ux research

All you need to know about UX research

Last updated

21 February 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Are you looking for ways to optimize your product, service, or software to better reach and resonate with your audience?

The first step to successful UX research is to discover what UX research is, its process, and how you can leverage it in your business.

Read on to discover everything you need to know, including:

What UX research is

Why UX research is important

The five steps of UX research

Don't let UX problems go unnoticed

Use Dovetail to analyze all your customer interviews and uncover hidden UX issues that are costing your business every day.

• What is UX research?

User experience (UX) research involves gathering valuable insights into how your consumers use your product, service, or software and learning more about your target users to better meet their needs and preferences. Depending on your focus area, UX research serves different purposes in the user-centered design process.

Uncovering what your end users want and need will inform your product team's decisions on product ideas, prototypes , and changes in current designs. In marketing, these targeted user insights from your user researchers can help to customize brand designs and create messaging for the right target audience.

• Why is UX research important to businesses?

There was a time when products and services sold themselves. If it was decent, people bought it. Today, however, customers want more. They want product experiences and brand interactions to be customized. There is also far more competition in most industries than ever before.

Here are some examples of the importance of UX research to your business's success.

Bring more value to your customers

Your customers are the reason for your company's existence. If they didn't need what you're offering, there'd be no reason for you to offer it. UX research goes beyond the basics of what your product/service provides and focuses on improving customer satisfaction and customer experience.

In turn, your customer gets more value out of what you've launched—a smoother experience, more tools and resources, additional features, and more—while you boost customer retention and gain an advantage over the competition by going above and beyond to fulfill your customer's needs.

Take the bias out of your user-centered design process

Believe it or not, quite a few companies still think they know what the end user wants more than the end users themselves. This kind of thinking can be limiting because it's often wrong. The UX design process can offer a solution so long as it’s focused on real users.

UX researchers take the bias out of the process to ensure the user is at the center of brand and product decisions since your customers are the ones buying your products—not you.

Increase your odds of success by making more informed decisions

When heading into a product launch, brainstorming ideas, or reevaluating your product, the most daunting question is: Will people buy it? The odds of succeeding when you launch your product or reconstruct a current one skyrocket if your decisions are based on consumer data and human insights.

This is because you're not making decisions derived from “gut feelings” and guesswork. You’re using cold, hard facts that come straight from the users themselves via techniques such as:

Observational studies

Contextual interviews

User feedback

Online surveys

Usability testing

• What is the return on investment (ROI) for UX research?

The significant time, effort, skill, and expertise your UX researcher needs to conduct their work effectively may make you wonder whether the process is worth the cost and effort. However, research suggests it's a necessary part of product success.

Baymard Institute reveals some telling statistics in its report:

When done right, a flawless UX design can potentially produce 400% higher conversion rates

The average ROI of UX research is 9,900% or $100 back for every $1 spent

Studies show that data-driven companies often outperform their counterparts by 228% or more

By redesigning its site with a more UX focus, Staples was able to increase its eCommerce revenue by 500%

The important takeaway here is that your users’ experience is vital to your success. Despite the complexities of user research , it is essential to every part of your business and development process because it puts the customer at the center of everything you do.

If you don’t focus on your users in this way, you risk your “solution” missing the mark as far as your prospective users' needs and wants are concerned. Misses like this can be due to building products on guesses or assumptions that internal stakeholders believe to be true without any validation. The result is unhappy users, falling retention rates, and costly designs and builds, resulting in negative impacts on ROI.

• User experience research methods

According to the Nielsen Norman Group , the methods you use to conduct UX research depend on what stage of the design cycle you're in.

Stage 1: Discover

During this stage, researchers conduct methods such as:

Field studies

User interviews

Diary studies.

Interviews with stakeholders (discuss designs with stakeholders)

Requirements and constraints

Sales and support interviews

Support call monitoring

Competitive testing

Stage 2: Explore

Researchers use different methods to explore the problems at hand more deeply. They use methods such as:

Competitive analysis

Design review

Task analysis

Persona building

Journey mapping

Design diversity exploration

Cognitive walkthroughs

Prototype feedback and testing

Writing user stories

Card sorting

Stage 3: test.

The most common testing methods are:

Qualitative usability testing

Accessibility evaluation

Benchmark testing

Training research

Social media monitoring

Forum post analysis

User group outreach

Help documentation

Stage 4: Listen

Some excellent methods of listening to your users are:

Search-log analysis

FAQ reviews

Feedback reviews

Analytics reviews

Usability error reviews

Conference outreach

Q&A talks and demos

All these methods can be categorized into several UX research methods, which fall under one or more of the following terms.

Attitudinal vs. behavioral

Consumer insights and data are either attitudinal or behavioral. Attitudinal research refers to the data end users report to you when questioned about their opinions. This is the information you obtain through surveys, focus groups, card sorts, etc.

Behavioral research is the data your researchers collect through observing participants. Examples of observation methods include usability studies, A/B testing, and eye-tracking.

Qualitative vs. quantitative

Qualitative research methods strive to better understand end users through words and meanings. Quantitative methods draw insights from numbers and statistics.

Their purpose, methods, and sampling are very different.

The purpose of qualitative methods is to understand a phenomenon better, while quantitative methods aim to identify relationships and describe a phenomenon. Qualitative sampling is more intentional and on a smaller scale, whereas quantitative sampling is random and larger scale.

Qualitative methods include case studies, clinical research, and ethnography (studies of cultural contexts); in other words, data you draw from interviews, focus groups, and field observation. On the other hand, quantitative methods consist of quasi-experimental, experimental, and comparative techniques drawn from conducting surveys, tests, and questionnaires.

