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How to conduct user research: A step-by-step guide

This is part one of a guide to User research.

Continue with part two: How to conduct user research: A Step-by-step guide

Continue with part three: What is exploratory research and why is it so exciting?

What user research did you conduct to reveal your ideal user?

Uh-oh. Not this question again. We both know the most common answer and it’s not great.

“Uhm, we talked to some users and had a brainstorming session with our team. It’s not much, but we don’t have time to do anything more right now. It’s better than nothing.”

Let’s be brutally honest about the meaning of that answer and rephrase it:

“ We don’t have time to get to know our actual user and maximize our chances of success. We’ll just assume that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.”

If that sounds super bad, it’s because IT IS. You don’t want to end up in this situation. And you won’t.

After reading this guide, you’ll know exactly how to carry out the user research that will become your guiding star during product development.

On this page

Why is user research so important?

Step #1: define research objectives.

Go ahead – create that fake persona

Step #2: Pick your methods

Qualitative methods – the why, quantitative methods – the what, behavioral and attitudinal methods, step #3: find your participants, how to recruit participants, how many participants, step #4: conduct user research.

Focus groups

Competitive analysis

Field studies

What’s next?

User research can be a scary word. It may sound like money you don’t have, time you can’t spare, and expertise you need to find. That’s why some people convince themselves that it’s not that important.

Which is a HUGE mistake.

User research is crucial – without it, you’ll spend your energy, time and money on a product that is based around false assumptions that won’t work in the real world.

Let’s take a look at Segway, a technologically brilliant product with incredible introductory publicity. Although it’s still around, it simply didn’t reach initial expectations. Here are some of the reasons why:

• It brought mockery, not admiration. The user was always “that guy”, who often felt fat or lazy.
• Cities were not prepared for it. Neither users nor policemen knew if it should be used on the road or on the sidewalk.
• A large segment of the target market comprised of postal and security workers. However, postal workers need both hands while walking, and security workers prefer bikes that don’t have a limited range.

Segway mainly fell short because of issues that could’ve been foreseen and solved by better user research.

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, sums it up nicely:

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

? Bonus material Download User research checklist and a comparison table

Never forget – you are not your user.

You require proper user research to understand your user’s problems, pain points, needs, desires, feelings and behaviours.

Let’s start with the process!

Before you get in touch with your target users, you need to define why you are doing the research in the first place. 

Establish clear objectives and agree with your team on your exact goals – this will make it much easier to gain valuable insights. Otherwise, your findings will be all over the place.

Here are some sample questions that will help you to define your objectives:

• What do you want to uncover?
• What are the knowledge gaps that you need to fill?
• What is already working and what isn’t?
• Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? What is that problem?
• What will the research bring to the business and/or your customers?

Once you start answering questions like these, it’s time to make a list of objectives. These should be specific and concise .

Let’s say you are making a travel recommendation app. Your research goals could be:

• Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions.
• Uncover the different tools that participants are using to make travel decisions.
• Identify problems or barriers that they encounter when making travel decisions.

I suggest that you prioritize your objectives and create an Excel table. It will come in handy later.

Go ahead, create that fake persona

A useful exercise for you to do at this stage is to write down some hypotheses about your target users.

Ask yourself:

What do we think we understand about our users that is relevant to our business or product?

Yes, brainstorm the heck out of this persona, but keep it relevant to the topic at hand.

Here’s my empathy map and empathy map canvas to really help you flesh out your imaginary user.

Once you’re finished, research any and every statement , need and desire with real people.

It’s a simple yet effective way to create questions for some of the research methods that you’ll be using.

However, you need to be prepared to throw some of your assumptions out of the window. If you think this persona may affect your bias, don’t bother with hypotheses and dive straight into research with a completely open mind.

Alright, you have your research goals. Now let’s see how you can reach them.

Here’s the main question you should be asking yourself at this step in the process:

Based on our time and manpower, what methods should we select?

It’s essential to pick the right method at the right time . I’ll delve into more details on specific methods in Step #4. For now, let’s take a quick look at what categories you can choose from.

Qualitative research tells you ‘why’ something occurs. It tells you the reasons behind the behavior, the problem or the desire. It answers questions like: “ Why do you prefer using app X instead of other similar apps?” or “What’s the hardest part about being a sales manager? Why?” .

Qualitative data comes in the form of actual insights and it’s fairly easy to understand.

Most of the methods we’ll look at in Step #4 are qualitative methods.

Quantitative research helps you to understand what is happening by providing different metrics.

It answers questions such as “What percentage of users left their shopping cart without completing the purchase?” or “Is it better to have a big or small subscription button?”.

Most quantitative methods come in handy when testing your product, but not so much when you’re researching your users. This is because they don’t tell you why particular trends or patterns occur.

There is a big difference between “what people do” and “what people say”.

As their names imply, attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure and observe behaviors.

Here’s a practical landscape that will help you choose the best methods for you. If it doesn’t make sense now, return to it once you’ve finished the guide and you’ll have a much better understanding.

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

I’ll give you my own suggestions and tips about the most common and useful methods in Step #4 – Conducting research.

In general, if your objectives are specific enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to see which methods will help you achieve them.

Remember that Excel table? Choose a method or two that will fulfill each objective and type it in the column beside it.

It won’t always be possible to carry out everything you’ve written down. If this is the case, go with the method(s) that will give you most of the answers. With your table, it will be easy to pick and choose the most effective options for you.

Onto the next step!

This stage is all about channeling your inner Sherlock and finding the people with the secret intel for your product’s success.

Consider your niche, your objectives and your methods – this should give you a general idea of the group or groups you want to talk to and research further.

Here’s my advice for most cases.

If you’re building something from the ground up, the best participants might be:

• People you assume face the problem that your product aims to solve
• Your competitors’ customers

If you are developing something or solving a problem for an existing product, you should also take a look at:

• Advocates and super-users
• Customers who have recently churned
• Users who tried to sign up or buy but decided not to commit

There are plenty of ways to bring on participants, and you can get creative so long as you keep your desired target group in mind.

You can recruit them online – via social media, online forums or niche community sites.

You can publish an ad with requirements and offer some kind of incentive.

You can always use a recruitment agency, too. This can be costly, but it’s also efficient.

If you have a user database and are changing or improving your product, you can find your participants in there. Make sure that you contact plenty of your existing users, as most of them won’t respond.

You can even ask your friends to recommend the right kind of people who you wouldn’t otherwise know.

With that said, you should always be wary of including friends in your research . Sure, they’re the easiest people to reach, but your friendship can (and probably will) get in the way of obtaining honest answers. There are plenty of horror stories about people validating their “brilliant” ideas with their friends, only to lose a fortune in the future. Only consider them if you are 100% sure that they will speak their mind no matter what.

That depends on the method. If you’re not holding a massive online survey, you can usually start with 5 people in each segment . That’s enough to get the most important unique insights. You can then assess the situation and decide whether or not you need to expand your research.

Finally! Let’s go through some of the more common methods you’ll be using, including their pros and cons, some pro tips, and when you should use them.

Engaging in one-on-one discussions with users enables you to acquire detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences. Individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up on the spot.

Interviews are time-consuming, especially on a per participant basis. You have to prepare for them, conduct them, analyze them and sometimes even transcribe them. They also limit your sample size, which can be problematic. The quality of your data will depend on the ability of your interviewer, and hiring an expert can be expensive.

• Prepare questions that stick to your main topics. Include follow-up questions for when you want to dig deeper into certain areas.
• Record the interview . Don’t rely on your notes. You don’t want to interrupt the flow of the interview by furiously scribbling down your answers, and you’ll need the recording for any potential in-depth analysis later on.
• Conduct at least one trial run of the interview to see if everything flows and feels right. Create a “playbook” on how the interview should move along and update it with your findings.
• If you are not comfortable with interviewing people, let someone else do it or hire an expert interviewer. You want to make people feel like they are talking to someone they know, rather than actually being interviewed. In my experience, psychologists are a great choice for an interviewer.

Interviews are not really time-sensitive, as long as you do them before the development process.

However, they can be a great supplement to online surveys and vice-versa. Conducting an interview beforehand helps you to create a more focused and relevant survey, while conducting an interview afterwards helps you to explain the survey answers.

Surveys are generally conducted online, which means that it’s possible to gather a lot of data in a very short time for a very low price . Surveys are usually anonymous, so users are often more honest in their responses.

It’s more difficult to get a representative sample because it’s tough to control who takes part in the survey – especially if you post it across social media channels or general forums. Surveys are quite rigid and if you don’t account for all possible answers, you might be missing out on valuable data. You have to be very careful when choosing your questions – poorly worded or leading ones can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue, as many people hate taking long surveys.

• Keep your surveys brief , particularly if participants won’t be compensated for their time. Only focus on what is truly important.
• Make sure that the questions can be easily understood. Unclear or ambiguous questions result in data on which you can’t depend. Keep the wording as simple as possible.
• Avoid using leading questions. Don’t ask questions that assume something, such as “What do you dislike about X?”. Replace this with “What’s your experience with X?”.
• Find engaged, niche online communities that fit your user profile. You’ll get more relevant data from these.

Similar to interviews. It depends on whether you want to use the survey as a preliminary method, or if you want a lot of answers to a few, very focused questions.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are moderated discussions with around 5 to 10 participants, the intention of which is to gain insight into the individuals’ attitudes, ideas and desires.

As focus groups include multiple people, they can quickly reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of your target audience . They are helpful when you require a lot of specific information in a short amount of time. When conducted correctly, they can act like interviews on steroids.

Focus groups can be tough to schedule and manage. If the moderator isn’t experienced, the discussion can quickly go off-topic. There might be an alpha participant that dictates the general opinion, and because it’s not one-on-one, people won’t always speak their mind.

• Find an experienced moderator who will lead the discussion. Having another person observing and taking notes is also highly recommended, as he or she can emphasize actionable insights and catch non-verbal clues that would otherwise be missed.
• Define the scope of your research . What questions will you ask? How in-depth do you want to go with the answers? How long do you want each discussion to last? This will determine how many people and groups should be tested.
• If possible, recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback, yet will still allow others to speak their mind. You won’t know the participants most of the time, so having an experienced moderator is crucial.

Focus groups work best when you have a few clear topics that you want to focus on.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis highlights the strengths and weaknesses of existing products . It explores how successful competitors act on the market. It gives you a solid basis for other user research methods and can also uncover business opportunities. It helps you to define your competitive advantage , as well as identify different user types.

A competitive analysis can tell you what exists, but not why it exists. You may collect a long feature list, but you won’t know which features are valued most by users and which they don’t use at all. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell how well a product is doing, which makes the data less useful. It also has limited use if you’re creating something that’s relatively new to the market.

• Create a list or table of information that you want to gather – market share, prices, features, visual design language, content, etc.
• Don’t let it go stale. Update it as the market changes so that you include new competitors.
• If you find something really interesting but don’t know the reason behind it, conduct research among your competitor’s users .
• After concluding your initial user research, go over the findings of your competitive analysis to see if you’ve discovered anything that’s missing on the market .

It can be a great first method, especially if you’re likely to talk to users of your competitors’ products

Field Studies

Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context, rather than at your company or office. Some are purely observational (the researcher is a “fly on the wall”), others are field interviews, and some act as a demonstration of pain points in existing systems.

You really get to see the big picture –  field studies allow you to gain insights that will fundamentally change your product design . You see what people actually do instead of what they say they do. A field study can explain problems and behaviours that you don’t understand better than any other method.

It’s the most time-consuming and expensive method. The results rely on the observer more than any of the other options. It’s not appropriate for products that are used in rare and specific situations.

• Establish clear objectives. Always remember why you are doing the research. Field studies can provide a variety of insights and sometimes it can be hard to stay focused. This is especially true if you are participating in the observed activity.
• Be patient. Observation might take some time. If you rush, you might end up with biased results.
• Keep an open mind and don’t ask leading questions. Be prepared to abandon your preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs. When interviewing people, try to leave any predispositions or biases at the door.
• Be warm but professional. If you conduct interviews or participate in an activity, you won’t want people around you to feel awkward or tense. Instead, you’ll want to observe how they act naturally.

Use a field study when no other method will do or if it becomes clear that you don’t really understand your user. If needed, you should conduct this as soon as possible – it can lead to monumental changes.

We started with a user persona and we’ll finish on this topic, too. But yours will be backed by research 😉

A persona outlines your ideal user in a concise and understandable way. It includes the most important insights that you’ve discovered. It makes it easier to design products around your actual users and speak their language. It’s a great way to familiarize new people on your team with your target market.

A persona is only as good as the user research behind it. Many companies create a “should be” persona instead of an actual one. Not only can such a persona be useless, it can also be misleading.

• Keep personas brief. Avoid adding unnecessary details and omit information that does not aid your decision making. If a persona document is too long, it simply won’t be used.
• Make personas specific and realistic. Avoid exaggerating and include enough detail to help you find real people that represent your ideal user.

Create these after you’ve carried out all of the initial user research. Compile your findings and create a persona that will guide your development process.

Now you know who you are creating your product for – you’ve identified their problems, needs and desires. You’ve laid the groundwork, so now it’s time to design a product that will blow your target user away! But that’s a topic for a whole separate guide, one that will take you through the process of product development and testing 😉

PS. Don’t forget -> Here is your ? User Research Checklist and comparison table

About the author

Oh hey, I’m Romina Kavcic

I am a Design Strategist who holds a Master of Business Administration. I have 14+ years of career experience in design work and consulting across both tech startups and several marquee tech unicorns such as Stellar.org, Outfit7, Databox, Xamarin, Chipolo, Singularity.NET, etc. I currently advise, coach and consult with companies on design strategy & management, visual design and user experience. My work has been published on Forbes, Hackernoon, Blockgeeks, Newsbtc, Bizjournals, and featured on Apple iTunes Store.

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A 7-step adaptable UX research process

Every team knows how important great UX research is for satisfying and converting users. But with so many tasks to juggle, research can get pushed to the bottom of the workflow. 

You conduct research—but only in response to stakeholder requests, user complaints, or a major new web or product launch. By then, it’s too late for your research to shape your design. The result? Scrappy research and a missed opportunity to forge your product around user needs.

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Be proactive rather than reactive by implementing a solid user experience (UX) research process from the start. Stay tuned to learn how to structure a flexible, 7-step research process that will guide your product development and design thinking to help you generate customer delight.

Boost your UX research with Hotjar

Design confidently with Hotjar’s rich, data-informed user experience insights

Why a strong UX research process is key

The UX research process acts as the foundation for all other stages of UX design and product development.

Mar P., product researcher at Hotjar, says: “The main goal of UX research is to create a product that works for your users and your business. It's about understanding real user problems so the team can work on solutions and move away from assumptions that can lead to bad product decisions. ”

Without a strong UX research process, you’ll end up with frustrated users, low conversion and customer loyalty rates, high error and churn rates, and costly redesigns. In short, if you rely on guesswork rather than research , users suffer—and so do your business objectives and team.

What are the benefits of great UX research? 

Great UX research helps you make confident UX decisions. 

It lets you validate your assumptions and weed out unpromising ideas before you waste resources on them, and ensures your product is designed to delight users from the start. 

Ongoing UX research is crucial to cultivating empathy for users throughout your organization . User experience data helps you solve problems and continually optimize your platform or product to meet user needs, and gives you the insights you need to get stakeholder buy-in on fixes and redesigns.

UX research is critical in validating that a team’s concepts are on the right track. It fosters alignment between an idea and the reality of what users actually want and need. UX research also allows teams to ‘fail early’ and adapt before large sums of time and money are spent.

The UX research process

Clearly, research is critical to UX design and development success. 

