rates and increased revenues over time for a given service or product.

During the development phase, UX teams should talk to users, showing them that their input matters greatly in ensuring a good overall experience. This will create strong bonds between clients, enhancing brand loyalty since they feel valued during such moments.

User interviews can help indicate design and feature prioritization decisions at the start of a project. Teams can learn from people who have used comparable products or services to determine which features are most important to them as customers and which may not be needed. This helps set achievable targets and, accordingly, rank features.

While a project is being developed, user interviews with participants should also be conducted during the usability research and testing phases. Testers should be asked how they feel about certain product parts — such as navigation or features — during this time and what features would make their experience smoother and more satisfying.

Finally, post-launch user interviews can help understand how customers use the product after its release and where further improvement may still be needed. By talking to real users once you’ve launched your service or product, you can learn much more about their sentiments as customers, what bugs need fixing, what could have made things easier for them based on usage patterns observed so far, etc., which will ultimately help inform marketing strategies among other decisions.

Source: CoWomen on Unsplash

User interviews throughout each stage of development provide an interesting resource for product teams by giving them feedback straight from users about their products or services’ interaction at different points in time. This allows developers’ optimization efforts to align better with reality by gaining insights into how clients use these offerings.

Tips for Ensuring a Successful User Interview

Conducting effective user interview sessions is crucial for any product team. Here are some tips on creating compelling user interviews that yield valuable insights.

Firstly, frame questions around specific areas of focus for an interview. Open-ended questions allow more detailed answers and responses, while well-crafted ones give more precise information regarding the subject matter. Also, ask only relevant queries tied directly to what needs to be accomplished within the team’s goals, not to waste people’s time on unrelated matters.

Secondly, it’s important to conduct interviews through focus groups consisting of individuals from diverse backgrounds; this helps reveal different ways people engage with various products or services offered by companies – including those outside its primary target market segment – thereby providing input that shapes subsequent developments.

Focus groups can also be a great way to gather feedback on new ideas and concepts. Participants can discuss and provide insights collectively, often leading to more comprehensive feedback.

Thirdly, during an interview session, ensure neutrality among all parties involved; refrain from pushing personal opinions during interviews and stick to obtaining facts only. Be open-minded throughout the process to receive genuine feedback.

A Structured User Interview Guide

It is important to have a well-structured interview guide in place to make your interviews more effective. An interview guide serves as a roadmap for the interviewer, providing a consistent framework to follow during each session.

It helps maintain focus, ensures all relevant topics are covered, and allows for easier comparison and analysis of responses across different participants.

Source: NNGroup

Here are some key elements to consider when creating a structured interview guide:

• State the objective of the interview: Clarify what you hope to achieve from your user interviews. What do you want to learn? What information do you need? Clearly state why these interviews are being conducted so that this can be used as a basis for asking questions.
• Prepare standardized questions: Develop a set of standardized questions that will act as the main body of your interview. These questions should aim to reveal insights into user needs, pain points, preferences, and behaviors while keeping them open-ended enough for participants to share thoughts and experiences freely.
• Ask probing and follow-up questions: Besides the standard set of questions, plan probing or follow-up ones that let you dig deeper into specific areas of interest. They can bring out more findings, explain ambiguous responses, or explore new avenues. For instance, one may ask, “Can tell me about…” or “Why do think…”
• Plan the order: Arrange your inquiries logically so that there is a smooth transition from one topic to another throughout the conversation during an individual interview session; general – specific inquiries starting point (building rapport), moving through various aspects until the conclusion.
• Allow participant input: Having structure within an interview guide is necessary but not sufficient since it is also important that those being interviewed share their views regarding what they perceive as valuable or not about the particular product under review, etcetera. Therefore, be prepared to adapt during sessions based on responses received from different individuals who may participate in these interviews. Also, participants should be encouraged to ask questions or bring up points they feel are important.
• Practice and improve: Before embarking on actual sessions with users, ensure that you have a dry run using this type of guide with someone else from the same team as you or a colleague. This will help highlight areas that need more work, show any potential problems that might arise during use, and so forth. Refine it continuously through feedback gained after each session held with the user.

Source: Kate Oseen on Unsplash

Structured interview guides can achieve consistency across interviews. Collecting standardized information allows for meaningful comparisons between participants. It enables one to have a focused conversation that leads to useful insights about what should inform decisions regarding product development.

Remember, although the guide provides some structure, do not let go of other things, such as being flexible enough to accommodate different scenarios that may arise from individuals’ unique perspectives during interviews. Every participant brings their view, thus making the findings richer.

Once you have designed an appropriate manual, gathering valuable data becomes easy. This data, in turn, informs the various stages involved in creating products.

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In conclusion, interviewing users is a great way to gather feedback for the product team. It is important to remember that these interviews are qualitative and should be used as information to help make design decisions. By conducting research with users, asking relevant questions throughout development stages, and following some conversation guidelines, teams can get direct input about what users need or want from their products, enabling them to optimize their products better.

Clay is a UI/UX design & branding agency in San Francisco. We team up with startups and leading brands to create transformative digital experience. Clients: Facebook, Slack, Google, Amazon, Credit Karma, Zenefits, etc.

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User Interviews: Guide To An Insightful UX Interview

Mária Ilona Horváth

How to do a good user interview? Do you REALLY know your users' pain points or are you just seeing the top of the iceberg? Let's face it: all products and research processes have new challenges. We, at our   UX company , give you our process and essentials to good user interviews.

In this post we cover:

• Planning an interview
• Conducting the interview
• Interview analysis
• + 7 Essentials to a good user interview

What are user interviews and when to use them?

A user interview differs from an everyday conversation.

Mainly in its aim and the roles each person plays. An interview has a well-defined and previously agreed upon topic or question the interviewer wants to understand, explore or better specify by talking to people and listening to them.

Accordingly, the UX researcher talks with people who in some way belong to the target group connected to their topic, researched product, service or broader problem during a UX interview.

When deciding on the method of interviewing, you don’t only need a clearly defined topic and a good idea for your target group. You also want a convincing reason for choosing this technique, perhaps real curiosity, a lack of data from other sources or the impossibility of using other methods .

A good interview results from deep and well-researched interest and openness. To simply validate existing beliefs, concepts or already collected – perhaps quantitative – data, consider other options. You can share surveys or do desktop research instead of taking the time to conduct interviews. Find our summary on different UX research methods here.

Do user interviews when you need exploration

Do user interviews if your question or problem needs further exploration or you need insight into how others relate to your topic. Also, if you want the option to ask back and react to what your respondents have to share.

Interviewing works great in the early phase of developing a concept or product. Also, it can really provide insight when researching existing solutions by asking people’s opinions on and experience with it.

User interviews provide an understanding of how your target audience talks about an issue in a more intimate setting. What do they mention as their main problems, needs, wishes and joys regarding a process, service or solution? Also, it can reveal how they express themselves when talking about such factors.

When preparing products and thinking about users, you can also create personas. To learn more, read our post on personas here

User interviews collect what people say about a topic and how they say it during the interview session. Do not confuse that with how they think or feel about the question in general. It takes time and practice to differentiate these realms easily.