So it can’t just happen sporadically to put out customer or stakeholder fires, or when you happen to find yourself with extra time—which, let's be honest, never happens .

Instead, engage in a structured UX research process to prioritize research and infuse all stages of UX design with data insights.

But remember: a structured process doesn’t mean a rigid process. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to UX research: the best processes are flexible, adaptable, and tailored to the unique needs of your users, team, and business. 

Use our guide to establish a solid UX research process—tweaking it throughout to fit your workflow, company culture, and customer types.

You want your UX research to inform decisions, rather than post-rationalize decisions that have already been made without customer input. That’s why you need to define a research process.

7 steps for user research with impact

Our step-by-step guide to UX research is based on lean UX design principles, meaning continuous iteration, testing, and user feedback are central. 

Lean UX is based on an agile cycle with three phases: 

Think: brainstorming and reflecting on areas for improvement 

Make: creating new designs or features to solve user problems

Check: testing assumptions and verifying designs with real customers 

UX research is a non-linear process—research doesn’t end when design and development begin. The best research centers on continuous discovery at every stage, and involves circling back and forth between those stages. 

These 7 steps will get you well on your way:

1. Clarify your goals 

Clear goals will help you define the process, efficiently distribute resources, get stakeholders on board, and maximize the user insights you uncover .

Start by formulating hypotheses and topics of interest based on the potential problems and opportunities you want to learn more about. These might emerge from previous research, new opportunities you’ve identified, or from creative brainstorming. 

Then, define the key UX research questions you want to answer . These might center on user behavior (why are customers abandoning carts?), on different UX design options (which new CTA option performs best?), or on customer goals (which new features would most improve the user experience?). 

Pro tip : design user questions that are focused but flexible enough to allow for free discovery. Don’t go in armed with too many assumptions and don’t ask leading questions. Make sure you leave space to discover new information from your users that might not have occurred to you. Set up Hotjar’s Feedback widget to collect open-ended feedback from users to start.

Next, make sure you contextualize UX research goals in line with larger organizational objectives and success metrics: how will decreasing cart abandonment impact conversions and revenue, for example? 

Finally, explain to key stakeholders what you’re doing—and why—to get their support and maximize the reach of your research.  

It’s important to set research goals around current problems. For instance, if we need to offer an advanced search function for an ecommerce website, the goal will be to find the best solution for our users that’s easy to implement from the development perspective.

2. Define your research methods

Once you’ve set goals and designed user questions, decide what kinds of research you’ll do and the type of data you want to collect. 

Use a variety of methods to cover all the bases and fill potential gaps. These will depend on your user and business needs, and the resources you have available. 

Make sure you include both attitudinal and behavioral UX research methods .  

Behavioral research is about observing how users act. Heatmaps, A/B testing, user recordings, and eye-tracking are all important sources you can use to understand user behavior data.

Attitudinal research tells you how users are thinking and feeling . This often involves asking them directly through surveys, focus groups, customer interviews, concept testing, and card sorting.

If you rely on only one of these, you’ll be missing out on the big picture. Combining behavioral and attitudinal research fills in the gaps between what users say and what they actually do , which don’t always align.

Seek to also explore a mix of qualitative and quantitative UX data. 

Quantitative studies put a number on user behavior. Analyzing the number of users who scrolled past your CTA or clicked in frustration where they couldn’t find a button will help you spot patterns in clickthroughs, conversions, user engagement, and retention. 

Qualitative data uncovers the reasons behind these patterns. They’re opportunities to learn what your users really think and help you understand their needs more deeply.  

Remember: Hotjar’s tools combine behavioral and attitudinal research methods through a blend of quantitative and qualitative data. Use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to collect voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback, and Heatmaps and Session Recordings to round out the picture with behavioral insights.

3. Dive into discovery

Once you’ve set up research questions and UX analysis methods, the next step is to jump into the discovery phase, where the spotlight should be on speaking to your customers and understanding what they need to convert. 

Seek to develop a deep understanding of your users, the problems they experience, and what will help them with their jobs to be done. 

User interviews are a great way to start—video tools like UserInterview can really help when paired with Hotjar's brilliant interview tips .

Check out our in-depth guide to UX research tools that can help streamline the process.  

You should also: 

Observe customers using other similar sites (lab studies are great, but you can also use session recordings to see how users behave in their own environment)

Deploy Hotjar Feedback widgets to learn what users are thinking while they browse and understand blocks in navigation

Use surveys to ask users questions about their current and ideal experience

Run competitive analyses and conduct market research to understand the UX offered by other companies and identify areas of improvement and exploration

Make sure to ask customers open-ended questions about their experiences and what they’d like to see, as well as targeted questions around navigating particular product pages or features. For example, are they finding all the information they need to confidently complete the checkout process? You might discover that your users like to check out reviews before making a final decision, so making reviews more accessible could help UX and conversions alike.

4. Dig deeper and explore

Use the insights from the discovery phase as a starting point, then get more specific and home in on answering your specific UX research questions and really understanding your users at a granular level.  

Map out customer journeys and develop user personas and stories to clarify and communicate the information you’ve learned. 

You should also use your discoveries to inform preliminary idea development, design sketches, and wireframes and prototypes.

Maybe you’re losing customers at the checkout stage, and discovery phase feedback has suggested it could be because you don’t have a ‘guest checkout’ option, forcing users to sign up for a full account, which creates friction if they’re browsing your site on mobile.

Start by validating the guest checkout idea with your users, then design and test different iterations through prototypes, mockups, and card sorting experiments. 

5. Iterate and test

Once you have a working model of your website or product redesign, focus on testing the user experience to refine it. 

Here's how:

Start with usability testing to ensure that your website hierarchies, user flow, and search filters make sense. Run A/B and multivariate testing to see which designs users respond to best, and use heatmaps to see exactly where they're clicking and scrolling. 

Make sure you also evaluate accessibility: is the guest checkout option easy to find? Is it visible to users across different devices, and with different vision needs? 

Next, go deeper: seek to build a complete picture of the UX and how it facilitates and blocks users from getting their needs met.

Observe users in action. Use Hotjar Heatmaps to identify click and scroll patterns and Session Recordings to track the entire user journey. This helps the UX team see what their customers see, which is crucial at this testing stage when you’re often too close to the design to understand the experience from the outside. 

Look at the page elements customers are engaging with, and which ones they’re scrolling past. Filter session recordings by rage clicks to see where users may be clicking in frustration expecting a button or action. Pay special attention to dissatisfied customers or users who didn’t complete key conversion actions, and understand what their journey looks like.

Complement this understanding of user behavior with qualitative interviews and survey methods that will help you understand their motivations and product experience (PX). 

6. Evaluate and communicate research findings

By now, you’ve collected many research insights. Organize your data using categories and tags, focusing on user pain points . Look for key patterns and recurring issues—and once you’ve identified them, ask users more questions if needed.

Make your research insights searchable, manipulable, and easily accessible by everyone on the team.

Then, engage in cross-functional communication outside the core UX team. Make sure you keep different departments informed and involved with your UX research process. 

Create UX analysis reports and engage stakeholders with comprehensive UX and user storytelling and strong product narratives. But make sure you also share key nuggets of user data along the way, so your research insights filter throughout the whole organization.

Pro tip : use Hotjar Highlights to easily share user recording clips, screenshots, heatmap snippets, and VoC quotes throughout your company. You can also use the Slack integration to automatically keep different departments up to date!

7. Put your research into action

The UX research data you gather is a potential goldmine. It can help you prioritize brilliantly and boost user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. But only if you turn those insights into action . 

You need to put the data to work in making key UX design decisions. 

Use your UX research insights to prioritize fixes and product updates . Focus on urgent issues that are affecting key metrics and blocking users from meeting their needs. 

Heatmaps and session recordings can help you quickly spot low-hanging fruit. You might find you could drastically improve conversions by positioning your CTA differently or making your signup form more streamlined and intuitive. 

For larger design opportunities that will require significant resources, UX research data can help you to justify the cost to stakeholders.

I follow the process of finding patterns in the data, pulling at least one insight from each identified pattern, and then creating at least one design recommendation or design principle for each insight. When you are designing you can easily refer back to your identified design principles and requirements to help guide your decision making and have data-supported designs when it’s time for handoff.

Building the UX research process into your design culture

UX research isn’t a one-time activity to be forgotten about once you begin designing and developing. 

The UX research process should happen continuously, influencing all other aspects of UX design and product development. Ongoing research, testing, and user conversations are all part of confident, user-led design thinking. 

Prioritizing brilliant UX research will improve your design culture, boost conversions, and keep users engaged and delighted.  

FAQs on the UX research process:

Is ux research important.

UX research is hugely important in data-informed UX design. The UX research process acts as the foundation for all other stages of UX design and development.

Great UX research gives you confidence in your UX decisions, lets you test your assumptions and weed out unpromising ideas before you waste resources on them, and ensures your product is designed to delight users from the start. 

UX research is crucial to cultivating empathy for users throughout your organization . It helps you to problem-solve and continually optimize your platform or product to meet user needs, and gives you the evidence you need to get stakeholder buy-in on fixes and redesigns.

Should I do attitudinal or behavioral UX research?

Use both attitudinal and behavioral UX research methods.  

Behavioral research is about observing how users act. Heatmaps, A/B testing, user recordings, and eye-tracking are all important sources of user behavior data.

If you rely on only one of these, you’ll be missing a big part of the picture. Combining behavioral and attitudinal research methods fills in the gaps between what users say and what they actually do , which don’t always align.

What’s the best UX research process?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to UX research. The best processes are flexible and tailored to the unique needs of your users, team, and business. 

We recommend a 7-step, adaptable UX research process: 

Clarify your goals

Define your research methods

Dive into discovery

Dig deeper and explore

Iterate and test

Evaluate and communicate your research findings

Put your research into action

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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.

• UserResearch

Miklos Philips

London, United Kingdom

Member since May 20, 2016

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The Complete Guide To UX Research (User Research)

UX Research is a term that has been trending in the past few years. There's no surprise why it's so popular - User Experience Research is all about understanding your customer and their needs, which can help you greatly improve your conversion rate and user experience on your website. In this article, we're going to provide a complete guide to UX research as well as how to start implementing it in your organisation.Throughout this article we will give you a complete high-level overview of the entire UX Research meaning, supported by more in-depth articles for each topic.

Introduction to UX Research

Wether you're a grizzled UX Researcher who's been in the field for decades or a UX Novice who's just getting started, UX Research is an integral aspect of the UX Design process. Before diving into this article on UX research methods and tools, let's first take some time to break down what UX research actually entails.

Each of these UX Research Methods has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to understand your goals for the UX Research activities you want to complete.

What is UX Research?

UX research begins with UX designers and UX researchers studying the real world needs of users. User Experience Research is a process --it's not just one thing-- that involves collecting data, conducting interviews, usability testing prototypes or website designs with human participants in order to deeply understand what people are looking for when they interact with a product or service.

By using different sorts of user-research techniques you can better understand not only people desires from their product of service, but a deeper human need which can serve as an incredibly powerful opportunity.

There's an incredible amount of different sorts of research methods. Most of them can be divided in two camps: Qualitative and Quantitative Research.

Qualitative research - Understanding needs can be accomplished through observation, in depth interviews and ethnographic studies. Quantitative Research focusses more on the numbers, analysing data and collecting measurable statistics.

Within these two groups there's an incredible amount of research activities such as Card Sorting, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Usability Tests, Personas & Customer Journeys and many more. We've created our The Curated List of Research Techniques to always give you an up-to-date overview.

Why is UX Research so important?

When I started my career as a digital designer over 15 years ago, I felt like I was always hired to design the client's idea. Simply translate what they had in their head into a UI without even thinking about changing the user experience. Needless to say: This is a recipe for disaster. An no, this isn't a "Client's don't know anything" story. Nobody knows! At least in the beginning. The client had "the perfect idea" for a new digital feature. The launch date was already set and the development process had to start as soon as possible.

When the feature launched, we expected support might get a few questions or even receive a few thank-you emails. We surely must've affected the user experience somehow!

But that didn't happen. Nothing happened. The feature wasn't used.

Because nobody needed it.

This is exactly what happens when you skip user experience research because you think you're solving a problem that "everybody" has, but nobody really does.

Conducting User Experience research can help you to have a better understanding of your stakeholders and what they need. This is incredibly valuable information from which you can create personas and customer journeys. It doesn't matter if you're creating a new product or service or are improving an existing once.

Five Steps for conducting User Research

Created by Eric Sanders , the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for your user research.

• Objectives: What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
• Hypotheses: What do we think we understand about our users?
• Methods: Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
• Conduct: Gather data through the selected methods.
• Synthesize: Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

1: Objectives: Define the Problem Statement

A problem statement is a concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be improved upon. It identifies the gap between the current (problem) state and desired (goal) state of a process or product.

Problem statements are the first steps in your research because they help you to understand what's wrong or needs improving. For example, if your product is a mobile app and the problem statement says that customers are having difficulty paying for items within the application, then UX research will lead you (hopefully) down that path. Most likely it will involve some form of usability testing.

Check out this article if you'd like to learn more about Problem Statements.

2: Hypotheses: What we think we know about our user groups

After getting your Problem Statement right, there's one more thing to do before doing any research. Make sure you have created a clear research goal for yourself. How do you identify Research Objectives? By asking questions:

• Who are we doing this for? The starting point for your personas!
• What are we doing? What's happening right now? What do our user want? What does the company need?
• Think about When. If you're creating a project plan, you'll need a timeline. It also helps to keep in mind when people are using your products or service.
• Where is the logical next step. Where do people use your product? Why there? What limitations are there to that location? Where can you perform research? Where do your users live?
• Why are we doing this? Why should or shouldn't we be doing this? Why teaches you all about motivations from people and for the project.
• Last but not least: How? Besides thinking about the research activities itself, think about how people will test a product or feature. How will the user insights (outcome of the research) work be used in the  User Centered Design - and development process?

3: Methods: Choose the right research method

UX research is about exploration, and you want to make sure that your method fits the needs of what you're trying to explore. There are many different methods. In a later chapter we'll go over the most common UX research methods .

For now, all you need to keep in mind that that there are a lot of different ways of doing research.

You definitely don't need to do every type of activity but it would be useful to have a decent understanding of the options you have available, so you pick the right tools for the job.

4. Conduct: Putting in the work

Apply your chosen user research methods to your Hypotheses and Objectives! The various techniques used by the senior product designer in the BTNG Design Process can definitely be overwhelming. The product development process is not a straight line from A to B. UX Researchers often discover new qualitative insights in the user experience due to uncovering new (or incorrect) user needs. So please do understand that UX Design is a lot more than simply creating a design.

5. Synthesise: Evaluating Research Outcome

So you started with your Problem Statement (Objectives), you drafted your hypotheses, chose the top research methods, conducted your research as stated in the research process and now "YOU ARE HERE".

The last step is to Synthesise what you've learned. Start by filling in the knowledge gaps. What unknowns are you now able to answer?

Which of your hypotheses are proven (or disproven)?

And lastly, which new exciting new opportunities did you discover!

Evaluating the outcome of the User Experience Research is an essential part of the work.

Make sure to keep them brief and to-the-point. A good rule of thumb is to include the top three positive comments and the top three problems.

UX Research Methods

Choosing the right ux research method.

Making sure you use the right types of user experience research in any project is essential. Since time and money is always limited, we need to make sure we always get the most bang-for-our-buck. This means we need to pick the UX research method that will give us the most insights as possible for a project.

Three things to keep in mind when making a choice among research methodologies:

• Stages of the product life cycle - Is it a new or existing product?
• Quantitative vs. Qualitative - In depth talk directly with people or data?
• Attitudinal vs. Behavioural - What people say vs what people do

Image from Nielsen Norman Group

Most frequently used methods of UX Research

• Card Sorting: Way before UX Research even was a "thing", psychological research originally used Card Sorting.  With Card Sorting, you try to find out how people group things and what sort of hierarchies they use. The BTNG Research Team is specialised in remote research. So our modern Card Sorting user experience research have a few modern surprises.
• Usability Testing: Before launching a new feature or product it is important to do user testing. Give them tasks to complete and see how well the prototype works and learn more about user behaviours.
• Remote Usability Testing: During the COVID-19 lockdown, finding the appropriate ux research methods haven't always been that easy. Luckily, we've adopted plenty of modern solutions that help us with collecting customer feedback even with a remote usability test.
• Research-Based User Personas: A profile of a fictional character representing a specific stakeholder relevant to your product or service. Combine goals and objections with attitude and personality. The BTNG Research Team creates these personas for the target users after conducing both quantitative and qualitative user research.
• Field Studies: Yes, we actually like to go outside. What if your product isn't a B2B desktop application which is being used behind a computer during office hours? At BTNG we have different types of Field Studies which all help you gain valuable insights into human behaviour and the user experience.
• The Expert Interview: Combine your talent with that of one of BTNG's senior researcher. Conducting ux research without talking to the experts on your team would be a waste of time. In every organisation there are people who know a lot about their product or service and have unique insights. We always like to include them in the UX Research!
• Eye Movement Tracking: If you have an existing digital experience up and running - Eye Movement Tracking can help you to identify user experience challenges in your funnel. The outcome shows a heatmap of where the user looks (and doesn't).

Check out this article for a in-depth guide on UX Research Methods.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative UX research methods

Since this is a topic that we can on about for hours, we decided to split this section up in a few parts. First let's start with the difference.

Qualitative UX Research is based on an in-depth understanding of the human behaviour and needs. Qualitative user research includes interviews, observations (in natural settings), usability tests or contextual inquiry. More than often you'll obtain unexpected, valuable insights through this from of user experience research methods.

Quantitative UX Research relies on statistical analysis to make sense out of data (quantitative data) gathered from UX measurements: A/B Tests - Surveys etc. Quantitative UX Research is as you might have guessed, a lot more data-orientated.

If you'd like to learn more about these two types of research, check out these articles:

Get the most out of your User Research with Qualitative Research

Quantitative Research: The Science of Mining Data for Insights

Balancing qualitative and quantitative UX research

Both types of research have amazing benefits but also challenges. Depending on the research goal, it would be wise to have a good understanding which types of research you would like to be part of the ux design and would make the most impact.

The BTNG Research Team loves to start with Qualitative Research to first get a better understanding of the WHY and gain new insights. To validate these new learning they use Quantitative Research in your user experience research.

A handful of helpful UX Research Tools

The landscape of UX research tools has been growing rapidly. The BTNG Research team use a variety of UX research tools to help with well, almost everything. From running usability tests, creating prototypes and even for recruiting participants.

In the not-too-distant future, we'll create a Curated UX Research Tool article. For now, a handful of helpful UX Research Tools should do the trick.

• For surveys : Typeform
• For UX Research Recruitment: Dscout
• For analytics and heatmaps: VWO
• For documenting research: Notion & Airtable
• For Customer Journey Management : TheyDo
• For transcriptions: Descript
• For remote user testing: Maze
• For Calls : Zoom

Surveys: Typeform

What does it do? Survey Forms can be boring. Typeform is one of those ux research tools that helps you to create beautiful surveys with customisable templates and an online editor. For example, you can add videos to your survey or even let people draw their answers instead of typing them in a text box. Who is this for? Startup teams that want to quickly create engaging and modern looking surveys but don't know how to code it themselves.

Highlights: Amazing UX, looks and feel very modern, create forms with ease that match your branding, great reports and automation.

Why is it our top pick? Stop wasting time on ux research tools with too many buttons. Always keep the goal of your ux research methods in mind. Keep things lean, fast and simple with a product with amazing UX.

https://www.typeform.com/

UX Research Recruitment: Dscout

What does it do? Dscout is a remote research platform that helps you recruit participants for your ux research (the right ones). With a pool of +100.000 real users, our user researchers can hop on video calls and collect data for your qualitative user research. So test out those mobile apps user experience and collect all the data! Isn't remote research amazing?

Highlights: User Research Participant Recruitment, Live Sessions,Prototype feedback, competitive analysis, in-the-wild product discovery, field work supplementations, shopalongs.

Why is it our top pick? Finding the right people is more important than finding people fast. BTNG helps corporate clients in all types of industries which require a unique set of users, each time. Dscout helps us to quickly find the right people and make sure our user research is delivered on time and our research process stays in tact.

https://dscout.com/

Analytics and heatmaps: VWO

What does it do? When we were helping the Financial Times, our BTNG Research Team collaborated with FT Marketing Team who were already running experiments with VWO. 50% of the traffic would see one version of a certain page while 50% saw a different version. Which performed best? Perhaps you'd take a look at time-on-page. But more importantly: Which converts better!

Hotjar provides Product Experience Insights that show how users behave and what they feel strongly about, so product teams can deliver real value to them.

Highlights: VWO is an amazing suite that does it all:Automated Feedback, Heatmaps, EyeTracking, User Session Recordings (Participant Tracking) and one thing that Hotjar doesn't do: A/B Testing.

Why is it our top pick? Even tho it's an expensive product, it does give you value for money. Especially the reports with very black and white outcomes are great for presenting the results you've made.

https://vwo.com/

Documenting research: Notion

What does it do? Notion is our command center, where we store and constantly update our studio's aggregate wisdom. It is a super-flexible tool that helps to organise project documentation, prepare for interviews with either clients or their product users, accumulate feedback, or simply take notes.

Highlights: A very clean, structured way to write and share information with your team in a beautiful designed app with an amazing user experience.

Why is it our top pick? There's no better, more structured way to share information.

https://www.notion.so/

Customer Journey Management: TheyDo

What does it do? TheyDo is a modern Journey Management Platform. It centralises your journeys in an easy to manage system, where everyone has access to a single source of truth of the customer experience. It’s like a CMS for journeys.

Highlights: Customer Journey Map designer, Personas and 2x2 Persona Matrix, Opportunity & Solution Management & Prioritisation.

Why is it our top pick? TheyDo fits perfectly with BTNG's way of helping companies become more customer-centric. It helps to visualise the current experience of stakeholders. With those insight which we capture from interviews or usability testing, we discover new opportunities. A perfect starting point for creating solutions!

https://www.theydo.io/

Transcriptions: Descript

What does it do? Descript is an all-in-one solution for audio & video recording, editing and transcription. The editing is as easy as a doc. Imagine you’ve interviewed 20 different people about a new flavor of soda or a feature for your app. You just drop all those files into a Descript Project, and they show up in different “Compositions” (documents) in the sidebar. In a couple of minutes they’ll be transcribed, with speaker labels added automatically.

Highlights: Overdub, Filler Word Removal, Collaboration, Subtitles, Remote Recording and Studio Sound.

Why is it our top pick? Descript is an absolute monster when it comes to recording, editing and transcribing videos. It truly makes digesting the work after recording fast and even fun!

https://www.descript.com/

Remote user testing: Maze

What does it do? Maze is a-mazing remote user testing platform for unmoderated usability tests. With Maze, you can create and run in-depth usability tests and share them with your testers via a link to get actionable insights. Maze also generates a usability study report instantly so that you can share it with anyone.

It’s handy that the tool integrates directly with Figma, InVision, Marvel, and Sketch, thus, you can import a working prototype directly from the design tool you use. The BTNG Design Team with their Figma skills has an amazing chemistry with the Research Team due to that Figma/Maze integration.

Highlights: Besides unmoderated usability testing, Maze can help with different UX Research Methods, like card sorting, tree testing, 5-second testing, A/B testing, and more.

Why is it our top pick? Usability testing has been a time consuming way of qualitative research. Trying to find out how users interact (Task analysis) during an Interviews combined with keeping an eye on the prototype can be... a challenge. The way that Maze allows us to run (besides our hands on usability test) now also run unmoderated usability testing is a powerful weapon in our arsenal.

https://maze.co/

Calls: Zoom

What does it do? As the other video conferencing tools you can run video calls. But what makes Zoom a great tool? We feel that the integration with conferencing equipment is huge for our bigger clients. Now that there's also a Miro integration we can make our user interviews even more fun and interactive!

Highlights: Call Recording, Collaboration tools, Screen Sharing, Free trial, connects to conferencing equipment, host up to 500 people!

Why is it our top pick? Giving the research participants of your user interviews a pleasant experience is so important. Especially when you're looking for qualitative feedback on your ux design, you want to make sure they feel comfortable. And yes, you'll have to start using a paid version - but the user interface of Zoom alone is worth it. Even the Mobile App is really solid.

https://zoom.us/

In Conclusion

No matter what research methodology you rely on if it is qualitative research methods or perhaps quantitative data - keep in mind that user research is an essential part of the Design Process. Not only your UX designer will thank you, but also your users.

In every UX project we've spoken to multiple users - no matter if it was a task analysis, attitudinal research or focus groups... They all had one thing in common:

People thanked us for taking the time to listen to them.

So please, stop thinking about the potential UX research methods you might use in your design process and consider what it REALLY is about:

Solving the right problems for the right people.

And there's only one way to get there: Trying things out, listening, learning and improving.

Looking for help? Reach out!

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of user research tips: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/

Find an extensive range of user research considerations, discussed in Smashing Magazine: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/comprehensive-guide-ux-research/

Here’s a convenient and example-rich catalogue of user research tools: https://blog.airtable.com/43-ux-research-tools-for-optimizing-your-product/

Related Posts

How to generate UX Insights

The importance of User Research

How to recruit participants

What is ux research.

UX Research Tools

How to Conduct User Experience Research Like a Professional

Whether you’re looking to develop a broad UX design skillset, or you’re exploring UX research as a design specialization , here’s your complete introduction to conducting user research like a pro. 

Hello, I’m Raven, a mentor for aspiring UX designers enrolled in the CareerFoundry UX Design Course . I also work as a UX Research Assistant at IBM and studied behavioral science at the University of Texas. I have 10 years of experience studying and analyzing human behavior—user research is definitely my thing.

During the past few years, I’ve worked with major companies, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations to develop and improve impactful products and applications. I’ve moderated focus groups, designed and administered surveys, carried out usability testing, and conducted user interviews. I also know a thing or two about creating a good persona!

In this guide, we’re going to cover the basics of UX research. We’ll start with exactly what it is, and then move on to discuss the various steps and associated terminology of UX research , as well as its role and value within the broader design process . We’ll then review the most common UX research methods, diving into how they’re conducted and a few best practices.

If you’re particularly interested in one of these topics, simply select it from the list below to jump straight to it. I’ve also added videos throughout the guide for those of you who prefer to learn with both eyes and ears—and I recommend you save this set of free UX research tutorials for later, too. Sound good? Let’s get started!

Introduction To User Experience (UX) Research

• What is UX research?
• What’s the difference between good and bad UX research?
• What are the five steps of UX research?
• What’s the role of research in the UX design process?
• Whats the value of UX research?

Introduction To User Experience Research Methods

• User Groups
• Usability Testing
• User Interviews
• Online Surveys
• User Personas
• What Next? User Research Analysis

1. What is UX research?

You read my bio in the introduction. Using only this information, could you explain why I recently switched from one time management app to another? Probably not. In order to answer this question, you need more context. UX research provides that context.  So, what is UX research and what is its purpose ?

“User research is how you will know your product or service will work in the real world, with real people. It’s where you will uncover or validate the user needs which should form the basis of what you are designing.”

— Chris Mears, UXr

According to Design Modo , UX research is; “The process of understanding user behaviors, needs, and attitudes using different observation and feedback collection methods.” One of the other benefits of user experience research is that it helps us understand how people live their lives so that we can respond to their needs with informed design solutions. Good UX research involves using the right method at the right time during the development of a product.

Maria Arvidsson, Head of Product and UX at Usabilla , describes UX research as:

“The means through which you try to understand your users’ needs, behaviors and motivations and validate your assumptions and solutions.”

2. What’s the difference between good and bad UX research?

The biggest sign of an amateur UX designer is excluding end users from the design process. At the very start of my career I held the attitude that I could test any app, website, or product on myself, replacing the act of speaking with users. Never a good idea. It took time for me to learn a more professional approach, which is to start the design process by listening to the end user. Overall, UX research helps us avoid our biases since we are required to design solutions for people who are not like us.

“Insights that are received directly from user experience research are like muscle memory; the more you do research, the more insights you build up. But just like muscle memory, YOU have to be a part of the hard work in order to enjoy the lasting benefits of it that are specific to you. While it may be tempting to outsource research to a specialized team (and sometimes you can’t avoid it), you should try your utmost best to engage in at least a little bit of the research so that the insights grow under your skin instead of being handed to you from someone else who has sweated it.” 

—UX designer Ali Rushdan Tariq from ARTariq

A quick plug before we continue: If you’re looking to become a professional in this subdomain of UX, be sure to take a look at our guide to becoming a UX researcher

3. What are the five steps of UX research?

Created by Erin Sanders , the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for conducting UX research. The first two steps are about forming questions and hypotheses, and the last three steps are about gathering knowledge through selected UX research methods.

• Objectives: What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
• Hypotheses: What do we think we understand about our users?
• Methods: Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
• Conduct: Gather data through the selected methods.
• Synthesize: Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

4. What’s the role of research in the UX design process?

UX research is the starting point for a project . Research helps us learn about the users and their behavior, goals, motivations, and needs. It also shows us how they currently navigate a system, where they have problems and, most importantly, how they feel when interacting with our product.

UX research comes first in the UX design process because without it, our work can only be based on our own experiences and assumptions, which is not objective. As Neil Turner, founder of UX for the Masses told us, a good foundation is key to successful design:

“Good user research is key to designing a great user experience. Designing without good user research is like building a house without solid foundations—your design will soon start to crumble and eventually fall apart.”

5. What’s the value of UX research?

In the current digital product landscape, the real value of UX research is its ability to reduce uncertainty in terms of what users want and need , which yields benefits for the product, the business, and, of course, the users themselves.

1. Product Benefits

UX research provides data about the end user of the product, how and when the user will use the product, and the main problems the product will solve. UX research is also helpful when UX designers and the rest of the team (and stakeholders) have to decide between multiple design solutions.

2. Business Benefits

UX research brings a lot of a value to businesses. By knowing the end users and incorporating design requirements upfront, businesses can speed up the product development process, eliminate redesign costs, and increase user satisfaction.

3. User Benefits

One of the greatest values of user experience research is that it’s unbiased user feedback. Simply put, UX research speaks the user’s thoughts—without any influence from outside authority. It also serves as a bridge between users and the company.

“User experience research provides powerful insights that allow companies to humanize their customers and insert their needs, intentions, and behaviors into the design and development process. In turn, these insights enable companies to create experiences that meet—and sometimes exceed—customer needs and expectations. User experience research should be conducted well before the first sketch is drawn and integrated throughout the concept, iterative design, and launch phases of a product.”

—Janelle Estes, Director of Research Strategy at UserTesting

UX research is based on observation, understanding,  and analysis.  With the help of various UX research techniques, you will:

• O bserve your users , keeping an eye out for non-verbal clues as to how they are feeling;
• Develop an understanding of the user’s mental model : what does the user anticipate when using a certain product? Based on their previous experience, how do they expect this particular product to work?
• A nalyze  the insights you’ve gathered and try to identify patterns and trends. Eventually, these insights will inform the decisions you make about the product and how it is designed.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the most valuable user research techniques.