Planning can start once interviews have clearly proven themselves the best method for researching a topic.

User interviews: planning and preparation

1. consider the time and the resources.

No golden rule says how to plan these elements, as the difficulty of the topic and that of recruitment can influence this.

Once you have everybody on the same page about interviewing, start developing a research plan and specifying the main questions to answer in connection with the topic.

Calculate sufficient time for interviews, especially if you work in a bigger or remote team. Poorly prepared questions or dissimilar interviews can ruin your efforts.

2. Choose a structure: semi-structured or unstructured

Once you have an idea about the most important questions, choose a structure. We won’t discuss structured interviews here as they resemble surveys more than explorative interviews based on the approach introduced this far. So go for semi-structured or unstructured interviews.

We recommend semi-structured user interviews, as leading and analyzing unstructured ones really take a lot of time and practice. Also, if you want to share the workload within a team, semi-structured interviews and such guides leave less room for misunderstanding.

Wonderful, but what is a semi-structured interview? A semi-structured interview operates with a set of questions and a proposed order for them as defined in the user interview guide.

The interviewer has to prepare and have the willingness to change these questions and add new ones if the interview situation requires. The interview guide serves as an invaluable asset in finding the golden path between an overly strict structure and an overly vague organization for the interview.

A semi-structured interview guide leaves room to improvise and helps with tips on how to handle unexpected situations or directions of the talk. Remember what we’ve said about the nature and worth of interviews: You would not have expected some of the most important and interesting findings.

Writing a UX research plan and interview guide also proves helpful in collecting and evaluating assumptions and any possible bias. Pay attention to them, as unreflected-upon assumptions and researchers’ bias can interfere a lot with results.

You can write a UX interview guide and recruit participants simultaneously. However, we write interview guides before talking to participants, not simply because of the problematics of bias but also in order to take the right approach to this easily. Instead of writing a guide to the first respondents, we want to find respondents to our questions and guide.

3. User recruitment: You can do it!

Recruitment might be difficult. Luckily, tips and ideas abound on how to find respondents for your interviews. Here, we will only stress (relieved by CBD isolate powder )one very important detail that can separate a really insightful interview from average ones.

Let’s say you have already tried all the databases you might have. Keep GDPR in mind, though! You posted calls on social media, wrote ads, offered incentives and subscribed to platforms, asked friends and family and still have difficulty finding (enough) respondents.

Again, some extremely difficult topics can make recruitment tough. We’ve gone through that. Still, at this stage, you might want to go back quickly and check your UX research plan, topics and an interview guide. Even if you can’t make systematic changes at this point, sooner make small adjustments to the plan than compromise requirements by recruiting somebody who does not really fit but seems “almost OK”.

4. Schedule your user interviews

If you’ve successfully found your respondents, keep in mind that success does not only depend on the actual interview. The way you first contact interviewees will affect them. Your tone and style will impact their relaxation levels once you actually start talking about your questions.

Depending on the organization of a user experience research project, different people may contact and schedule the interviews from those conducting them. In such a case, make sure within the team that the respondents join the interview well informed.

Also, when asking them to participate, you will inevitably tell them something about the topic and the goals of the interview. For one, it stands as an ethical requirement.

Always state the aims of the project and summarize participants’ rights so they can give informed consent to participate. It makes it easier for you, too. If respondents have an idea of what will happen during the interview, it reduces the risk of scheduling an unsuccessful or cancelled interview.

Still, the possibility remains for cancelled or less insightful interviews. Therefore, we at UX Studio always calculate with more interviews than absolutely necessary for our UX research goal.

5. Remote user interviews?

Some situations prevent personal interviews, otherwise the ideal choice of user research method. Life just doesn’t work that way. When conducting remote (e.g. phone) interviews, keep in mind that some factors and response effects might have a stronger influence on respondent answers in such a setting.

For example, people tend to finish remote interviews sooner than in person. People on the phone agree easier and answer in shorter sentences. They lose patience. Also, you can’t observe non-verbal reactions and body language in as much detail as when in the same room. It makes sense to adjust your interview guide and planning accordingly, like to formulate questions very clearly.

Conducting the user interview

1. before the user interview, prepare.

Calculate sufficient time for the interview. You will have to concentrate, as it makes for a tiring process. Also, spend time preparing before every single interview even if you’ve already conducted interviews focusing on the same topic.

Why? Because you need some time before the actual interview to go through your interview guide to get calm and confident enough when starting the interview. Also, check the respondent data quickly so you can make minor changes in the guide to make it more relevant. This way, you can greet your respondents naturally and kindly, which proves not just nice but it boots up your interview process!

2. Make interviewees feel comfortable

When the users arrive – and after offering a coffee or glass of water – we at UX Studio usually guide them to the interview room while making a few warm-up remarks or asking some casual questions. Meeting the respondents at their location of choice really makes them more comfortable!

Here, you can also see why remote interviews can get more complicated. You lose all these options to create a relaxing atmosphere.

Once you have everything set and your respondent has relaxed enough, quickly introduce the research you’re working on, thank them for the interview, and summarize participants’ rights and the terms of participation. After this point, signing an informed consent form (and if necessary, a confidentiality disclosure) and discussing the details of a possible recording follows.

3. Do the interview like a smooth conversation

Start the interview with a warm-up session. Discussing rights, signing forms and switching on a voice or video recorder interfere with your interviewee’s state of mind. Find our tips on recording a UX interview here.

Depending on the difficulty and sensitivity of the topic and the scheduled length of the interview, this warm-up phase can go shorter or longer. But we’ve found that it usually takes five to seven minutes.

Try to make the transition from this part to your central topic smooth. Again, consider the interview guide your friend and build a logical bridge between your warm-up questions and your main topic.

This is key to conducting insightful user interviews. Not only the questions follow in a meaningful order but the interviewer’s tone of voice, body language and gestures signal interest in all the answers, not only in those marked as important in the interview guide.

This way, the respondent can participate in a normal conversation where they do not feel tested on or experimented with. Aim to really understand users. Let them talk, not just answer.

Don’t just focus on open-ended research interview questions about their central problems, frustrations and pain points regarding the topic. It involves more than simply embracing silence, trusting your respondents and efforts thus far. You recruited these people because they have something interesting to tell you; give them time and room to do so.

4. Listen and ask clever questions

If they start telling you something that seems irrelevant at first, bear with them a bit. The detour they make might lead you to the diamond you are mining for with interviewing. We can’t stress enough: Discovery interviews explore stuff you would have not thought of otherwise.

Don’t misunderstand, take the lead during the interview and keep track of time but remain flexible and truly curious about what the respondents have to share.

Especially so, as some interviews prove to be tricky. Don’t worry,  we’ve met less talkative respondents, too. You can always use little tricks to make them more engaged in the conversation. You can find out more by guiding the respondents to share more. How? If you feel that your respondent did not tell you everything you needed to know, use probing or summarizing questions.