1. User Groups

User groups—also called “focus group discussions” or “focus groups”—are structured interviews that quickly and inexpensively reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of a target audience. User groups are a helpful user experience research method when a company needs a lot of insight in a short amount of time. If you are unsure when to use a user experience research method, user groups can be a good one to start with.

Why Do We Conduct User Groups?

User groups can help your company better understand:

1) How users perceive a product

2) What users believe are a product’s most important features

3) What problems users experience with the product

4) Where users feel the product fails to meet expectations

User groups can also be used to generate ideas of what users want to see in the future.

What people say and what people do are often very different, therefore user groups do not provide an accurate measurement of behavior . And because user groups are conducted with more than one user at a time, participants may influence each other’s opinions and preferences (aka “groupthink”), thus introducing bias and producing inaccurate data.

Best Practices For User Groups

Getting the most out of your user group is straightforward if you consider the following best practices when conducting this particular user research technique.

• Ask good questions: Make sure your questions are clear, open-ended, and focused on the topics you’re investigating.
• Choose a few topics: On average, plan to discuss 3-5 topics during a 90-minute focus group.
• Include the right amount of people: A good focus group should include 3-6 users—large enough to include a variety of perspectives, but small enough so everyone has a chance to speak.

“Conducting user research allows you to dive deep beneath the surface of what your users say they want, to instead uncover what they actually need. It’s the key to ensuring that your products and features will actually solve the problems that your clients face on a day to day basis. User research is imperative if you want to create a successful, habit forming product.”

— Jennifer Aldrich, UX and Content Strategist at InVisionApp

How To Conduct User Experience Research With User Groups

Conducting user groups can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Create a schedule that provides enough time for recruiting, testing, analyzing, and integrating results.
• Assemble your team, and establish roles: choose a moderator, note-taker, and discussion leader.
• Define the scope of your research: what questions will you ask? And how in-depth do you want to explore the answers? This will determine the number of people and the number of groups that need to be tested.
• Create a discussion guide that includes 3-5 topics for discussion.
• Recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback.
• Conduct user group testing, and record data.
• Analyze and report findings.

“It’s really hard to design products by user groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

—Steve Jobs

2. Usability Testing

According to the usability.gov website, usability testing refers to “evaluating a product or service by testing it with representative users.” During a test, participants will be asked to complete specific tasks while one or more observers watch, listen, and record notes. The main goal of this user experience testing method is to identify usability problems, collect qualitative data, and determine participants’ overall satisfaction with the product.

Why Do We Perform Usability Testing?

Usability testing helps identify problems before they are coded. When development issues are identified early on, it is typically less expensive to fix them. Usability testing also reveals how satisfied users are with the product , as well as what changes are required to improve user satisfaction and performance .

Unfortunately, usability testing is not 100% representative of the real life scenario in which a user will engage with your product. Also, because the data is qualitative, this kind of UX testing method doesn’t provide the large samples of feedback a questionnaire might. The good news it that the qualitative feedback you receive can be far more accurate and insightful.

Best Practices For Usability Testing

• Test with five users: Testing five users is typically enough to identify a design’s most important usability problems.
• Invite your team to the testing sessions: Anyone who is involved with how fast and how well problems are addressed should be invited to the usability testing sessions. These stakeholders may include the executive team, and lead developers or designers.
• Keep the findings brief and to-the-point: When you report the findings of a usability test, limit the comments to the ones that are really important. One good rule of thumb is to include the top three positive comments and the top three problems. The overall report should be no more than approximately 50 comments and 30 pages.

How to Conduct UX Research with Usability Testing

Usability testing can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Identify what needs to be tested and why (e.g. a new product, feature, etc.)
• Identify the target audience (or your desired customers).
• Create a list of tasks for the participants to work through.
• Recruit the right participants for the test.
• Involve the right stakeholders.
• Apply what you learn.

“One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that ‘you are not the user.’ If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.”

– Jakob Nielsen

3. User Interviews

A well-known user experience methodology is an interview. An interview is a user experience research method used to discover the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of users (and potential users) of a product. Interviews are typically conducted by one interviewer speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an hour. Interviews can take place face-to-face, over the phone, or via video streaming.

Why Do We Conduct Interviews?

Of all the user experience design methods, interviews are typically conducted at the beginning of the product development cycle when reviewing product goals. Because of the one-to-one nature of the interview, individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up.

Face-to-face interviews also allow you to capture verbal and nonverbal cues, such as emotions and body language, which may identify enthusiasm for the product or discomfort with the questions.

When thinking about what research methodology to use, bear in mind that interviews are also a good supplement to online surveys: conducting an interview beforehand helps you refine questions for the survey, while conducting an interview afterwards allows you to gain explanations for survey answers.

There are a few drawbacks, however. First, because interviews require a team of people to conduct them, personnel costs are usually difficult to keep low. Sample size is also limited to the size of the interviewing staff.

Best Practices For User Interviews

• Hire a skilled interviewer: A skilled interviewer asks questions in a neutral manner, listens well, makes users feel comfortable, and knows when and how to probe for more details.
• Create a discussion guide: Write up a discussion guide (or an interview protocol) for all interviewers to follow. This guide should include questions and follow-up questions.
• Get informed consent: Before conducting the interview, make sure to get permission or consent to record the session. It’s also good to have one or two note takers on hand.

How To Conduct User Experience Research With User Interviews

Conducting an interview can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Prepare a discussion guide, or a list of questions to ask participants.
• Select a recording method (e.g. written notes, tape recorder, video).
• Conduct at least one trial run of the interview.
• Recruit the right participants for the interview.
• Conduct the interview.
• Analyze and report the results.

“Curiosity is a natural outcome of caring, and it is the single greatest contributor to effective user research … Caring and curiosity engender personal investment, and investment motivates a researcher to develop a deep understanding of users.”

– Demetrius Madrigal

4. Online Surveys

A survey is a research tool that typically includes a set of questions used to find out the preferences, attitudes, and opinions of your users on a given topic. Today, surveys are generally conducted online and in various lengths and formats. Data collected from surveys is received automatically, and the survey tool selected generally provides some level of analysis, the data from which can then be used for user experience studies further down the line to inform your product.

“It is so important to avoid using leading questions when it comes to surveys. It’s a common mistake that many people make. For example phrasing a question like “What do you dislike about Uber?” assumes the user has a negative preference for the service off the bat. A more neutral phrase would be “Tell us about your experience getting around town.” – this elicits more natural user feedback and behavior instead of forcing them down a funnel.”

– Top tip from UXBeginner

Why Do We Conduct Online Surveys?

Unlike traditional surveys, online surveys enable companies to quickly collect data from a broad (and sometimes remote) audience for free—or a low price. Surveys also help you discover who your users are , what your users want to accomplish, and what information your users are looking for.

Unfortunately, what users say versus what they do are two different things and can often yield inaccurate results. Furthermore, poorly worded questions can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue—many people hate taking long surveys. This is why it’s important to create short surveys so users are more likely to complete them and participate in future research efforts.

Best Practices For Online Surveys

• Keep it short: Keep your surveys brief, especially if participants will be compensated little or not at all. Only focus on what is truly important.
• Keep it simple: Make sure questions can be easily understood: ambiguous or complex wording can make questions more difficult to understand, which can bring the data into question.
• Keep it engaging: Include a mix of both multiple choice questions and open-ended questions (or questions in which users complete the answer).

How To Conduct User Experience Research With Online Surveys

Conducting an online survey can be broken down into a few major steps:

• Identify goals and objectives of the survey.
• Create survey questions.

Note: Consider collecting information about how satisfied users are with your product, what users like/dislike, and if they have suggestions for improvement.

• Select an online survey tool (e.g. SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics).
• Recruit participants.
• Conduct the survey.

“We have to arm ourselves with data, research … and a clear understanding of our users so our decisions are not made out of fear but out of real, actionable information. Although our clients may not have articulated reasons for why they want what they want, it is our responsibility to have an ironclad rationale to support our design decisions.”

– Debra Levin Gelman

5. User Personas

A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. A persona is generally based on user research and includes the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of your target audience. You can find out how to create a user persona in this detailed guide .

Why Do We Create User Personas?

Whether you’re developing a smartphone app or a mobile-responsive website, any user experience research job will require you to understand who will be using the product. Knowing your audience will help influence the features and design elements you choose, thus making your product more useful. A persona clarifies who is in your target audience by answering the following questions:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
• What are the needs and goals of my users?

Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful product. Well-defined personas will enable you to efficiently identify and communicate user needs. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product, which is essential to your overall value proposition.

Unfortunately, creating personas can be expensive — it all depends on how deep into user research your organization is willing to go. There is also no real “scientific logic” behind persona building, which makes some people a little more hesitant to accept them.

Best Practices For User Personas

• Create a well-defined user persona: A great persona contains four key pieces of information: header, demographic profile, end goal(s), scenario.
• Keep personas brief: As a rule of thumb, avoid adding extra details that cannot be used to influence the design. If it does not affect the final design or help make any decisions easier: omit it.
• Make personas specific and realistic: Avoid exaggerated caricatures, and include enough detail to help you find real-life representation.

How To Conduct User Experience Research By Creating Personas

Creating user personas can be broken down into these main steps:

• Discuss and identify who your target users are with stakeholders (e.g. UX team, marketing team, product manager).
• Survey and/or interview real users to get their demographic information, pain points, and preferences.
• Condense the research, and look for themes to define your groups.
• Organize your groups into personas.
• Test your personas.

“Be someone else. It takes great empathy to create a good experience. To create relevant experiences, you have to forget everything you know and design for others. Align with the expected patience, level of interest, and depth of knowledge of your users. Talk in the user’s language.”

– Niko Nyman

Which User Experience Research Method Should You Use?

Now that you know more about the various user experience research methods, which one do you choose? Well, it all depends on your overall research goals.

You’ll also need to consider what stage you’re at in the design process. If you’re just starting out, you’ll want to focus on understanding your users and the underlying problem . What are you trying to solve? Who are you trying to solve it for? At this early stage in the design process, you’ll typically use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods such as field studies, diary studies, surveys, and data mining.

Once you’ve established a direction for your design, you’ll start to think about actually building your product. Your UX research will now focus on evaluating your designs and making sure that they adequately address your users’ needs . So, you’ll choose research methods that can help you to optimize your designs and improve usability—such as card sorting and usability testing.

Eventually, you’ll have finalized your design and developed a working product—but this doesn’t mean your research is done! This is the ideal time to investigate how well the product performs in the real world. At this point, you’ll focus mainly on quantitative research methods , such as usability benchmarking, surveys, and A/B testing.

To help you with the task of choosing your research methods, let’s explore some important distinctions between the various techniques.

Behavioral vs. Attitudinal Research

As mentioned before, there is a big difference between “what people do” versus “what people say.” Attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure behaviors. For example, usability testing is a behavioral user research method that focuses on action and performance. By contrast, user research methods like user groups, interviews, and persona creation focus on how people think about a product.

UX designers often conduct task analysis to see not how users say they complete tasks in a user flow, but how they actually do.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

When conducting UX research and choosing a suitable method, it’s important to understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative research   gathers data that is measurable. It gives you clear-cut figures to work with, such as how many users purchased an item via your e-commerce app, or what percentage of visitors added an item to their wishlist. “Quant methods”, as they’re sometimes called in the industry, help you to put a number on the usability of your product. They also allow you to compare different designs and determine if one version performs significantly better than another.

Qualitative research   explores the reasons or motivations behind these actions. Why did the user bounce from your website? What made them “wishlist” an item instead of purchasing it? While quantitative data is fixed, qualitative data is more descriptive and open-ended. You can learn all about qualitative research in the video guide below, in which CareerFoundry graduate and professional UX designer Maureen Herben takes you through the most common qualitative user research processes and tools.

A further distinction to make is between how qualitative and quantitative studies go about collecting data. Studies that are qualitative in nature are based on direct observation. For example, you’ll gather data about the user’s behaviours or attitudes by observing them directly in action. Quantitative studies gather this data indirectly—through an online survey, for example.

Qualitative research methods (e.g. usability testing, user groups, interviews) are better for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem, whereas quantitative methods (e.g. online surveys) are great for answering questions about how many and how much.

Ideally, you’ll use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods throughout your user research, and work hard to ensure that the UX research you conduct is inclusive !

6. What Next? Conducting User Research Analysis

Once you’ve conducted extensive user research, you’ll move on to the analysis phase. This is where you’ll turn the raw data you’ve gathered into valuable insights. The purpose of UX research analysis is to interpret what the data means; what does it tell you about the product you’re designing, and the people you’re designing it for? How can you use the data you’ve gathered to inform the design process?

Watch this video to learn how to conduct user research analysis in five simple steps:

Final thoughts

“User experience research is the work that uncovers and articulates the needs of individuals and/or groups in order to inform the design of products and services in a structured manner.”

—Nick Remis, Adaptive Path

Overall, the purpose of user experience research is simple: to discover patterns and reveal unknown insights and preferences from the people who use your product. It basically provides the context for our design. Research also helps us fight the tendency to design for ourselves (or our stakeholders)—and returns the focus on designing for the user.

If you’d like to learn more about UX research, check out these articles:

• What Does a UX Researcher Actually Do? The Ultimate Career Guide
• The Ultimate Guide to UX Research Bootcamps
• Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your UX Research Portfolio
• Interview Toolkit: Top 5 UX Research Questions to Prepare For

And to get inspired, check out these 15 quotes from influential designers in the industry.

User research: the definitive guide for 2024

Last updated

28 February 2023

Reviewed by

Looking to make a change to your current design? Not without well-conducted user research, we hope!

User research is an essential component of design success. An effective method for gaining valuable information about the preferences and behavior of your target audience, user research allows you to act like a fly on the wall. You can listen to your customers, then improve your service or product to specifically meet their needs.

Depending on the project size, scope, and type of information you want to gain, there are many different types of user research tools that you can employ for your UX study. But where to start?

In this definitive 2023 guide, you will learn everything you need to know about user research. We will cover three of the most important things to consider when starting up your next user research project—figuring out the type of research to conduct, picking the right methods and tools to meet your goals, and planning how to best implement the valuable information you will collect.

With so much to explore, let’s get into it.

Analyze user research

Bring all your user research into one place to tag, analyze, and understand

• What is user research?

By undergoing a thorough study of your current users, the ultimate goal of user research should be to learn more about the needs, desires, and pain points of using your product or service.

Using this valuable information, you will be able to tailor your design and future offerings to improve customer satisfaction. This process will ultimately:

Drive engagement

Increase revenue

Bring in more daily users

Improve any other KPI you’re targeting

• The benefits of getting to know your users

If your team is planning on making changes to your design, making time for user research is an essential first step to ensure success. As experts in your product or service, you know it offers unique benefits to your target audience—but is your design and user experience conveying this to your current users and beyond?

By choosing to start your design-refresh process with user research, you obtain valuable information that can change how you approach this large-scale project. When done correctly, the findings from your UX research can offer your business plenty of benefits.

Let’s take a look at three of the main advantages of user research.

User research helps to design better products

Which of the following two options sounds better?

Building your design based on something you think your target audience needs

Building your design based on direct feedback so you know what your customers want

Companies that prioritize user research are more than three times as likely to achieve their highest annual financial and business goals. It takes the guesswork out of what your users appreciate and lets you focus your time and effort on design updates that will make the user experience more enjoyable.

Moral of the story: better user research = better product, service, and design.

UX research saves your business valuable time and resources

We can all relate to the feeling of spending extra time and effort on a new idea to pitch, just to have it rejected. This disappointment can be avoided with the help of well-conducted user research.

Avoid spending unnecessary time and resources on design plans and options that will ultimately get rejected by going to the source (your users) to understand their needs. With your user research results acting as your North Star, you can use your time and resources more efficiently as you redesign your current service or product model.

User research can be done on a dime

Conducting user research does not need to carry an expensive price tag. While it’s tempting to purchase specific tools or consult experts, it’s also possible to get plenty of high-value information about your current users on a small budget.

Depending on the scope of your user research project, you could save costs by opting for more community-based approaches. For example, turning to your social media followers is a great way to get feedback while keeping your costs low. Other free tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Reddit can be used to have more meaningful conversations about your services with voluntary research participants.

Learn more about conducting effective UX research on a budget.

• The different types of UX research

Now we’ve piqued your interest in the wonderful world of user research, we’ll explore the different types of research you can use to get results.

The type of UX research you choose should match your desired outcome and the scope of your project. What’s more, the type of user research will change at each stage of your project, adapting to your needs as you learn more about your target audience.

Let’s look at some of the most common UX research types and the best times to use them.

Generative or exploratory user research

Generative UX research methods can help you gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. It will help you explore your customers’ interests, habits, and motivations. When exploratory UX research is done effectively, you will uncover unmet user needs and pain points for which you can begin to find solutions.

This user research is best done before a significant design change for your existing product or service.

Descriptive or explanatory user research

Descriptive UX research is done by studying your current users to discover their wants and needs. Using these valuable insights, your team can directly integrate the findings into your design refresh.

This type of user research is most effective before changing your current product or service design.

Evaluative user research

Evaluative research is a valuable tool during the creation and implementation stage of your design process. Used to see if your project is moving in the right direction, the goal of evaluative user research is to test prototypes while confirming or denying your design assumptions.

This type of UX research offers the most value when it is done during the early planning and creation stages of your project.

Causal user research

Causal research refers to the process of identifying cause-and-effect relationships between your design and your desired outcomes. By exploring the differences between two or more variables, this research style helps determine which path to take during your design process.

This type of user research is only effective if you have a few prototype options to explore and test, similar to A/B testing in marketing research.

• When to use the different user research methods to get the best results

In all areas of research, there are two primary types of information that can be collected: qualitative and quantitative data.

Each offers its own unique benefits, so it is important to consider what questions you want to be answered by your research. This will impact how you start and progress through your user research project.

Generally speaking, it is common for user research projects to start with qualitative research methods , as this can help unearth important information about users’ needs and wants. Later, during prototype testing or product trialing, quantitative user research methods may be explored to determine if the proposed design changes are effective or not.

Balancing qualitative and quantitative data in UX research: Our full guide

Qualitative user research methods.

Qualitative UX research refers to studies designed to gain anecdotal evidence from current users of your product or service. Conversations, interviews, and diary studies will collect this kind of data, to gain real-life responses from participants.

Unlike quantitative research, qualitative data is heavily tied to personal experiences and bias (from both the users and researchers ). Therefore, it is important to set clear boundaries for yourself and your team when collecting this type of data. Doing your best to set research parameters (such as avoiding leading questions and sourcing the right participants) that reduce the influence of bias is essential for getting the most accurate, helpful data for your design.

Quantitative UX research methods

Quantitative user research focuses more on collecting numeric data from your users. The goal of this type of research is to collect validating information about your current design assumptions and the habits of your target audience.

Interestingly, it is possible to collect quantitative data from the same research tools used to collect anecdotal, qualitative information. Using surveys, interviews, polls, A/B testing, and usage analytics, the difference between these two research methods lies in the types of questions asked—quantitative research uses questions geared toward statistical results.

For the most accurate information, use larger sample sizes to get a better understanding of the average user experience.

Learn how to calculate the right sample size for your UX research.

The best user research projects often incorporate both methods

When planning your UX research project, it’s important to know you will likely create a research plan involving both qualitative and quantitative user research methods .

As your user research projects begin, focusing on qualitative data can be incredibly valuable as a jumping-off point. What do your current users like about your service or product? What do they wish was different?

It is common for businesses to use their collected qualitative data as a guide during the early stages of design development. Later in the process, when there are design options to be tested and evaluated, quantitative user research can help to provide evidence for which option is preferred by your customers.

• How to plan your user research

Keeping everything we’ve just learned in mind, it’s time to jump into the process of starting a UX research project.

Like any other large project, breaking down the process into bite-sized pieces and steps will help to make the entire experience less overwhelming.

Here are the eight steps to successfully completing your first UX research project:

Step 1: Identify your research and project goals

Take the time to determine the 'What' and 'Why' of your UX research project before you begin.

While this may seem like a tedious, unimportant first step (let’s get to the good stuff already!), organizing your thoughts and expectations for your UX research project will help to keep you on track throughout the project.

Questions to consider before you begin:

What are you looking to accomplish with your user research project?

What information do you want to learn about your current users?

What design updates are you planning?

Who is your target audience?

Why is now an important time to learn more about your users?

How will the research findings be used?

Step 2: Choose your research method

Next, decide what type of information you want to collect from your research project.

Qualitative user research

This includes customers’ anecdotal and personal accounts of their experience with your service or product or about the users themselves (their needs and motivations). This type of UX research requires fewer participants than quantitative research but can be more difficult to conduct without bias.

Qualitative user research is most often done during the early stages of a design process to learn more about the needs of your current audience.

Generative and descriptive UX research methods can be used to achieve this goal.

Quantitative user research

Numerical or statistical data can be used to evaluate the value of a particular design update. This type of UX research can be easier to plan but requires more participants to achieve more accurate results.

Quantitative user research is commonly conducted once the design process has begun, as your team evaluates prototype options for your service or product.

Evaluative and causal user research methods are effective tools for gathering this type of participant data.

Step 3: Create a user research plan

Once you’ve decided what method of UX research you’ll be using to collect your data, you need to come up with the plan (aka, the tools you will be using to gather information from your participants).

Depending on your specific needs, some examples of commonly used UX research methods are:

Participant observation: Watching your customers interact with your service or product to learn more about their overall experience

Individual or group interviews: Asking volunteers questions to learn more about their preferences and pain points with your product

Surveys and questionnaires: Collecting qualitative or quantitative data from users by sending out a set list of questions

Diary studies: Asking users to self-document their experience with your product or service over time, giving you insight into their habits and behaviors

Card sorting: Watching participants organize cards into groups based on overarching categories that they self-determine

How to create an effective UX research plan (2024)

Step 4: recruit participants from your target audience.

With your detailed user research plan in place, start recruiting participants. Some of the different ways to recruit participants for your UX research study include:

Reaching out on social media

Using digital communities on Reddit, Facebook, Slack, or Discord

Creating paid advertisements looking for volunteers

Hiring a UX research company to provide study participants

Step 5: Conduct research

Now that everything is in place, it’s time to run your study. We recommend allotting at least a few weeks for this stage of the UX research process —you don’t want to rush the collection of your data.

Step 6: Analyze your results

You now have access to high-quality data about the needs, wants, and/or behaviors of your current audience. Your business can start to look for the following:

Patterns of use

User preferences

Commonly reported pain points

Participant recommendations

Through this analysis, it will become clear what direction you need to take to create a more user-friendly design for your service or product.

Step 7: Share your findings

An important (and often overlooked) step in the UX research process is sharing your findings with your key stakeholders. This will help your team and stakeholders to:

Make better changes to your product/services based on direct customer feedback

Promote the credibility and value of your research

Spread the word about the importance of UX research within the company structure (leading to more research requests and better quality offerings!)

Discover why you might need to build a UX research repository to ensure teams can find the right insights and avoid doubling up on research.

Step 8: Adapt your product or service to serve your target audience better

The time has arrived to move forward with the new design, product feature, or insight!

Using your UX research results as your guiding star for your design update, you are in the best position to avoid wasting time and resources on ideas that will not work.

• Putting it all together—your next steps for user research success

User research is an incredibly valuable tool, no matter the size of your business. And you don’t need to work for a large multinational company with a massive research budget to get the results you want.

As a way to gain invaluable information on the preferences and pain points of your current or future users, user research is essential. Choosing to take the time to plan, conduct, and analyze UX research is essential for successful design implementation—and it can also improve your relationship with and understanding of your target audience.

Using the findings and data that you collect from your UX research project, you can feel confident that your next design update will be tailored specifically to your customer’s needs and wants—and that’s something both your team and your users will appreciate.

Can anyone research their users?

Yes, anyone can do UX research—designers, product managers, engineers, and others. User research is an incredibly valuable resource for any size of business. Having a better understanding of your current users is the key to improving your design to best serve their needs.

When done correctly, UX research can save you time and money by reducing the hours spent on design ideas that do not adequately serve your target audience.

How many people do I need for user research?

Aim for at least 15 participants in your quantitative user research study; even better if you can survey more than 30 people. The more people you have providing their insight, the more statistical significance your project has. This fact can be used as a helpful rebuttal when asked about the credibility and importance of your research.

If your team is looking to collect qualitative user data, interviewing smaller numbers of people (like 5–10) can be sufficient to gather the information you need.

Generally speaking, it is more common to need a larger sample size of participants for quantitative research compared to qualitative studies. Interestingly, research shows that interviewing as few as five high-quality participants for a qualitative study is enough to get the information you need, without data saturation or diminished return on investment.

How long does the average UX research project take?

The average UX research project takes three to six weeks to complete. The actual time you spend conducting your research can be shorter or longer than this, depending on the scope of your study and stakeholders’ timelines (which should be discussed and agreed at the start of the project).

As a rule of thumb, we recommend at least four weeks for your team to collect UX data. This can be the period that a survey is open, interviews are being held, or customer habits and behaviors are being observed.

Do your best not to rush the whole user research process. Taking your time with quality UX research design and implementation will save you resources, time, and money down the road.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

A guide to using user-experience research methods.

August 21, 2022 2022-08-21

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For further detail, see When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods .

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User Research: What Is It and How to Do It in SaaS

12 min read

Looking for the best ways to conduct user research and gather actionable insights?

Whether you’re building a product from scratch, updating something on your platform, or just want to listen to users and create better experiences , this article provides the guide you need.

We covered:

• The benefits of proper user research.
• A detailed 5-step process for conducting effective research.
• Types of user research and different methods to implement.
• User research employs various qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and understand users better. It helps you create a user-centered design process and ensure your final product is what customers love.

Effective user research helps you:

• Understand user behaviors, needs , and preferences.
• Identify experience gaps and remove friction.
• Increase product value and improve user experience .

Implement this user research process to gather data that’s exhaustive and actionable:

• Define your main objective and build a hypothesis.
• Choose research participants that represent your target audience.
• Choose the appropriate research method .
• Start collecting data.
• Analyze and form a conclusion.

User research methods for SaaS:

Usability testing

User testing, user interviews, focus groups, session replays, first click testing, user feedback surveys, card sorting, a/b testing, product analytics.

• Userpilot can help you conduct user experience (UX) research and easily interpret the data. Book a demo to discuss your needs with our team and get tailored solutions.

What is user research?

User research employs various qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and understand users.

It’s a critical part of the product development process that helps inform design decisions and ensure the final product aligns with user expectations.

Why is conducting user research important?

Without effective user research, you’ll be building or updating your product based on assumptions, and that’s not a good place to be.

It’s like trying to construct a bridge without ever stepping onto the riverbank. You might craft something impressive, but without understanding the water’s flow, depth, and potential hazards, your bridge risks being unusable or, worse, dangerous.

Understand user behaviors, needs, and preferences

By conducting proper user research, you’ll gain data showing how users interact with your tool and their underlying needs and motivations.

This knowledge forms the foundation for designing products that resonate with users. It ensures what you build not only meets functional requirements but also aligns with the specific desires of your target audience.

Identify experience gaps and remove friction

An experience gap refers to the disparity between users’ expectations and their actual experience with your product. Such gaps can lead to customer dissatisfaction, as user needs are not adequately met.

User experience research is pivotal in closing experience gaps and removing friction from the user journey. By identifying pain points through methods like usability testing and feedback collection, you can pinpoint areas for improvement.

This proactive approach allows you to implement targeted enhancements, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying user experience. Ultimately, addressing these gaps not only boosts user satisfaction but also cultivates customer loyalty and positive brand perception.

Increase product value and improve user experience

Continuous user experience research ensures your product keeps adding more value and enhancing the user experience. With this, users will be more comfortable interacting with your product regularly.

As they incorporate your tool into their workflows and increase engagement, they’ll have more reasons to expand their accounts, leading to higher revenue for your business.

How to conduct user research to improve user experience

Ready to start conducting user research? Here’s a five-step process to follow:

1. Define your main objective and build a hypothesis

Before diving into user research, clearly define your primary objective. Whether it’s improving onboarding processes , enhancing navigation, or refining a specific feature, having a focused goal is crucial.

Use the objective to create a hypothesis of the results you hope to get. The research will then confirm or reject this hypothesis.

For instance, if your objective is to enhance your app’s usability, a hypothesis might be that simplifying the navigation will lead to a higher user satisfaction score . You can then design user feedback surveys to collect user opinions and see if your hypothesis is correct.

2. Choose your research participants

Identifying the right participants is key to obtaining relevant insights. Define segments based on characteristics like user type (current users, new users), demographics, or usage patterns.

For example, if you’re improving a feature specific to premium users, draw research participants from users who have engaged with the feature enough to provide valuable feedback. Taking this targeted approach ensures the data you obtain is relevant and actionable.

3. Choose the appropriate research method

There are many user research methods, but what you use generally depends on your objective. For example:

• Usability testing : Helps assess how easily users can accomplish specific tasks within the app.
• Features heatmap : Visually highlights user interaction with specific elements or features of your tool.
• First click testing : Focuses on the first click users make, revealing initial impressions and navigational challenges.
• User feedback surveys : Collects user opinions, preferences, and suggestions, providing valuable qualitative data.
• Card sorting : Helps understand how users categorize information, aiding in intuitive information architecture and a user-centered design process.

Depending on your objectives, you can employ several other types of user research methods. We’ll provide an extensive list in a later section.

4. Start collecting data

After deciding on your objective and choosing a suitable user research approach, it’s time to execute and gather valuable data.

Ensure you have the necessary resources (user research tools, participants, and the like) and clearly define the steps for data collection.

For instance, let’s return to the example we discussed in step 1. Recall the objective was to enhance app usability, and the user research technique was customer feedback surveys. Now that you have those two settled, it’s time to begin collecting data.

You want to keep the survey short and concise to get the best result. Combine various question types, including multiple-choice, open-ended, and rating scales. This provides a more comprehensive view of user opinions and allows for both quantitative and qualitative user research.

For example, you can ask: “ How would you rate the overall usability of [your app] on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very poor, and 5 is excellent? ” and follow up with, “ Please share any specific challenges or difficulties you encountered while using the app, and if you have any suggestions for improving the usability, feel free to provide them here .”

Imagine your objective is broader—you want to understand usability, then decide which of two features to prioritize for an update. After the initial survey, you can ask what feature they prefer and the reason for their choice. Make a decision based on the data you obtain.

5. Analyze and form a conclusion

Once data collection is complete, the next step is to analyze the gathered information. Bring together all the data you’ve collected and form a comprehensive understanding of user behavior. Identify patterns, trends , and pain points within the data.

When you’re done, it’s time to implement changes to improve the user experience. For instance, imagine your research data shows your onboarding takes too long and results in drop-offs due to several unnecessary steps.

Your product team can work on identifying areas of the onboarding flow they can cut off. Also, you can implement an onboarding checklist to reduce the time to value and boost adoption rates.

Types of user research

User research is quite broad, but when you look at it closely, anybody researching users is either implementing quantitative or qualitative methods—or both.