If you simply repeat what they just said, people tend to add more details to it. Also, you can check if you really understand the point they are making.  Silence is a great tool, too. If you are patient enough and don’t rush to ask another question to fill the silence, people usually make an extra effort to answer your initial question. Additionally, you can always point out nicely that they are experts and you need more details or further explanation of the topic.

When you have asked all your UX research questions and got all the answers you needed, move on to the last part of the interview.

Closing the conversation in a skilled way is not simply polite but can add valuable insight to your results, too. For that reason, we always ask respondents about the interview experience. It helps them (and us!) come out of interview mode and improves the user experience research process.

Also, ask them if they have any thoughts connected to the topic which you hadn’t raised. You may collect ideas to develop for the next interview. Lastly, express gratitude!

5. After the interview: not quite finished

Your respondent’s interview process has finished there, but another difficult part begins for you now. First, right after saying goodbye to your interviewee, write down your notes, remarks and impressions. What makes it so important and beneficial to sit down and collect your reflections? Because the experience is fresh, you remember things you might not when listening to your recording.

Also, it adds to your notes taken during the session. When you take notes while listening to your respondent and thinking about your next user research question, you have to concentrate on the here and now. Collecting the ideas, reflections and analytical problems that occurred to you during the user interview should go into your after-session notes.

These notes also open the door to the analytical process following the interview. Even though we believe analysis starts when you start thinking about the UX interview questions to ask, your collected data requires another form of systematic analysis.

Analysis of the user interview

Just like with the topic of recruitment, we will mostly focus on sharing some tips. Still, you can find lots of material available online and off on analyzing interviews. A well-prepared and conducted semi-structured interview will offer many insights and possible directions of analysis. Just choose one (or a few) to pursue.

Embrace the specifics of qualitative data and do not try to understand it with a quantitative mindset. It doesn’t only involve numbers, figures or even facts. Among other things, it deals with experience, memory, expression, expectation and wishes.

However, working with qualitative data requires a systematic approach. We would also add that analyzing and sharing qualitative data convincingly takes a certain kind of discipline.

As the analysis and the resulting suggestions build on interpretations of what you heard during the interviews, have confidence in your findings. Do not only share some quotes but detail your reasoning on why you understand this or that quote this or that way. As we see it, the interview process really ends here for the interviewer.

Summary: 7 essentials to insightful user interviews

1. Plan: go deep, do a research plan and an interview guide, take into account the time and the resources as well

2. Provide a calm atmosphere for the interview: even offering tea and coffee can do the trick. A relaxed user is an open user

3. Prepare and be confident as a researcher: know the interview guide, but know the subject to be able to be flexible and go around it

4. Prepare and inform the respondent: do the UX for your own interview, pave the path to an open conversation

5. Take notes and collect impressions: actions sometimes speak louder than words

6. Embrace the specifics of qualitative data

7. Practice and be patient: be willing to improve your interview skills, even if it takes time

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6 User Research Methods & When To Use Them

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

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

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

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

Let’s get started …

What is User Research?

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

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

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

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

Term Check: User Research vs. UX Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. User Interviews

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

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

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

Challenges:

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

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

Surveys are best used when …

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

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

3. Focus Groups

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

Focus groups are best used when … 

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

Tips to make it work:

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

4. A/B Testing

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

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

A/B testing is best used when …

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

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

5. Card Sorting

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

Card sorting is best used when …

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

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

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

6. Tree Test

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

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

Tree testing is best used when ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UX Research Cheat Sheet

February 12, 2017 2017-02-12

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User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

In This Article:

When to conduct user research.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

• Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now . The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.
• Do user research at all the stages . As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
• Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing , which is the most effective method to improve usability . If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what , but you often need to know why . So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all .

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

• Conduct field studies and interview users : Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.
• Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
• Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
• Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
• Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
• Do competitive testing . Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

• Compare features against competitors.
• Do design reviews.
• Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
• Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
• Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
• Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
• Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
• Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
• Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

• Do qualitative usability testing . Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
• Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies .
• Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
• Talk with user groups.
• Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
• Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
• Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

• Survey customers and prospective users.
• Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
• Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
• Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
• Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
• Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.
• Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

• Find allies . It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.
• Talk with experts . Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.
• Follow ethical guidelines . The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.
• Involve stakeholders . Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.
• Hunt for data sources . Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?
• Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.
• Follow Tog's principles of interaction design .
• Use evidence-based design guidelines , especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.
• Design for universal access . Accessibility can’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.
• Give users control . Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.
• Prevent errors . Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.
• Improve error messages . For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.
• Provide helpful defaults . Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.
• Check for inconsistencies . Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment . Meet expectations instead.
• Map features to needs . User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.
• When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy . Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.
• When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling . Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.
• Avoid waste . Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.
• Consider system usability in different cultural contexts . You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries . Translation is only part of the challenge.
• Look for perverse incentives . Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.
• Consider social implications . How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?
• Protect personal information . Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.
• Keep data safe . Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.
• Deliver both good and bad news . It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.
• Track usability over time . Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.
• Include diverse users . People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.
• Track usability bugs . If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.
• Pay attention to user sentiment . Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.
• Reduce the need for training . Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
• Communicate future directions . Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.
• Recruit people for future research and testing . Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

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What Is User Research, and What Is Its Purpose?

User research, or UX research, is an absolutely vital part of the  user experience design process.

Typically done at the start of a project, it encompasses different types of research methodologies to gather valuable data and feedback. When conducting user research, you’ll engage with and observe your target users, getting to know their needs, behaviors, and pain points in relation to the product or service you’re designing.

Ultimately, user research means the difference between designing based on guesswork and assumptions, and actually creating something that solves a real user problem. In other words: Do not skip the research phase!

If you’re new to user research, fear not. We’re going to explain exactly what UX research is and why it’s so important. We’ll also show you how to plan your user research and introduce you to some key user research methods .

We’ve divided this rather comprehensive guide into the following sections. Feel free to skip ahead using the menu below:

• What is user research?
• What is the purpose of user research?
• How to plan your user research.
• An introduction to different research methods—and when to use them.

Ready? Let’s jump in.

1. What is user research?

User experience research is the systematic investigation of your users in order to gather insights that will inform the design process. With the help of various user research techniques, you’ll set out to understand your users’ needs, attitudes, pain points, and behaviors (processes like task analyses look at how users actually navigate the product experience —not just how they should or how they say they do). 

Typically done at the start of a project—but also extremely valuable throughout—it encompasses different types of research methodology to gather both qualitative and quantitative data in relation to your product or service.

Before we continue, let’s consider the difference between qualitative and quantitative data .

Qualitative vs. Quantitative data: What’s the difference?

Qualitative UX research results in descriptive data which looks more at how people think and feel. It helps to find your users’ opinions, problems, reasons, and motivations. You can learn all about in-depth in this video by professional UX designer Maureen Herben:

Quantitative UX research , on the other hand, generally produces numerical data that can be measured and analyzed, looking more at the statistics. Quantitative data is used to quantify the opinions and behaviors of your users.

User research rarely relies on just one form of data collection and often uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods together to form a bigger picture. The data can be applied to an existing product to gain insight to help improve the product experiences, or it can be applied to an entirely new product or service, providing a baseline for UX, design, and development.