Quantitative research

This user research type involves collecting numerical data to measure and analyze specific aspects of user behavior and preferences.

It uses surveys, analytics, and A/B testing to uncover user data.

Qualitative research

While quantitative research asks the what questions, qualitative research focuses on uncovering the why behind user behavior . For example, realizing that users are dissatisfied with a new feature is just the first step in your research process. You still don’t have sufficient data to make the changes your users will love.

But by conducting research that asks users why they don’t like the feature, you can identify changes to make. Examples of qualitative research methods include interviews, focus groups, and open-ended user feedback surveys.

User research can be both attitudinal and behavioral:

• Attitudinal research helps uncover user attitudes, opinions, and emotional responses to your product.
• Behavioral research focuses on observing and analyzing actual human behavior and interactions with your product.

User research methods

Combine any of the following qualitative and quantitative research methods to collect comprehensive user data and make informed development decisions:

Usability tests involve observing users as they interact with a prototype or an existing product to identify challenges and assess the overall user experience. You can do this remotely using specialized usability testing tools or have testers come together in a physical test lab while a user researcher observes and records everything.

You can also implement think-aloud protocols, asking users to verbalize their thoughts while interacting with the product.

During the test, aim to identify how well your product performs against these usability components :

• Learnability : The ease with which users can understand and navigate your product for the first time.
• Efficiency : User speed and effectiveness in performing tasks—this says a lot about your UI.
• Memorability : The extent to which users can remember how to use the product or feature after an initial encounter. Good memorability is a sign of a reduced learning curve.
• Errors : The frequency and severity of user mistakes while interacting with your product. Too many test participants making errors is a sign of friction.
• Satisfaction : The overall fulfillment and positive sentiment users experience when interacting with the product.

User testing and usability testing sound similar; people even use them interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

While the former is focused on evaluating functionality and ease of use , user or UX testing encompasses a broader spectrum, digging deep into user needs and preferences . Another way to put it is that usability testing is a subset of UX testing.

The specific approach you adopt when testing users depends on your research objectives, but just like any user research approach, you begin by deciding what feature, product, or prototype to test. Then, create the test task with a list of objectives and have it done remotely or in person.

Example of UX testing: create different interface designs , then ask users to interact with them and mention the one they find most appealing. Implement task analysis to analyze the data and uncover user user preferences.

If it were to be a usability test, you’d create a prototype and ask users to accomplish a specific task with it—e.g., schedule social media posts—then observe the steps they follow and how long it takes.

User interviews involve one-on-one conversations between you and participants to gather in-depth qualitative insights into their experiences and collect relevant data.

Although it can be more tasking than a quick usability test, a user interview allows you to collect extensive data and get immediate responses to your follow-up questions.

The best way to conduct interviews for your SaaS is over video conferencing platforms like Zoom—the one-on-one interaction allows for easy communication.

Here’s an interview preparation template you can use when preparing to interview users:

This is a structured group research involving a small group of 6-12 users (you can do more if you have the resources). Usually, an experienced moderator is present to facilitate discussions and debates about your product.

While the discussion is ongoing, someone is recording user thoughts, opinions, and attitudes toward the topics raised. In the end, you’ll gather useful qualitative data from different participants and use it to advise your product design process.

Side note: you can also use focus groups if you’re conducting market research as part of your development process.

This method involves using tools like Hotjar to record and analyze user sessions on your website or app.

By viewing clicks, scrolls, and keystrokes in a natural environment without users knowing someone is recording, you’ll gather quantitative data on click patterns and session duration, among other things. You can analyze the results to identify if users follow your tool’s happy path and see how they respond to your interface.

The first click test is an incredibly important component of user research. When users make the right first click, they’re more likely to achieve their goals faster and be satisfied with your tool than when they click several times on the wrong UI elements before finding the happy path.

First click testing helps you determine if your product is intuitive—and if it isn’t, you’ll see the errors users make and know what changes to implement.

To conduct this test, show users a mockup, screenshot, or prototype of your tool and ask them to verbally share their initial click choice and reasoning.

You can also have an interactive test where you share the task with users and have them click on what they think should be the first step. That’s what user researchers did in the example below:

They presented users with Bank of America’s homepage and tested to see where users click to find information. 82% of the test participants went to the right section of the homepage, demonstrating an intuitive design.

From quick quantitative questions to more in-depth qualitative research, user feedback surveys come in different forms.

The specific survey type you use depends on your objective. For instance, if you need to understand the ease of using your platform, trigger a customer effort score survey asking users to rate how much effort they put into using specific features. Other common survey types you might want to implement include NPS and CSAT surveys.

Userpilot can help you create in-app surveys, decide who sees them, and analyze the results quickly. Here’s what building your surveys with our tool looks like:

This research method comes in handy when testing your information architecture. Card sorting involves giving test participants cards representing various features, functions, or sections of your SaaS. For example, the cards might include “dashboard,” “reports,” “settings,” and so on.

You can ask participants to categorize the cards into predefined groups or tell them to do it as they deem fit. Choose the former if you already have a structure you wouldn’t want to change.

Take note of participants’ grouping patterns and any challenges or uncertainties they may encounter in the process. Once you’re done, implement task analysis to interpret the result and make data-driven decisions.

A/B testing compares two versions (A and B) of a webpage, email, or feature to determine which performs better in terms of user engagement or conversion.

With a tool like Userpilot, you can create different versions of the in-app flows or UI elements you want to test, and then run them through specific user segments. Userpilot also allows you to conduct multivariate tests where you compare more than two variables.

Product analytics involves collecting and analyzing data from user interactions with your platform to understand their behavior and preferences.

Userpilot’s robust analytics platform lets you track user actions extensively and generate different analytics reports to identify trends, patterns, and changes in user behavior. What’s more, you can visualize the results in a detailed analytics dashboard for easy interpretation and decision-making.

Heatmaps provide visual representations of user behavior. They’re generated based on data from user interactions, such as clicks, scrolls, or mouse movements, recorded during user sessions on a website or app.

As in the image below, heatmap tools assign colors ranging from warm to cool tones to demonstrate different engagement levels. Hotter colors (e.g., red) indicate high interaction, while cooler colors (e.g., blue) represent lower or no interaction.

Userpilot allows you to select the features of your product you want to track and generate real-time heatmap reports to see how users interact with your tool. This is useful when you want to make quick decisions about what features receive better engagement.

User research always pays off.

When you invest in understanding user needs, expectations, and pain points, you’ll build an exceptional user experience that drives retention and loyalty.

That’s not to mention the fact that your product will stay competitive, making it easy to expand your user base and offering.

Ready to start reaping these benefits? Book a demo now and see how Userpilot can help you implement different user research methods and easily interpret the results.

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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11 Key UX research methods: How 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. You can use methods 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 (40 participants, as recommended by Nielsen Norman Group ).

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

Collect both quantitative and qualitative insights from your customers and build truly user-centric products with Maze.

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.

User interviews

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 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 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.

Field studies

Field studies 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Tree Testing: Your Guide to Improve Navigation and UX

• David Sherwin
• Sep 23, 2013

A 5-Step Process For Conducting User Research

• 19 min read
• UX , Tools , Guidelines , User Research , User Research
• Share on Twitter ,  LinkedIn

About The Author

David Sherwin is Director of User Experience for lynda.com at LinkedIn , as well as a Fellow at frog . He is the author of Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to … More about David ↬

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Weekly tips on front-end & UX . Trusted by 200,000+ folks.

Imagine that this is what you know about me: I am a college-educated male between the ages of 35 and 45. I own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 5, on which I browse the Internet via the Google Chrome browser. I tweet and blog publicly, where you can discover that I like chocolate and corgis. I’m married. I drive a Toyota Corolla. I have brown hair and brown eyes. My credit-card statement shows where I’ve booked my most recent hotel reservations and where I like to dine out.

If your financial services client provided you with this data, could you tell them why I’ve just decided to move my checking and savings accounts from it to a new bank? This scenario might seem implausible when laid out like this, but you’ve likely been in similar situations as an interactive designer, working with just demographics or website usage metrics.

We can discern plenty of valuable information about a customer from this data, based on what they do and when they do it. That data, however, doesn’t answer the question of why they do it, and how we can design more effective solutions to their problems through our clients’ websites, products and services. We need more context. User research helps to provide that context.

User research helps us to understand how other people live their lives, so that we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions. User research also helps us to avoid our own biases, because we frequently have to create design solutions for people who aren’t like us.

So, how does one do user research? Let me share with you a process we use at Frog to plan and conduct user research. It’s called the “research learning spiral.” The spiral was created by Erin Sanders, one of our senior interaction designers and design researchers. It has five distinct steps, which you go through when gathering information from people to fill a gap in your knowledge.

“The spiral is based on a process of learning and need-finding,” Sanders says. “It is built to be replicable and can fit into any part of the design process. It is used to help designers answer questions and overcome obstacles when trying to understand what direction to take when creating or moving a design forward.”

The first three steps of the spiral are about formulating and answering questions, so that you know what you need to learn during your research:

• Objectives These are the questions we are trying to answer. What do we need to know at this point in the design process? What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
• Hypotheses These are what we believe we already know. What are our team’s assumptions? What do we think we understand about our users, in terms of both their behaviors and our potential solutions to their needs?
• Methods These address how we plan to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Based on the time and people available, what methods should we select?

Once you’ve answered the questions above and factored them into a one-page research plan that you can present to stakeholders , you can start gathering the knowledge you need through the selected research methods:

• Conduct Gather data through the methods we’ve selected.
• Synthesize Answer our research questions, and prove or disprove our hypotheses. Make sense of the data we’ve gathered to discover what opportunities and implications exist for our design efforts.

You already use this process when interacting with people, whether you are consciously conducting research or not. Imagine meeting a group of 12 clients who you have never worked with. You wonder if any of them has done user research before. You believe that only one or two of them have conducted as much user research as you and your team have. You decide to take a quick poll to get an answer to your question, asking everyone in the room to raise their hand if they’ve ever conducted user research. Five of them raise their hands. You ask them to share what types of user research they’ve conducted, jotting down notes on what they’ve done. You then factor this information into your project plan going forward.

In a matter of a few minutes, you’ve gone through the spiral to answer a single question. However, when you’re planning and conducting user research for an interactive project or product, each step you take through the spiral will require more time and energy, based on the depth and quantity of questions you need to answer. So, let’s take an in-depth spin through the research learning spiral. At each step of the spiral, I’ll share some of the activities and tools I use to aid my teams in managing the complexity of planning and conducting user research. I’ll also include a sample project to illustrate how those tools can support your team’s user research efforts.

1. Objectives: The Questions We Are Trying To Answer

Imagine that you’re in the middle of creating a next-generation program guide for TV viewers in Western Europe. Your team is debating whether to incorporate functionality for tablet and mobile users that would enable them to share brief clips from shows that they’re watching to social networks, along with their comments.

“Show clip sharing,” as the team calls it, sounds cool, but you aren’t exactly sure who this feature is for, or why users would want to use it.

Step back from the wireframing and coding, sit down with your team, and quickly discuss what you already know and understand about the product’s goal. To facilitate this discussion, ask your team to generate a series of framing questions to help them identify which gaps in knowledge they need to fill. They would write these questions down on sticky notes, one question per note, to be easily arranged and discussed.

These framing questions would take a “5 Ws and an H” structure, similar to the questions a reporter would need to answer when writing the lede of a newspaper story:

• “Who?” questions help you to determine prospective audiences for your design work, defining their demographics and psychographics and your baseline recruiting criteria.
• “What?” questions clarify what people might be doing, as well as what they’re using in your website, application or product.
• “When?” questions help you to determine the points in time when people might use particular products or technologies, as well as daily routines and rhythms of behavior that might need to be explored.
• “Where?” questions help you to determine contexts of use — physical locations where people perform certain tasks or use key technologies — as well as potential destinations on the Internet or devices that a user might want to access.
• “Why?” questions help you to explain the underlying emotional and rational drivers of what a person is doing, and the root reasons for that behavior.
• “How?” questions help you go into detail on what explicit actions or steps people take in order to perform tasks or reach their goals.

In less than an hour, you and your team can generate a variety of framing questions, such as:

• “Who would share program clips?”
• “How frequently would viewers share clips?”
• “Why would people choose to share clips?”

Debate which questions need to be answered right away and which would be valuable to consider further down the road. “Now is your time to ask the more ‘out there’ questions,” says Lauren Serota, an associate creative director at Frog. “Why are people watching television in the first place? You can always narrow the focus of your questions before you start research… However, the exercise of going lateral and broad is good exercise for your brain and your team.”

When you have a good set of framing questions, you can prioritize and cluster the most important questions, translating them into research objectives. Note that research objectives are not questions. Rather, they are simple statements, such as: “Understand how people in Western Europe who watch at least 20 hours of TV a week choose to share their favorite TV moments.” These research objectives will put up guardrails around your research and appear in your one-page research plan.

Don’t overreach in your objectives. The type of questions you want to answer, and how you phrase them as your research objective, will serve as the scope for your team’s research efforts. A tightly scoped research objective might focus on a specific set of tasks or goals for the users of a given product (“Determine how infrequent TV viewers in Germany decide which programs to record for later viewing”), while a more open-ended research objective might focus more on user attitudes and behaviors, independent of a particular product (“Discover how French students decide how to spend their free time”). You need to be able to reach that objective in the time frame you have alloted for the research.

2. Hypotheses: What We Believe We Already Know

You’ve established the objectives of your research, and your head is already swimming with potential design solutions, which your team has discussed. Can’t you just go execute those ideas and ship them?

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. All designers have early ideas and assumptions about their product. Some clients may have initial hypotheses that they would like “tested” as well.

“Your hypotheses often constitute how you think and feel about the problem you’ve been asked to solve, and they fuel the early stages of work,” says Jon Freach, a design research director at Frog. Don’t be afraid to address these hypotheses and, when appropriate, integrate them into your research process to help you prove or disprove their merit. Here’s why:

• Externalizing your hypotheses is important to becoming aware of and minimizing the influence of your team’s and client’s biases.
• Being aware of your hypotheses will help you select the right methods to fulfill your research objective.
• You can use your early hypotheses to help communicate what you’ve discovered through the research process. (“We believed that [insert hypothesis], but we discovered that [insert finding from research].”)

Generating research hypotheses is easy. Take your framing questions from when you formulated the objective and, as a team, spend five to eight minutes individually sketching answers to them, whether by writing out your ideas on sticky notes, sketching designs and so forth. For example, when thinking about the clip-sharing feature for your next-generation TV program guide, your team members would put their heads together and generate hypotheses such as these:

• Attitude-related hypothesis . “TV watchers who use social networks like to hear about their friends’ favorite TV shows.”
• Behavior-related hypothesis . “TV watchers only want to share clips from shows they watch most frequently.”
• Feature-related hypothesis . “TV watchers are more likely to share a highlight from a show if it’s popular with other viewers as well.”

3. Methods: How We Plan To Fill The Gaps In Our Knowledge

Once you have a defined research objective and a pile of design hypotheses, you’re ready to consider which research methods are most appropriate to achieving your objective. Usually, I’ll combine methods from more than one of the following categories to achieve my research objective. (People have written whole books about this subject. See the end of this article for further reading on user research methods and processes.)

Building A Foundation

Methods in this area could include surveys, observational or contextual interviews, and market and trend explorations. Use these methods when you don’t have a good understanding of the people you are designing for, whether they’re a niche community or a user segment whose behaviors shift rapidly. If you have unanswered questions about your user base — where they go, what they do and why — then you’ll probably have to draw upon methods from this area first.