From the data gathered during your user research phase, you should be able to understand the following areas within the context of your product or service:

• Who your users are
• What their needs are
• What they want
• How they currently do things
• How they’d like to do them

As you consider the  why  of user research, remember that it’s easier than you might realize to overlook entire groups of users. It’s important to ensure that you’re conducting inclusive UX research and that starts in the earliest stages!

2. What is the purpose of user research?

The purpose of user research is to put your design project into context. It helps you understand the problem you’re trying to solve; it tells you who your users are, in what context they’ll be using your product or service, and ultimately, what they need from you, the designer! UX research ensures that you are designing with the user in mind, which is key if you want to create a successful product.

Throughout the design process, your UX research will aid you in many ways. It’ll help you identify problems and challenges, validate or invalidate your assumptions, find patterns and commonalities across your target user groups, and shed plenty of light on your users’ needs, goals, and mental models.

Why is this so important? Let’s find out.

Why is it so important to conduct user research?

Without UX research, you are essentially basing your designs on assumptions. If you don’t take the time to engage with real users, it’s virtually impossible to know what needs and pain-points your design should address.

Here’s why conducting user research is absolutely crucial:

User research helps you to design better products!

There’s a misconception that it’s ok to just do a bit of research and testing at the end of your project. The truth is that you need UX research first, followed by usability testing and iteration throughout.

This is because research makes the design better. The end goal is to create products and services that people want to use. The mantra in UX design is that some user research is always better than none .

It’s likely at some point in your UX career that you will come across the first challenge of any UX designer—convincing a client or your team to include user research in a project.

User research keeps user stories at the center of your design process.

All too often, the user research phase is seen as optional or merely “nice-to-have”—but in reality, it’s crucial from both a design and a business perspective. This brings us to our next point…

User research saves time and money!

If you (or your client) decide to skip the research phase altogether, the chances are you’ll end up spending time and money developing a product that, when launched, has loads of usability issues and design flaws, or simply doesn’t meet a real user need. Through UX research, you’ll uncover such issues early on—saving time, money, and lots of frustration!

The research phase ensures you’re designing with real insights and facts — not guesswork! Imagine you release a product that has the potential to fill a gap in the market but, due to a lack of user research, is full of bugs and usability issues. At best, you’ll have a lot of unnecessary work to do to get the product up to scratch. At worst, the brand’s reputation will suffer.

UX research gives the product a competitive edge. Research shows you how your product will perform in a real-world context, highlighting any issues that need to be ironed out before you go ahead and develop it.

User research can be done on a budget

There are ways that you can conduct faster and less costly user research , utilizing Guerrilla research outlined later on in this article (also handy if budget and time are an issue). Even the smallest amount of user research will save time and money in the long run.

The second challenge is how often businesses think they know their users without having done any research. You’ll be surprised at how often a client will tell you that user research is not necessary because they know their users!

In a 2005 survey completed by Bain, a large global management consulting firm, they found some startling results. 80% of businesses thought they knew best about what they were delivering. Only 8% of those businesses’ customers agreed.

The survey may be getting old, but the principle and misperception still persist.

In some cases, businesses genuinely do know their customers and there may be previous data on hand to utilize. However, more often than not, ‘knowing the users’ comes down to personal assumptions and opinions.

“It’s only natural to assume that everyone uses the Web the same way we do, and—like everyone else—we tend to think that our own behavior is much more orderly and sensible than it really is.” (Don’t Make Me Think ‘Revisited’, Steve Krug, 2014.) A must on every UX Designer’s bookshelf!

What we think a user wants is not the same as what a user thinks they want. Without research, we inadvertently make decisions for ourselves instead of for our target audience. To summarize, the purpose of user research is to help us design to fulfill the user’s actual needs, rather than our own assumptions of their needs.

In a nutshell, UX research informs and opens up the realm of design possibilities. It saves time and money, ensures a competitive edge, and helps you to be a more effective, efficient, user-centric designer.

3. How to plan your user research

When planning your user research , it’s good to have a mix of both qualitative and quantitative data to draw from so you don’t run into issues from the value-action gap, which can at times make qualitative data unreliable.

The value-action gap is a well-known psychology principle outlining that people genuinely don’t do what they say they would do, and is commonly referred to as what people say vs. what people do.

More than 60% of participants said they were “likely” or “very likely” to buy a kitchen appliance in the next 3 months. 8 months later, only 12% had. How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman, 2003

When planning your user research, you need to do more than just User Focus Groups—observation of your users really is the key. You need to watch what your users do.

Part of being a great user researcher is to be an expert at setting up the right questions and getting unbiased answers from your users.

To do this we need to think like the user.

Put yourself in your user’s shoes without your own preconceptions and assumptions on how it should work and what it should be. For this, we need empathy (and good listening skills) allowing you to observe and challenge assumptions of what you already think you know about your users.

Be open to some surprises!

4. When to use different user research methods

There’s a variety of different qualitative and quantitative research methods out there. If you’ve been doing the CareerFoundry UX Design course , you may have already covered some of the list below in your course.

It isn’t an exhaustive list, but covers some of the more popular methods of research. Our student team lead runs through many of them in the video below.

Qualitative Methods:

• Guerrilla testing: Fast and low-cost testing methods such as on-the-street videos, field observations, reviews of paper sketches, or online tools for remote usability testing.
• Interviews: One-on-one interviews that follow a preset selection of questions prompting the user to describe their interactions, thoughts, and feelings in relation to a product or service, or even the environment of the product/service.
• Focus groups: Participatory groups that are led through a discussion and activities to gather data on a particular product or service. If you’ve ever watched Mad Men you’ll be familiar with the Ponds’ cold cream Focus Group !
• Field Studies: Heading into the user’s environment and observing while taking notes (and photographs or videos if possible).
• In-lab testing: Observations of users completing particular tasks in a controlled environment. Users are often asked to describe out loud their actions, thoughts, and feelings and are videoed for later analysis
• Card sorting : Used to help understand Information Architecture and naming conventions better. Can be really handy to sort large amounts of content into logical groupings for users.

Quantitative Methods:

• User surveys: Questionnaires with a structured format, targeting your specific user personas. These can be a great way to get a large amount of data. Surveymonkey is a popular online tool.
• First click testing: A test set up to analyse what a user would click on first in order to complete their intended task. This can be done with paper prototypes, interactive wireframes or an existing website.
• Eye tracking: Measures the gaze of the eye, allowing the observer to ‘see’ what the user sees. This can be an expensive test and heatmapping is a good cheaper alternative.
• Heatmapping: Visual mapping of data showing how users click and scroll through your prototype or website. The most well-known online tool to integrate would be Crazyegg.
• Web analytics: Data that is gathered from a website or prototype it is integrated with, allowing you to see the demographics of users, page views, and funnels of how users move through your site and where they drop off. The most well-known online tool to integrate would be Google Analytics .
• A/B testing: Comparing two versions of a web page to see which one converts users more. This is a great way to test button placements, colors, banners, and other elements in your UI.

Further reading

Now you know what user research is and why it’s so important. If you’re looking for a way to get trained in this particular discipline, there’s good news—owing to demand and popularity, there’s a growing number of UX research bootcamps out there.

If you’d like to learn more about UX research, you may find the following articles useful:

• What Does A UX Researcher Actually Do? The Ultimate Career Guide
• How to Conduct User Research Like a Professional
• How to Build a UX Research Portfolio (Step-by-Step Guide)

User research is the process of understanding the needs, behaviors, and attitudes of users to inform the design and development of products or services. It involves collecting and analyzing data about users through various methods such as surveys, interviews, and usability testing.

2. How to conduct user research?

User research can be conducted through various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, and usability testing. The method chosen depends on the research goals and the resources available. Typically, user research involves defining research objectives, recruiting participants, creating research protocols, conducting research activities, analyzing data, and reporting findings.

3. Is user research the same as UX?

User research is a part of the broader UX (User Experience) field, but they are not the same. UX encompasses a wide range of activities such as design, testing, and evaluation, while user research specifically focuses on understanding user needs and behaviors to inform UX decisions.

4. What makes good user research?

Good user research is characterized by clear research goals, well-defined research protocols, appropriate sampling methods, unbiased data collection, and rigorous data analysis. It also involves effective communication of research findings to stakeholders, as well as using the findings to inform design and development decisions.

5. Is user research a good career?

User research is a growing field with many opportunities for career growth and development. With the increasing importance of user-centered design, there is a high demand for skilled user researchers in various industries such as tech, healthcare, and finance. A career in user research can be fulfilling for those interested in understanding human behavior and designing products that meet user needs.

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User Research

What is user research.

User research is the methodic study of target users—including their needs and pain points—so designers have the sharpest possible insights to make the best designs. User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities and find crucial information to use in their design process.

Discover why user research is a crucial part of the design process.

• Transcript loading…

User Research – Get to know your Users, and What They want

To call user research a crucial part of an interaction design process might seem overly obvious. Indeed, it’s the only way to discover exactly what these users need, having first found out precisely who they are. To set out to generate these facts, you must gather data from your users through a structured approach . First, you must choose methods that 1) suit your research’s purpose and 2) will yield the clearest information. Afterwards—to get the insights you want—you’ll need to interpret your findings from all that data, which can be tricky . You can apply user research anytime during the design process. Typically, researchers begin with qualitative measures, to discover users’ needs and motivations . They might later test their results by using quantitative measures .

“Research is creating new knowledge.” – Neil Armstrong, the First person to walk on the Moon

User research essentially splits into two subsets:

Qualitative research – Ethnographic field studies and interviews are examples of methods that can help you build a deep understanding of why users behave the way they do (e.g., why they leave a website so quickly). For instance, you can interview a small number of users and get sharp insights into their shopping habits by asking them open-ended questions. Usability testing is another dimension of this type of research (e.g., examining users’ stress levels when they use a certain design). Qualitative research requires great care. As it involves collecting non-numerical data (e.g., opinions), your own opinions might influence findings.

Quantitative research – With more-structured methods such as surveys, you gather measurable data about what users do and test assumptions you developed from qualitative research. An example is to use an online survey to ask users questions about their shopping habits (e.g., “Approximately how many items of clothing do you buy online per year?”). You can use this data to find patterns within a large user group. In fact, the larger the sample of representative test users is, the more likely you’ll have a statistically reliable way of assessing the target user population. Regardless of the method, with careful research you can gather objective and unbiased data. Nevertheless, quantitative data alone cannot expose deeper human insights.

We can also split user research into two approaches:

Attitudinal – you listen to users’ words (e.g., in interviews).

Behavioral – you watch their actions through observational studies.

Usually, you can get the sharpest view of a design problem when you apply a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research as well as a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral approaches.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Leverage User Research Methods throughout Development

Industry-leading user experience consulting organization the Nielsen Norman Group names appropriate user research methods for you to use during your project’s four stages . Here are key methods:

Discover – Determine what’s relevant for users.

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

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

Explore – See how to address all users’ needs.

Card sorting – On cards, write words and phrases and then let participants organize these in the most meaningful way and label categories to ensure your design is logically structured.

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

Test – Evaluate your designs.

Usability testing – Make sure your design is easy to use.

Accessibility evaluations – Test your design to ensure everyone can use it.

Listen – Put issues in perspective, uncover any new problems and spot trends.

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

Surveys/Questionnaires – Track how users’ feel about your product/design via these.

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However you approach user research, always consider the pros and cons of each technique . Card sorting is cheap and easy, for example, but may prove time-consuming when you proceed to analysis. Moreover, it might not provide in-depth contextual meaning. The resources available to you are another constraint. These will decide when, how much and which type of user research you can actually do. Therefore, carefully choose only the most relevant method/s for your research . Also, get stakeholders from your organization involved early on . They can reveal precious insights and help keep your research on track regarding business goals. Overall, user research is a valuable way to validate the assumptions the design team makes concerning users in the field , cut the expense of the best deliverables and keep your product’s demand high and ahead of competitors’ in the marketplace.

User research methods have various pros and cons and involve activities ranging from observations of users in context to controlled experiments in lab settings.

Learn More about User Research

For a fuller grasp of user research, take our course here .

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of user research tips .

Find an extensive range of user research considerations , discussed in Smashing Magazine.

Here’s a convenient and example-rich catalogue of user research tools.

Questions related to User Research

User Research is a fulfilling career for individuals driven to comprehend user behaviors and work collaboratively with teams. As a User Researcher, you're instrumental in steering teams towards crafting user-centric solutions. If you're intrigued by a career that combines both analytical and creative insights, consider delving into this field. For a comprehensive understanding, explore the User Researcher Learning Path on our platform.

User Researchers are seeing competitive pay in the industry. On average, they can earn from $92,000 to $146,000 annually. In some smaller firms, user research duties might be combined with a broader UX role. To understand how salaries can differ by region or delve into a broader perspective on UX-related pay, check out this detailed guide on UI UX Designer Salaries for 2023 or Glassdoor's breakdown of User Experience Researcher salaries .

While both are integral to the user experience, User Research and UX Design serve different purposes. User Research delves deep into understanding user preferences and needs, paving the way for informed design strategies. In contrast, UX Design is about sculpting a product based on that insight, ensuring it's both user-centric and aesthetically pleasing. 

Sometimes, especially in compact teams, the roles might blur with a designer handling research. Want a comprehensive insight? Dive into User Experience: The Beginner's Guide to explore their interconnected dynamics.

Yes, there is! Think of UX research as a subset of user research. While both focus on understanding users, user research casts a broader net, examining topics like pricing or delivery preferences. UX research, meanwhile, zeroes in on how users interact with a product and their experience doing so. In short, user research looks at broader interactions, while UX research specifically studies product use. To dive deeper, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

User research utilizes varied techniques such as usability testing, A/B tests, surveys, card sorting, interviews, analytics analysis, and ethnographic studies. Every approach brings unique insights and is ideal for specific situations. It's essential to choose the proper technique based on your research goals and your audience. Discover these techniques further in 7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques . 