Generating Inspiration And Ideas

Methods in this area could include diary studies, card sorting, paper prototyping and other participatory design activities. Once I understand my audience’s expertise and beliefs well, I’m ready to delve deeper into what content, functionality or products would best meet their needs. This can be done by generating potential design solutions in close collaboration with research participants, as well as by receiving their feedback on early design hypotheses.

Specifically, we can do this by generating or co-creating sketches, collages, rough interface examples, diagrams and other types of stimuli, as well as by sorting and prioritizing information. These activities will help us understand how our audience views the world and what solutions we can create to fit that view (i.e. “mental models”). This helps to answer our “What,” “Where,” “When” and “How” framing questions. Feedback at this point is not meant to refine any tight design concepts or code prototypes. Instead, it opens up new possibilities.

Evaluating And Informing Design

Methods in this area could include usability testing, heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs and paper prototyping. Once we’ve identified the functionality or content that’s appropriate for a user, how do we present it to them in a manner that’s useful and delightful? I use methods in this area to refine design comps, simulations and code prototypes. This helps us to answer questions about how users would want to use a product or to perform a key task. This feedback is critical and, as part of an iterative design process, enables us to refine and advance concepts to better meet user needs.

Let’s go back to our hypothetical example, so that you can see how your research objective and hypotheses determine which methods your team will select. Take all of your hypotheses — I like to start with at least 100 hypotheses — and arrange them on a continuum:

On the left, place hypotheses related to who your users are, where they live and work, their goals, their needs and so forth. On the right, place hypotheses that have to do with explicit functionality or design solutions you want to test with users. In the center, place hypotheses related to the types of content or functionality that you think might be relevant to users. This point of this activity is not to create an absolute scale or arrangement of hypotheses that you’ve created so far. The point is for your team to cluster the hypotheses, finding important themes or affinities that will help you to select particular methods. Serota says:

"Choosing and refining your methods and approach is a design project within itself. It takes iteration, practice and time. Test things out on your friends and coworkers to see what works and the best way to ask open-ended questions."

Back to our clip-sharing research effort. When your team looks at all of the hypotheses you’ve created to date, it will realize that using two research methods would be most valuable. The first method will be a participatory design activity, in which you’ll create with users a timeline of where and when they share their favorite TV moments with others. This will give your team foundational knowledge of situations in which clips might be shared, as well as generate opportunities for clip-sharing that you can discuss with users.

The second method will be an evaluative paper-prototyping activity, in which you will present higher-fidelity paper prototypes of ideas on how people can share TV clips. This method will help you address your hypotheses on what solutions make the most sense in sharing situations. (Using two methods is best because mixing and matching hypotheses across different categories within a research session could confuse research participants.)

4. Conduct: Gather Data Through The Methods We’ve Selected

The research plan is done, and you have laid out your early hypotheses on the table. Now you get to conduct the appropriate research methods. Your team will recruit eight users to meet with for one hour each over three evenings, which will allow you to speak with people when they’re most likely to be watching TV. Develop an interview guide and stimuli, and test draft versions of your activities on coworkers. Then, go into the field to conduct your research.

When you do this, it’s essential that you facilitate the research sessions properly, capturing and analyzing the notes, photos, videos and other materials that you collect as you go.

Serota also recommends thinking on your feet: “It’s all right to change course or switch something up in the field. You wouldn’t be learning if you didn’t have to shift at least a little bit.” Ask yourself, “Am I discovering what I need to learn in order to reach my objective? Or am I gathering information that I already know?” If you’re not gaining new knowledge, then one of the following is probably the reason why:

• You’ve already answered your research questions but haven’t taken the time to formulate new questions and hypotheses in order to dig deeper (otherwise, you could stop conducting research and move immediately into synthesis).
• The people who you believed were the target audience are, in fact, not. You’ll need to change the recruitment process (and the demographics or psychographics by which you selected them).
• Your early design hypotheses are a poor fit. So, consider improving them or generating more.
• The methods you’ve selected are not appropriate. So, adapt or change them.
• You are spending all of your time in research sessions with users, rather than balancing research sessions with analysis of what you’ve discovered.

5. Synthesis: Answer Our Research Questions, And Prove Or Disprove Our Hypotheses

Now that you’ve gathered research data, it’s time to capture the knowledge required to answer your research questions and to advance your design goals. “In synthesis, you’re trying to find meaning in your data,” says Serota. “This is often a messy process — and can mean reading between the lines and not taking a quote or something observed at face value. The why behind a piece of data is always more important than the what .”

The more time you have for synthesis, the more meaning you can extract from the research data. In the synthesis stage, regularly ask yourself and your team the following questions:

• “What am I learning?”
• “Does what I’ve learned change how we should frame the original research objective?”
• “Did we prove or disprove our hypotheses?”
• “Is there a pattern in the data that suggests new design considerations?”
• “What are the implications of what I’m designing?”
• “What outputs are most important for communicating what we’ve discovered?”
• “Do I need to change what design activities I plan to do next?”
• “What gaps in knowledge have I uncovered and might need to research at a later date?”

So, what did your team discover from your research into sharing TV clips? TV watchers do want to share clips from their favorite programs, but they are also just as likely to share clips from programs they don’t watch frequently if they find the clips humorous. They do want to share TV clips with friends in their social networks, but they don’t want to continually spam everyone in their Facebook or Twitter feed. They want to target family, close friends or individuals with certain clips that they, the user believes, would find particularly interesting.

Your team should assemble concise, actionable findings and revise its wireframes to reflect the necessary changes, based on the answers you’ve gathered. Now your team will have more confidence in the solution, and when your designs for the feature have been coded, you’ll take another spin through the research learning spiral to evaluate whether you got it right.

Other Resources On User-Research Practices And Methods

The spiral makes it clear that user research is not simply about card sorting, paper prototyping, usability studies and contextual interviews, per se. Those are just methods that researchers use to find answers to critical questions — answers that fuel their design efforts. Still, understanding what methods are available to you, and mastering those methods, can take some time. Below are some books and websites that will help you dive deeper into the user-research process and methods as part of your professional practice.

• Observing the User Experience, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research , Elizabeth Goodman, Mike Kuniavsky and Andrea Moed A comprehensive guide to user research. Goes deep into many of the methods mentioned in this article.
• Universal Methods of Design , Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin A comprehensive overview of 100 methods that can be employed at various points in the user-research and design process.
• 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization , Vijay Kumar Places the user research process in the context of product and service innovation.
• Design Library , Austin Center for Design (AC4D) An in-depth series of PDFs and worksheets that cover processes related to user-research planning, methods and synthesis.

Further Reading

• Facing Your Fears: Approaching People For Research
• A Closer Look At Personas
• The Rainbow Spreadsheet: A Collaborative Lean UX Research Tool
• How Copywriting Can Benefit From User Research

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User Research – Methods and Best Practices

How this course will help your career, what you’ll learn.

What qualitative user research is and why you should do it

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How to plan user research projects that are valid and ethically sound

How to run a usability test, conduct a user interview, perform a contextual inquiry and make user observations

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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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Is This Course Right for You?

This is an intermediate-level course recommended for anyone involved or interested in product design and development:

• UX designers looking to broaden their UX careers with additional research techniques
• Project managers who are interested in techniques that will enable their design team to develop a greater understanding of users
• Entrepreneurs interested in building a user-centered product that users will want and purchase
• Marketers looking to gain a holistic view of customers’ needs and motivations
• Newcomers who are considering making the switch to UX design

Courses in the Interaction Design Foundation are designed to contain comprehensive, evidence-based content, while ensuring that the learning curve is never too steep. As a participant, you will have the opportunity to share ideas, seek help with tests, and enjoy the social aspects afforded by our open and friendly forum.

Learn and Work with a Global Team of Designers

You’ll join a global community and work together to improve your skills and career opportunities. Connect with helpful peers and make friends with like-minded individuals as you push deeper into the exciting and booming industry of design.

Lessons in This Course

• Each week, one lesson becomes available.
• There’s no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines .
• Estimated learning time: 32 hours 16 mins spread over 8 weeks .

Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 56 mins.

• 0.1: Welcome and Introduction (11 mins)
• 0.2: Build Your Portfolio Project (9 mins)
• 0.3: An introduction to courses from the Interaction Design Foundation (37 mins)
• 0.4: Let our community help you (1 min)
• 0.5: How to Earn Your Course Certificate (16 mins)
• 0.6: Meet your peers online in our discussion forums (5 mins)
• 0.7: Meet and learn from design professionals at an upcoming meet-up (1 min)
• 0.8: Gain Timeless Knowledge Through Courses From the Interaction Design Foundation (21 mins)
• 0.9: Mandatory vs. Optional Lesson Items (7 mins)
• 0.10: A Mix Between Video-Based and Text-Based Lesson Content (6 mins)
• 0.11: Discussion Forum (6 mins)
• See all lesson items See less lesson items

Lesson 1: Why do User Research and How to Fit User Research into Your Everyday Work

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 41 mins.

• 1.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
• 1.2: User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It (24 mins)
• 1.3: When to do User Research (21 mins)
• 1.4: How to Involve Stakeholders in Your User Research (21 mins)
• 1.5: Return on Investment of User Research (2 hours 20 mins)
• 1.6: Discussion Forum (7 mins)
• 1.7: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 2: The Basics of Qualitative User Research

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 2 hours 28 mins.

• 2.1: Welcome and Introduction (6 mins)
• 2.2: The Basics of Recruiting Participants for User Research (19 mins)
• 2.3: Planning a User Research Project (1 hour 7 mins)
• 2.4: Best Practices for Qualitative User Research (27 mins)
• 2.5: Conducting Ethical User Research (20 mins)
• 2.6: Discussion Forum (8 mins)
• 2.7: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 3: Usability Testing

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 4 hours 32 mins.

• 3.1: Welcome and Introduction (11 mins)
• 3.2: Introduction to Usability Testing Methods and Metrics (1 hour 3 mins)
• 3.3: Planning a Usability Test (1 hour 20 mins)
• 3.4: Running a Usability Test (1 hour 2 mins)
• 3.5: Reporting on the Results of a Usability Test (47 mins)
• 3.6: Discussion Forum (7 mins)
• 3.7: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 4: Semi-Structured Qualitative Interviews

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 5 hours 4 mins.

• 4.1: Welcome and Introduction (8 mins)
• 4.2: Pros and Cons of Conducting User Interviews (46 mins)
• 4.3: How to Prepare for a User Interview and Ask the Right Questions (52 mins)
• 4.4: How to Moderate User Interviews (1 hour 55 mins)
• 4.5: How to Do a Thematic Analysis of User Interviews (57 mins)
• 4.6: Discussion Forum (6 mins)
• 4.7: Build Your Portfolio Project: User Interviews (18 mins)
• 4.8: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 5: Contextual Inquiry

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 6 hours 45 mins.

• 5.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
• 5.2: Introduction to Contextual Inquiry (1 hour 50 mins)
• 5.3: Planning a Contextual Inquiry (1 hour 0 mins)
• 5.4: Running a Contextual Inquiry (1 hour 55 mins)
• 5.5: Analyzing a Contextual Inquiry (1 hour 27 mins)
• 5.6: Discussion Forum (7 mins)
• 5.7: Build Your Portfolio Project: Contextual Inquiry (19 mins)
• 5.8: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 6: User Observations

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 5 hours 52 mins.

• 6.1: Welcome and Introduction (8 mins)
• 6.2: Introduction to Observational Methods (1 hour 39 mins)
• 6.3: Planning an Observational Study (34 mins)
• 6.4: Running an Observational Study (1 hour 22 mins)
• 6.5: Analyzing an Observational Study (1 hour 41 mins)
• 6.6: Discussion Forum (7 mins)
• 6.7: Build Your Portfolio Project: Observations (20 mins)
• 6.8: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 7: How to Make Your Research Matter

To be scheduled. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 58 mins.

• 7.1: Welcome and Introduction (8 mins)
• 7.2: How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact (20 mins)
• 7.3: Creating Personas from User Research Results (44 mins)
• 7.4: Workshops to Establish Empathy and Understanding from User Research Results (17 mins)
• 7.5: Discussion Forum (9 mins)
• 7.6: Build Your Portfolio Project: Create Design Deliverables (17 mins)
• 7.7: Congratulations and Recap (6 mins)

Lesson 8: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up

To be scheduled.

• 8.1: Get Your Course Certificate (1 min)
• 8.2: Course Evaluation (1 min)
• 8.3: Continue Your Professional Growth (1 min)

Learning Paths

This course is part of 4 learning paths:

How Others Have Benefited

Ulrike Bruckenberger, Austria

“I enjoyed the mix between video and text very much and I am sure that it improved my learning experience. In general the content of the course was very interesting to me and I consider it very useful for improving in doing user research. I really like the possibility to download templates about different methods because they enable me to easily look up the most important information.”

Laura Gieco, Australia

“A strength of the course was the instructors' knowledge and examples from their own experience. I find it very useful when someone tells you stories, in this case about situations when they did research. The lessons where very easy to follow and understand.”

Juan Esteban Arango Florez, Colombia

“The course instructor has a lot of knowledge and experience, and can explain the topics without a problem.”

How It Works

Lessons are self-paced so you’ll never be late for class or miss a deadline. Learning and life, hand in hand.

Your answers are graded by experts, not machines. Get an industry-recognized Course Certificate to show you’ve put in the work.

Grow your professional knowledge by watching Master Classes, networking within our UX community, and more.

Start Advancing Your Career Now

Join us to take “User Research – Methods and Best Practices”. Take other courses at no additional cost. Make a concrete step forward in your career path today.

• Frequently Asked Questions

Don't worry if you missed the course . We will re-run it shortly. One of the reasons we continually open and close courses is in order to control the classroom size.

Networking is a large part of our value proposition, so we want just the right number of people inside the courses. That is also why we display the "XX % percent booked" on our course icons.

No . You can set your own study schedule. There are no "live sessions" since we have members from all timezones around the world. We are a truly global community.

Thus, once you are enrolled, you can take all the time to complete a given course. Every "classroom" in each course will never close , so you’ll have permanent access to your classmates and your course material (as well as your own answers).

Yes. You will get a digital industry-recognized course certificate every time you complete a course. Certificates never expire and can be saved as a .jpg file, so it's easy to be shared. Also, there is no limit to how many certificates you can earn during your membership.

You can see an example of a Course Certificate at the bottom of the Course Catalogue .

Don't worry; once you change your name, your certificate will be updated automatically in the next 48 hours.

Sure! We will be marking all your answers for as long as you are an active member.

You will have access to the course materials for the entire duration of your membership . So, if you pay for a one-year membership, you will have access for one year. Renewing your membership for a second year means you will have access to one more year, and so on.

No, you will not be locked out of any lesson or course. You will have access to all course materials throughout your membership, so there is no pressure to keep at the same pace as the specified lesson release dates.

All we recommend is that you try to stick to the same schedule as other participants. The reason is they may have moved on to other lessons, thereby meaning you could miss out on the social aspects of the course(s).

No, you can generate your certificate as soon as you score at least 70% of the total course points.

Course certificates will be given to participants when they have scored more than 70% or more of the total course points. For example, if a course contains ten lessons each with ten questions, you will receive a course certificate when the instructor has awarded you at least 70 points (70% of the total course points).

There is no specified time that certificates will be awarded — instead, they are given to participants as and when they have answered all questions, even if this is long after the official end date.

Below is a step-by-step guide on how to add your Interaction Design Foundation course(s) to your LinkedIn profile: 

Log in to your LinkedIn account, then go to your profile.

Below your profile description, click on the button Add profile section , choose Recommended and then select Add license or certification .