For a comprehensive understanding of usability testing, a popular user research method, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While a related degree can be beneficial, it's not strictly required to become a user researcher. Many successful user researchers have degrees in diverse fields like psychology, design, anthropology, statistics, or human-computer interaction. What's crucial is a mix of relevant education, hands-on experience, and continuous learning. Even if some employers might favor candidates with a bachelor's degree, it can be in something other than a UX-focused area. Only some degrees specifically target user research. To strengthen your knowledge, consider courses like Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX or User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While each user research project is unique, some standard steps guide most endeavors:

Determine the research question.

Choose the proper research technique.

Find participants.

Execute the research.

Evaluate the gathered data.

Share the results.

For a thorough understanding of these steps and more, check out User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

There's a wide array of user research tools to pick from, tailored to your research goals, organizational size, and project specifics. Some popular choices include:

For surveys: Typeform or Google Forms.

Card sorting: Tools like Optimal Workshop, Maze or Trello.

Analyzing user activity: HotJar or CrazyEgg for heatmaps.

Usability evaluations: Platforms like Userlytics or Lookback.

Analyzing qualitative data: Miro or Lucidchart for affinity diagramming.

Crunching numbers: Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel for quantitative insights.

Usability testing on prototypes: Tools like Adobe XD or Figma.

Presenting findings: Use Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Prezi.

These tools often boast extra features to amplify your research.

Dive deeper into their applications with User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

User research is paramount in creating products that align with users' genuine needs and preferences. Instead of basing designs on assumptions, it provides factual insights into how users feel and interact with products. By engaging in user research, designers can spot usability challenges, collect feedback on design ideas, and validate their design decisions. For businesses, this not only refines product offerings but also strengthens brand loyalty and reputation. A standout user experience gives a company a competitive edge and lowers the chances of product setbacks. Dive deeper into the significance of user research in design with Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX and User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide .

Literature on User Research

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

Learn more about User Research

Take a deep dive into User 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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Shadowing in User Research - Do You See What They See?

Creating Personas from User Research Results

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Co-Cultures and Value Framing: Know your users

How to Conduct Focus Groups

Understand the User’s Perspective through Research for Mobile UX

Learning Experience Design - The Most Valuable Lessons

Ethnography

Chapter 11: Curated List of Research techniques

Personas for Mobile UX Design

Mobile Usability Research – The Important Differences from the Desktop

How to Prepare for a User Interview and Ask the Right Questions

5 Ways to Improve the UX of Your Applications

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How To Use AI to Increase Efficiency in Your User Research

Paul Boag, an expert in user experience (UX) design and conversion rate optimization (CRO), shares how AI has revolutionized his work. He explains that AI has “made my job a lot easier,” offering tools that simplify user research and provide new ways to gather and analyze data. In this blog, we’ll explore how AI is transforming user research, the advantages it offers, and why user research is crucial for UX and CRO. We’ll also break down the step-by-step processes Paul uses to integrate AI into his workflow.

Table of contents

Why user research matters in ux and cro, common challenges in user research, the advantages of using ai for user research, step-by-step process for using ai in survey analysis, using ai tools for interview analysis, the future of user research with ai, get scale-up growth strategies in your inbox..

User research is key to creating effective UX designs and improving conversion rates. By understanding what users need, how they behave, and what challenges they face, businesses can make their websites and apps more user-friendly and effective.

In UX, user research helps designers build interfaces that are intuitive and enjoyable. Boag points out that “user research can be difficult and time-consuming… because it’s challenging to understand and interpret what you’re learning as a user researcher.” Despite these challenges, the insights gained are invaluable for making designs that truly meet user needs.

For CRO, user research identifies the barriers that prevent users from completing desired actions, like signing up or making a purchase. Boag uses a simple yet powerful approach: “If you decided not to sign up today, it would be helpful to know why.” This question uncovers objections and concerns that businesses can address directly, improving their chances of converting users.

Without thorough user research, UX and CRO efforts can miss the mark, leading to designs and strategies that don’t resonate with users. By making user research a priority, businesses ensure that their decisions are based on real user insights, not assumptions.

Although user research is essential, it often comes with significant challenges:

• Data Overload : Platforms like Google Analytics and Hotjar provide large amounts of data, but making sense of it all can be overwhelming. Boag notes, “Whether it’s Google Analytics, whether it’s Hotjar, wherever you’ve got a large amount of data, working through and getting understandings and insights… can be really difficult.” This can make it hard to focus on what’s most important.
• Analyzing Open-Ended Surveys : Surveys with open-ended questions give valuable qualitative insights but can be intimidating to analyze manually. Boag says, “If you haven’t run a survey and have an open-ended question and you’re faced with hundreds, if not thousands of answers… that is intimidating.” Sorting through this data to find common themes is time-consuming and complex.
• Handling Interview Transcripts : User interviews are rich in insights but managing the transcripts can be a challenge. Boag describes the difficulty of finding specific comments or recurring themes: “You’re then faced with transcripts of these conversations. Where did someone say that? And I’m sure I remember this, but I can’t remember where or how to find it.” Manually reviewing transcripts is a tedious process that can delay research outcomes.

AI provides solutions to these challenges by automating data analysis and simplifying the process of extracting insights from user feedback.

AI enhances user research by speeding up processes, improving accuracy, and enabling deeper analysis. Here are some key benefits of using AI in user research:

• Automated Data Analysis : AI can quickly process large datasets, whether from surveys or analytics tools, to identify patterns and trends that might be missed by human analysis. Boag mentions, “AI is an amazing tool that helps you… understand data.” This automation saves time and allows researchers to focus on drawing meaningful conclusions.
• Enhanced Qualitative Analysis : AI’s natural language processing capabilities are especially useful for analyzing open-ended survey responses and interview transcripts. Boag uses ChatGPT to analyze survey responses and rank common themes, which makes it easier to see what’s most important. He notes, “It’ll take a few minutes to look through all of those answers… with Ai, it’s not a few minutes, but a few seconds.” This speed allows researchers to get valuable insights quickly.
• Scalability : AI makes it possible to scale research efforts without increasing the workload. Boag emphasizes that AI tools enable researchers to “do so much more user research than you’ve ever done before,” because the tools handle much of the heavy lifting. This scalability is crucial for businesses looking to expand their research capabilities or handle large datasets.
• Improved Accuracy and Consistency : AI analyzes data with a high level of accuracy and consistency, reducing the risk of human error. This objective approach ensures that the insights derived are reliable and unbiased.
• Faster Iterations and Better UX : AI helps businesses respond to user feedback faster, allowing them to make improvements more quickly. Boag points out that AI allows researchers to “look at information in ways that I’ve never been able to do before as a user researcher.” This ability to rapidly interpret data leads to better user experiences and more effective design updates.

Boag outlines a straightforward approach to using AI for analyzing open-ended survey responses, addressing one of the biggest hurdles in user research:

• Download and Upload Survey Data : Boag begins by downloading the survey results as a CSV file and uploading it to ChatGPT. He explains, “You literally just drag and drop it [the CSV file] to ChatGPT.”
• Prompt ChatGPT for Analysis : Once the file is uploaded, Boag uses specific prompts to guide ChatGPT. For example, he asks, “Attached is a survey asking the question, ‘If you decided not to sign up today, it would be useful to know why. Please, can you identify common themes?’” ChatGPT then sifts through the responses, identifies patterns, and ranks them by frequency.
• Review and Act on Insights : The analysis quickly reveals actionable insights. For instance, ChatGPT might highlight “cost being too high” as a top reason why users don’t convert. By ranking the most common themes, Boag can prioritize which issues to address first, making it easier to focus on what will have the biggest impact on conversions.

This process, which once could take days, now takes only minutes, thanks to AI’s powerful data processing capabilities.

User interviews provide deep insights but are often underused due to the effort required to analyze them. Boag introduces Fathom , an AI tool that automates the transcription and analysis of interviews, making it a valuable addition to any researcher’s toolkit.

How to Use Fathom for Interview Analysis :

• Automated Notes and Highlights : Fathom automatically generates meeting notes and highlights key themes from the interview. Boag explains, “It’s created these meeting notes for me… covering all of the different areas of improvements or things that the user wants.”
• Easy Navigation and Search : With Fathom, users can jump directly to specific parts of the conversation, saving time otherwise spent manually searching through transcripts. Boag says, “I can jump through to any of these [questions] and see what response I got to those questions,” showing how the tool’s features make data more accessible.
• Ask Specific Questions : Users can also ask Fathom specific questions about the interview content, like “What were the main pain points experienced by this user?” The AI pulls insights directly from the transcript, giving researchers the ability to focus on strategic analysis rather than manual data extraction.

These capabilities make Fathom a powerful tool for anyone looking to get the most out of their user interviews, turning raw data into actionable insights quickly and efficiently.

AI is not just a tool for speeding up user research; it is changing the entire approach to how researchers work. By automating routine tasks, scaling efforts, and providing deeper insights, AI allows researchers to focus on strategy and creative problem-solving.

Boag’s experience shows that embracing AI in user research leads to more effective and efficient outcomes. As he concludes, “Go and try these tools, because you’ll find that you can do so much more user research than you’ve ever done before, because it’s so much quicker and you’ll get better results too.” For UX and CRO professionals, using AI is no longer optional—it’s becoming essential for staying competitive and delivering the best user experiences.

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Stefan Maritz

Stefan is a results-driven brand-first, content-second t-shaped marketer representing CXL as our marketing lead. Stefan's portfolio contains leading B2C and B2B brands and has been featured in marketing publications like Marketing Week and Marketing Mag.

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More From Forbes

How to use the jtbd framework for successful ai implementations.

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Rick Kelly is the Chief Strategy Officer at Fuel Cycle . His passion is helping brands unlock the power of customer intelligence.

As AI capabilities expand, there is a constant push to implement AI tools into everything that we do.

Implementation, however, shouldn't be the primary focus. AI tools must be integrated with a purpose. One way to ensure that AI tools have a purpose is to use the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework.

Overview Of JTBD

The JTBD framework was popularized by the late Clayton Christensen and emphasizes hiring products or services to accomplish specific tasks. Christensen described it as , “When we buy a product, we essentially 'hire' something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again.”

In essence, whether our stakeholders are internal team members or clients, they invest in our services to achieve particular objectives. Christensen illustrated this concept with a few examples:

• Uber: Revolutionized urban transportation by enabling users to book rides via smartphone apps, addressing pain points such as slow response times and non-mobile-friendly options.

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• Care.com: Provides a platform for finding various types of care services, helping users address personal challenges related to childcare and other caregiving needs.

• American Girl Dolls: Marketed as tools for self-expression and bonding, resulting in high sales and revenue. Consumers “hire” the product to validate and enhance a pre-teen's sense of self-worth.

Einstein In A Tiger Cage—Thought Exercise

As I've written about previously on my company's blog , a recent thought experiment by Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, can help apply the lessons from JTBD to AI: “Intelligence itself is overrated. ... To get things done is not necessarily the most important, but take Einstein and a tiger and put them in the cage. Who wins? It's not the smartest guy."

Kelly further explains: "It's not the company with the smartest people that will dominate. It's not the smartest person in the room that necessarily knows what to do. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient to get things done in the world."

Building off my blog post mentioned above, the LLMs available to the public are astonishing, with their ability to rapidly process and predict information far beyond human capabilities—they are superintelligent. However, similar to humans and human-designed institutions, their effectiveness hinges on how well they address stakeholders’ needs.

Advice To Discover JTBD Using Market Research Methods

So, how do you discover the job to be done for your stakeholders? Identifying the true JTBD requires leveraging various market research methods to gain a deep understanding of your stakeholders' needs:

User Interviews And Surveys

First off, conducting one-on-one interviews allows you to delve deeply into individual pain points, goals and desired outcomes, revealing the specific tasks users struggle with and their underlying needs.

For a broader perspective, surveys gather quantitative data on tasks, challenges and desired results. For instance, asking questions like, “What are the top three tasks you need to accomplish when using our product?” helps pinpoint critical areas that need attention.

Unstructured Feedback

To utilize unstructured feedback, start by analyzing customer reviews and comments across diverse platforms (review sites, social media, etc.) to identify recurring themes and unmet needs. Repeated mentions of workflow difficulties, for instance, can highlight critical JTBD.

User Communities

Communities allow for constant connection and engagement with stakeholders, helping you stay attuned to their evolving needs and challenges.

Additionally, you can segment your community into focused subgroups dedicated to specific topics or products, creating targeted insight communities that provide continuous and relevant feedback based on your needs.

Observational Research

When it comes to observational research, begin with passive observation—monitor how users naturally interact with your product and discuss their issues, revealing hidden JTBD through frequent mentions of workarounds and frustrations.

Complement this with ethnographic research by immersing yourself in the community's culture to gain a deep understanding of real-life scenarios where JTBD emerges. For instance, grasping the nuances of users' daily routines offers critical context that highlights the underlying needs and challenges they face.

Together, these approaches provide a comprehensive view of the JTBD, ensuring your solutions are both relevant and impactful.

Tying It Together: Implementing AI For JTBD

To achieve a successful AI implementation driven by the JTBD framework, you’ll need to integrate insights from the various research methods discussed above into a cohesive strategy:

1. Synthesize insights by combining qualitative and quantitative data collected from the various methods. This holistic approach provides a comprehensive view of JTBD, allowing you to understand both the explicit needs and the underlying challenges faced by stakeholders.

2. Prioritize needs by evaluating the importance and urgency of the identified JTBD. This involves analyzing the frequency and impact of different needs as highlighted by your research. For example, if your research reveals that users consistently struggle with a specific aspect of customer support, prioritize this JTBD based on its prevalence and significance.

3. Develop AI strategies tailored to address the prioritized JTBD. Use these insights to inform your AI implementation approach, ensuring that the solutions you develop are precisely aligned with the most critical needs identified. Using the same example, if feedback indicates that users face significant challenges with response times in customer support, focus on developing and/or integrating AI tools that enhance automation and efficiency in this area.