3. In the following fields add: 

Name – Course name

Issuing organization – The Interaction Design Foundation

Check the field “This credential does not expire”

Issue date - Input the date written on your certificate (e.g., May 2021)

Credential ID – Your membership ID number – it's written on your certificate. (For non-members, you can leave this field blank or, if you prefer, insert the certificate ID, which can be extracted from the certificate link. This ID will begin with "mcc_" and be followed by a string of numbers and letters.")

Credential URL: Input the certificate URL provided on your course page

Congratulate yourself!  Earning the certificate is a great accomplishment and now you can share it with the world! 

Name – Membership Certificate

Issue date - Input the date when you joined our community (e.g., May 2019)

Credential ID – Your membership ID number (it's written on your certificate)

Credential URL: Input the certificate URL provided on your profile page

It is as simple as that. Now, anyone who visits your profile can see your certificate! 

After you pay for your membership, you can take as many courses as you want with no additional costs . There are no further charges on top of the membership fee.

You will need approximately 5-8 hours to complete one lesson. Each course has between 3 and 16 lessons.

Once enrolled in a course, you will gain access to a new lesson each week, which you are free to complete without any deadlines and no end date, either.

Yes! Everyone's learning journey looks different, and we'd never stop our members from trying again. To retake a course, just follow these steps:

1. Go to your profile and click on the relevant course you'd like to retake.

2. Underneath your progress bar, you'll see a phrase "UX Courses" with an arrow (>) pointing to a clickable landing page of that course. Click on that link.

3. Once on the landing page, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. You'll see a red button, which you can simply click to drop the course.

4. Head back to our main list of UX Courses, and re-enroll yourself in the course. You'll all set to try again!

Please note that when you drop a course, you will lose any answers and progress you submitted. We advise that you screenshot or save any answers you'd like to reuse.

In some cases, we can open up lessons for members who are retaking a course, so that they don't have to wait for familiar lessons to unlock each week. If you'd like us to do this for you, please get in touch with our support team at [email protected] , and we can help you out.

To drop a course, the following should be done:

1. Visit your profile page and click the 'continue lesson...' button for the course you want to drop.

2. Click the course name link breadcrumb near the top of the page that opens (this only appears in unlocked lessons, not upcoming lessons)

3. Click the red 'drop my course now' button at the bottom of the page that opens

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New to UX Design? We’re Giving You a Free ebook!

Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

Our approach

• Responsibility
• Infrastructure
• Try Meta AI
• We’ve taken responsible steps before launching Meta AI and Meta Llama 3 so people can have safer and more enjoyable experiences.
• We’re supporting the open source developer ecosystem by providing tools and resources for developers as they build with Llama 3.
• We’re working with a global set of partners to create industry-wide standards that benefit the entire open source community.

Today, we released our new Meta AI , one of the world’s leading free AI assistants built with Meta Llama 3 , the next generation of our publicly available, state-of-the-art large language models. Thanks to our latest advances with Llama 3, Meta AI is smarter, faster, and more fun than ever before.

We are committed to developing AI responsibly and helping others do the same. That’s why we’re taking a series of steps so people can have enjoyable experiences when using these features and models, and sharing resources and tools to support developers and the open community.

Responsibility at different layers of the development process

We’re excited about the potential that generative AI technology can have for people who use Meta products, and for the broader ecosystem. We also want to make sure we’re developing and releasing this technology in a way that anticipates and works to reduce risk. To do this, we take steps to evaluate and address risks at each level of the AI development and deployment process. This includes incorporating protections in the process we use to design and release the Llama base model, supporting the developer ecosystem so they can build responsibly, and adopting the same best practices we expect of other developers when we develop and release our own generative AI features on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

As we explained when we released Llama 2, it’s important to be intentional in designing these mitigations because there are some measures that can only be effectively implemented by the model provider, and others that only work effectively when implemented by the developer as part of their specific application.

For these reasons, with Llama we take a system-centric approach that applies protections at every layer of the development stack. This includes taking a thoughtful approach to our training and tuning efforts and providing tools that make it easy for developers to implement models responsibly. In addition to maximizing the effectiveness of our responsible AI efforts, this approach aligns with our open innovation approach by giving developers more power to customize their products so they’re safer and benefit their users. The Responsible Use Guide is an important resource for developers that outlines considerations they should take to build their own products, which is why we followed its main steps when building Meta AI.

Responsibly building Llama 3 as a foundation model

We took several steps at the model level to develop a highly-capable and safe foundation model in Llama 3, including:

1. Addressing risks in training The foundation of any model is the training process, through which the model learns both the language and information that it needs to operate. As a result, our approach started with a series of responsible AI mitigations in our training process. For example:

• We expanded the training dataset for Llama 3 so it’s seven times larger than what we used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. Over 5% of the Llama 3 pre-training dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. While the models we’re releasing today are only fine tuned for English outputs, the increased data diversity helps the models better recognize nuances and patterns, and perform strongly across a variety of tasks.
• We found that previous generations of Llama are good at identifying high-quality data, so we used Llama 2 to help build the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3. We also leveraged synthetic data to train in areas such as coding, reasoning, and long context. For example, we used synthetic data to create longer documents to train on.
• As with Llama 2, Llama 3 is trained on a variety of public data. For training, we followed Meta’s standard privacy review processes . We excluded or removed data from certain sources known to contain a high volume of personal information about private individuals.

2. Safety evaluations and tuning

We adapted the pretrained model through a process called fine-tuning where we take additional steps to improve its performance in understanding and generating text conversations so it can be used for assistant-like chat applications.

During and after training, we conducted both automated and manual evaluations to understand our models’ performance in a series of risk areas like weapons, cyber attacks, and child exploitation. In each area, we performed additional work to limit the chance the model provides unwanted responses in these areas.

• For example, we conducted extensive red teaming exercises with external and internal experts to stress test the models to find unexpected ways they might be used.
• We also evaluated Llama 3 with benchmark tests like CyberSecEval, Meta’s publicly available cybersecurity safety evaluation suite that measures how likely a model is to help carry out a cyber attack.
• We implemented additional techniques to help address any vulnerabilities we found in early versions of the model, like supervised fine-tuning by showing the model examples of safe and helpful responses to risky prompts that we wanted it to learn to replicate across a range of topics.
• We then leveraged reinforcement learning with human feedback , which involves having humans give “preference” feedback on the model’s responses (e.g., rating which response is better and safer).
• This is an iterative process, so we repeated testing after taking the steps above to gauge how effective those new measures were at reducing risks and address any remaining ones.

3. Lowering benign refusals

We’ve heard feedback from developers that Llama 2 would sometimes inadvertently refuse to answer innocuous prompts. Large language models tend to over-generalize, and we don’t intend for it to refuse to answer prompts like “How do I kill a computer program?” even though we don’t want it to respond to prompts like “How do I kill my neighbor?”

• We improved our fine tuning approach so Llama 3 is significantly less likely to falsely refuse to answer prompts than Llama 2. As part of this, we used high-quality data to show the models examples of responses with these small language nuances, so we could train them to recognize these nuances.
• As a result, Llama 3 is our most helpful model to date and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning.

4. Model transparency

As with Llama 2, we’re publishing a model card that includes detailed information on Llama 3’s model architecture, parameters, and pretrained evaluations. The model card also provides information about the capabilities and limitations of the models.

• We’ve expanded the information in the Llama 3 model card so it includes additional details about our responsibility and safety approach.
• It also includes results for Llama 3 models on standard automatic benchmarks like general knowledge, reasoning, math problem solving, coding, and reading comprehension.

Over the coming months, we’ll release additional Llama 3 models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, and stronger overall capabilities. Our general approach of open sourcing our Llama 3 models is something we remain committed to. We’re currently training a 400B parameter model—and any final decision on when, whether, and how to open source will be taken following safety evaluations we will be running in the coming months.

How we built Meta AI as a responsible developer

We built the new Meta AI on top of Llama 3, just as we envision that Llama 3 will empower developers to expand the existing ecosystem of Llama-based products and services. As we describe in our Responsible Use Guide , we took additional steps at the different stages of product development and deployment to build Meta AI on top of the foundation model, just as any developer would use Llama 3 to build their own product.

In addition to the mitigations that we adopted within Llama 3, a developer needs to adopt additional mitigations to ensure the model can operate properly in the context of their specific AI system and use case. For Meta AI, the use case is a safe, helpful assistant available to people for free directly in our apps. We designed it to help people get things done like brainstorming and overcoming writer’s block, or connecting with friends to discover new places and adventures.

Since the launch of Meta AI last year, we’ve consistently updated and improved the experience and we’re continuing to make it even better. For example:

1. We improved Meta AI’s responses to peoples’ prompts and questions.

• For example, we wanted to refine the way Meta AI answers prompts about political or social issues, so we’re incorporating guidelines specific to those topics. If someone asks about a debated policy issue, our goal is that Meta AI won’t offer a single opinion or point of view, but will instead summarize relevant points of view about the topic. If someone asks specifically about one side of an issue, we generally want to respect that person’s intent and have Meta AI answer the specific question.
• Addressing viewpoint bias in generative AI systems is a new area of research. We continue to make progress toward reinforcing this approach for Meta AI’s responses but as we’re seeing with all generative AI systems, it may not always return the response we intend. We’re also exploring additional techniques that can address it along with user feedback.

2. We taught the Meta AI model specific instructions and responses to make it a more helpful AI assistant.

• This includes several fine-tuning steps, like developing reward models for safety and helpfulness that give the models a reward if it does what we intend.
• People send prompts to the model and categorize the responses in accordance with our guidelines.
• The examples that aligned with the tone and responsiveness we wanted Meta AI to emulate were then fed back into the Meta AI model, which “rewards” it when it generates similar content. This process continues to train the model to produce more content within the guidelines.

3. We evaluated Meta AI’s performance against benchmarks and using human experts.

• Just like we did for Llama 3, we reviewed Meta AI models with external and internal experts through red teaming exercises to find unexpected ways that Meta AI might be used, then addressed those issues in an iterative process.
• We’re also stress-testing Meta AI capabilities across our apps to make sure it’s working as intended in places like feed, chats, search, and more.
• We ran a battery of adversarial evaluations—both automated and reviewed by humans—as a comprehensive system-level review to see how Meta AI scored on key safety metrics.

4. We applied safeguards at the prompt and response level.

• To encourage Meta AI to share helpful and safer responses that are in line with its guidelines, we implement filters on both the prompts that users submit and on responses after they’re generated by the model, but before they’re shown to a user.
• These filters rely on systems known as classifiers that work to detect a prompt or response that falls into its guidelines. For example, if someone asks how to steal money from a boss, the classifier will detect that prompt and the model is trained to respond that it can’t provide guidance on breaking the law.
• We have also leveraged large language models specifically built for the purpose of helping to catch safety violations.

5. We’ve built feedback tools within Meta AI.

• Feedback is instrumental to the development of any generative AI feature since no AI model is perfect, so people can share directly with us whether they received a good or bad response and we’ll use this feedback to improve Meta AI and the models.
• This feedback is reviewed to determine if responses are helpful or if they went against the guidelines and instructions we developed.
• The results are used in ongoing model training to improve Meta AI’s performance over time.

Transparency is critical to help people understand this new technology and become comfortable with it. When someone interacts with Meta AI, we tell them it’s AI technology so they can choose whether they want to continue using it. We share information within the features themselves to help people understand that AI might return inaccurate or inappropriate outputs, which is the same for all generative AI systems. In chats with Meta AI, people can access additional information about how it generates content, the limitations of AI, and how the data they have shared with Meta AI is used.

We also include visible markers on photorealistic images generated by Meta AI so people know the content was created with AI. In May, we will begin labeling video, audio, and image content that people post on our apps as “Made with AI” when we detect industry standard AI image indicators or when people disclose that they’re uploading AI-generated content.

How developers can build responsibly with Llama 3

Meta AI is just one of many features and products that will be built with Llama 3, and we’re releasing different models in 8B and 70B sizes so developers can use the best version for them. We’re providing an instruction-tuned model that is specialized for chatbot applications and a pretrained model for developers with specific use cases that would benefit from custom policies.

In addition to the Responsible Use Guide , we’re providing open source tools that make it even easier for developers to customize Llama 3 and deploy generative AI-powered experiences.

• We’re releasing updated components for Llama Guard 2 , which is a state-of-the-art safeguard model that developers can use as an extra layer to reduce the likelihood their model will generate outputs that aren’t aligned with their intended guidelines. This is based on the recently announced classification from MLCommons.
• We’ve updated CyberSecEval , which is designed to help developers evaluate any cybersecurity risks with code generated by LLMs. We used this to evaluate Llama 3 and address issues prior to releasing it.
• We are introducing Code Shield , which developers can use to reduce the chance of generating potentially insecure code. Our teams have already used Code Shield with Meta’s internal coding LLM to prevent tens of thousands of potentially insecure suggestions this year.
• We have a comprehensive getting started guide that helps developers with information and resources to navigate the development and deployment process.
• We’ve shared Llama Recipes , which contains our open source code to make it easier for developers to build with Llama through tasks like organizing and preparing their dataset, fine-tuning to teach the model to perform their specific use case, setting up safety measures to identify and handle potentially harmful or inappropriate content generated by the model through RAG systems, and deploying the model and evaluating its performance to see if it’s working as intended.
• We also receive direct feedback from open source developers and researchers through open source repositories like GitHub and our long-running bug bounty program, which informs updates to our features and models.

Meta’s open approach to supporting the ecosystem

For more than a decade, Meta has been at the forefront of responsible open source in AI, and we believe that an open approach to AI leads to better, safer products, faster innovation, and a larger market. We’ve seen people using Llama 2 in new and innovative ways since it was released in July 2023—like Yale's Meditron LLM that’s helping medical professionals with decision-making and the Mayo Clinic’s tool that helps radiologists create clinically accurate summaries of their patients’ scans. Llama 3 has the potential to make these tools and experiences even better.

“The upcoming improvements in the reasoning capabilities of Llama 3 are important to any application, but especially in the medical domain, where trust depends quite a lot on the transparency of the decision-making process. Breaking down a decision/prediction into a set of logical steps is often how humans explain their actions and this kind of interpretability is expected from clinical decision support tools. Llama 2 not only enabled us to make Meditron, it also set a precedent for the potential impact of open-source foundation models in general. We are excited about Llama 3 for the example it sets in industry on the social value of open models.” —Prof Mary-Anne Hartley (Ph.D. MD, MPH), Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health and Humanitarian Response Technologies based jointly at Yale School of Medicine and EPFL School of Computer Science

Open source software is typically safer and more secure due to ongoing feedback, scrutiny, development, and mitigations from the community. Deploying AI safely is a shared responsibility of everyone in the ecosystem, which is why we’ve collaborated for many years with organizations that are working to build safe and trustworthy AI. For example, we’ve been working with MLCommons and a global set of partners to create responsibility benchmarks in ways that benefit the entire open source community. We co-founded the AI Alliance , a coalition of companies, academics, advocates, and governments working to develop tools that enable an open and safe AI ecosystem. We also recently released the findings from a Community Forum in partnership with Stanford and the Behavioral Insights Team so companies, researchers, and governments can make decisions based on input from people around the world about what’s important to them when it comes to generative AI chatbots.

We are collaborating with governments around the world to create a solid foundation for AI advancements to be secure, fair, and reliable. We eagerly await the progress on safety evaluation and research from national safety institutes including those in the United States and United Kingdom, particularly as they focus on establishing standardized threat models and evaluations throughout the AI development process. This will help measure risks quantitatively and consistently so risk thresholds can be set. The results of these efforts will guide companies like Meta in measuring and addressing risks, and deciding how and whether to release models.

As technologies continue to evolve, we look forward to improving these features and models in the months and years to come. And we look forward to helping people build, create, and connect in new and exciting ways.

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