By aligning your AI initiatives with the true JTBD, you ensure that your technology meets stakeholder needs, and more importantly, drives meaningful improvements in their experience.

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Vaxess' Rachel Sha - 'own the seat at the table that you have and have confidence'

16-Sep-2024 - Last updated on 16-Sep-2024 at 08:10 GMT

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She is CEO of Vaxess and wants to be able to deliver therapeutics in the most patient-friendly and pain-free way. Read our interview with her to find about more about her fascinating journey and the obstacles she overcame. 

Could you give us an overview of your work? ​

I’m the CEO of Vaxess, a life science company developing a technology platform for administering therapeutics and vaccines in a really patient-friendly way. Vaxess’s MIMIX transdermal patch and applicator is designed to be needle-free, painless for patients, and easy to administer from the comfort of their homes. It is also shelf stable, so it can be shipped without the refrigeration that many therapeutics and vaccines have traditionally required.

When did you realize you were interested in science - as a young child, teen, or older? ​

I’ve been interested in science since I was very young. My mom was in research at Merck, working on a hepatitis vaccine. My father was also a civil engineer. I remained interested in the sciences throughout my childhood and have spent much of my career working in the sciences. 

Could you describe your personal journey bringing us to where you are now? ​

After HBS, I joined the business development group at Genzyme. I worked in the company’s Biosurgery business unit, learning about medical devices, cell therapies, and biologics to help expand Genzyme’s portfolio of products. I also spent some time on their corporate development team and had the chance to interact with the rare disease and other business units.

When Genzyme was acquired, I stayed on at Sanofi initially to help them expand and grow Biosurgery to the next level and subsequently worked with the broader therapeutics areas to drive deal execution for Sanofi across all therapeutic areas. Then, I started working in digital business development, which was a new area for Sanofi. Our initial interest was in diabetes, and creating an integrated care system using CGMs, insulin pumps, and apps to see if we could improve diabetes outcomes and make it easier for patients to manage their disease. From there, I focused on the digital transformation of the company, everything from AI for drug discovery to clinical trial design and execution to enabling more effective commercialization. I led some of the biggest deals at Sanofi, for example in AI for drug discovery — they were industry leading in terms of the size, scope, and breadth of business development transactions. 

After a number of years, I had an enormous amount of learning from working at large companies in what it takes to succeed, how to advance programs and how to stop programs. I was really interested in shifting to the early stage and going to a startup environment. I decided to leave Sanofi and went to Engine Ventures, where I joined as an executive in residence and then full time as an operating partner. I was able to leverage all of my past learnings and experience to help portfolio companies refine strategy, share best practices for business development, and sharpen pitches to investors and strategic partners like Sanofi. That gave me the opportunity to work with Vaxess, which is one of Engine Ventures’ portfolio companies. I got to know the team and technology and became really excited about the company’s prospects. 

What challenges did you face - as a woman or otherwise - along the way and what is the most valuable lesson you have learned? ​

Especially early in my career, I felt underestimated — whether it was because I was female, because I was Chinese, or maybe because I was young. 

As a college graduate going into consulting, you’re plonked into situations where you’re the only female, the youngest person, and also a minority trying to develop recommendations to address business problems with senior leaders. The most valuable lessons I learned were to listen actively to what clients and customers have to say, to not be afraid of asking hard questions, and leaning into those conversations. Own the seat at the table that you have and have confidence in communicating what you know as much as what you don’t know. This is part of building trusting relationships. I worked to understand what was important to people, listened to why people might have biases and different perspectives, and focused on addressing those areas.  

Over time, I was able to build relationships with senior leaders, world experts who trusted me and who I trusted. The more you can build your network of people that also see the impact, the capabilities, and the results that you can drive, the more you can provide a surround sound of support and advocacy. I used to think that as long as I performed well and I achieved on my own, others would recognize and see my potential. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.  But if you have advocates who can recognize you fully for what you can do, it’s easier to just focus on what you need to get done.

Additionally, leveraging your network is not just for support but for different perspectives, expertise, to push you to think differently, to improve your idea. Don’t be afraid of seeking guidance or sharing early thinking. In general, most people want to help.

What ignites your passion in your current role? ​

The possibility is enormous at Vaxess. There’s just so much opportunity for where we can apply this technology and solve really important problems. In some ways, it’s an exercise of focus and identifying the best areas to apply the MIMIX platform.

Take the challenge of obesity, for example. This is an enormous public health need — all of the different conditions that are caused by cardiometabolic disease or dysfunction and a significant burden to health systems. GLP-1 seems to be the wonder drug, but there are still shortcomings around access and tolerability. There’s also room to improve the way the drug works, in terms of the kind and quality of weight loss. These are all problems that we feel the MIMIX platform can tackle over time. When Vaxess first started to generate data to show that the MIMIX platform can deliver the amount of the drug necessary to drive clinical outcomes, this opened up a whole new opportunity space for the company. 

Additionally, vaccines remain important to Vaxess. Being able to transport vaccines that require refrigeration to low resource settings in a cost-effective way remains a challenge. How do you enable patients to deliver vaccines themselves rather than rely on a healthcare worker to do those injections? There’s a tremendous opportunity to improve access to vaccines through the MIMIX platform.

In addition to the technology, I’m excited by the people at Vaxess who are working creatively every day to solve a range of different problems. It’s been great collaborating with the individuals here every day to advance what we’re doing. 

What is your current work ethos/style? ​

I think leadership, in many respects, is about providing direction and strategy for the company and unleashing people to achieve that strategy. Ultimately, it’s about how you get everyone to work at their very best, individually and as a team, because it’s only in that environment that you can really tackle the hardest problems.

I like to give people space to allow for the creativity to problem solve and ability to get things done while also holding them accountable for results. To give people flexibility, it means there has to be goals that are clearly defined.

One last point on style: I strive to create an open environment where people can be candid. But sometimes, when people think about candor, they think about a level of directness that can be offending. So, I like to call it candor with kindness. We need to have open, candid conversations, but we can be kind as we constructively work through problems together. 

Could you share some advice for young women starting to develop an interest in science or wanting to pursue a career like yours?  ​

Early on in my career, I felt like I was inconveniencing people when I reached out and asked them to network. Every now and then, I still have that reflex, but at the same time I believe it’s important to get to know what other people are doing, how they got where they got. There is no one right path or answer, and it’s through talking to a lot of different people that you can further shape your career and pursue the things that interest you.

Look for opportunities that interest you, push you to do something new or different, and give you the chance to work with great people. If you can do those things, you’re more likely to progress professionally and find fulfilment in what you do. I think early on, people spend time chasing logos and resume building, which is understandable. The work itself and brands you work for early in your career can matter a lot but do your homework on who it is you’d be working with, who you’d like to work with and who you’d learn the most from.

Lastly, I encourage women to be ready to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Many of my career decisions involved taking on roles very different to what I had done previously, because I wanted to learn and get exposure to different people and different things. Some of these opportunities were also not planned. Trust yourself, and don’t be afraid to take on a new opportunity.  

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