Generative vs. evaluative

Another important distinction when studying user experience is generative versus evaluative.

Generative research refers to the methods your team implements in the Discover and Explore stages of the Nielsen Norman Group design cycle. It seeks to uncover a deeper understanding of your users to identify opportunities for more valuable solutions.

On the other hand, evaluative research analyzes potential usability issues to validate that your product is aligned with real users who will benefit from it. You would conduct this type of research in the Test and Listen stages of the Nielsen Norman example.

• Qualitative UX research methods with examples

Qualitative UX research is often much more complex than the straightforward structure of quantitative data that requires numerical data points and statistical analysis. Although both are very important pieces of the puzzle, qualitative goes beyond the numbers to interpret what that data means. As a result, data analysis and user participation often take longer and require a wide range of language skills to conduct effectively.

Here are some examples of a user research method you can employ to gather qualitative insights.

Participatory design

One way to approach your UX research is by getting advice from people who use and work on your products, bringing them into the early stages of your design process. The participatory design method involves stakeholders—end users, partners, the design team, the development team, product managers, and more in the design decisions to ensure the final product is user-centered.

It's excellent for user testing and usability research methods and often leads to higher customer satisfaction ratings. It also works to bring your team together around a table to work on a shared problem and democratically decide on a solution. While it often involves a higher time investment upfront, it can result in a more fluid approach and greater efficiency throughout the project.

Card sorts are another popular UX research method. Through the use of mental models, they help you discover how users would organize your product. It’s often used in information architecture (IA) design. Here's how it works:

On index cards or Post-it notes, researchers write topics their product (e.g. a website) will have.

Participants organize these topics into groups that they define.

After grouping topics, participants will write a name for each group.

In an optional step, researchers may debrief participants with observations on the difficulty of placing topics in groups, overlapping topics, and thoughts on topics that weren't included in the card sort.

Diary studies are a qualitative research method that requires users to record their thoughts, experiences, and daily activities in a journal. How long a user keeps this record will depend on the head design researcher, but it can range from a few days to a few weeks.

Researchers evaluate and collect information from these diary studies to better understand user behavior and inform the ideal user journey. This method can be excellent for understanding user habits, journeys, attitudes, feelings, and the context of using your product (when, where, why, and how).

Diary study templates

• Types of user research tools

If you were to explore a UX research team's arsenal of tools, you would find dozens of ways to gather and interpret data. The tools used by one research team aren't always the same as those used by another team.

The differences can be due to several factors like preferences, budget, purpose, product types, design scope, and more. 

Surveys or questionnaires

There are tools available to help you create surveys and questionnaires, which make the process more informed and efficient in terms of time and cost. Depending on your needs, you can also toggle with different levels of complexity.

User groups or focus groups

User groups and focus groups bring together a larger team of people to capture insights from all of them at once.

Your team will need tools to help participants schedule a time and pick a place. You'll also need tools for the actual interview process (keeping participants on track) and the observations that follow.

Documenting, analyzing, and sharing

You can gather all the data in the world about your target market, but it's useless if you can't pull actionable insights from it.

This is where tools that allow you to store, analyze, and share data become crucial. Dovetail can help you manage, analyze, and share your user and product research. Collect and organize all your data in one place and action everything from transcribing and evaluating interviews to recording and organizing user insights.

User interview tools help you manage different stages of your user interview process, such as:

Recruitment

Offering incentives

Live user testing

Collaborative insights

With more robust apps, you'll find interview tools already integrated into your centralized research platform.

• The five stages of conducting UX research

There are five basic stages to good user research. Let’s take a look.

Stage 1: Objectives

The first stage of conducting good UX research is defining and detailing your research objectives. Well-thought-out, defined goals lead to significantly more success than poorly defined ones. Clear objectives also allow researchers to focus their research on a common goal: reducing usability issues, identifying user needs, etc.

This process will include the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions of your design process and research.

Stage 2: Hypothesis

The next stage of good research is framing your hypothesis, that is, making assumptions about user behaviors or potential solutions based on what you know about your end users (or think you know about them). This stage is structured to help you determine the best methods for moving forward with your research.

Stage 3: Methods

By the third stage of UX research, your research team has defined goals and made some hypotheses about the results. Now it's time to use that information to determine the best research methods for achieving your goal(s). There are dozens to choose from, so you'll need to consider important factors when selecting the ones you’ll use.

Consider asking yourself some of the following questions about each UX research method you’re considering:

Are you trying to define the phenomenon or explain why it’s happening?

Does it align with your goals?

Will it get you the desired results in your set time frame?

Is it a method researchers would typically use for this type of research?

Is it compatible with your dataset?

Is it appropriate for your ideal users/participants?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, the method may be the right choice. It will take significantly more thorough discussions before finalizing your approach, but this is a good starting point.

Stage 4: Process

You’ve decided on your UX research methods, so now it's time to put them to work. The next step is to source and gather the right participants. Make sure they're representative of your ideal end users. Otherwise, you risk getting inaccurate results from inadequate or irrelevant data.

Whether you’re interviewing, creating surveys, card sorting, or observing (or all these), this stage of your research requires capturing the results. Doing so may take specific skills depending on the method. For example, in qualitative sessions, psychological tricks like remaining silent so that your participant will want to speak or whether to use open or closed questions for certain survey questions.

The most successful research produces a wide range of content and material from which to collect insights, such as videos, notes, images, and more.

Stage 5: Synthesis

In the final stage of your UX research, you’ll gather all your results and make sense of what you've learned. First and foremost, does it prove or disprove your hypothesis? What insights can you take from your research to better accommodate the people who use your products?

The work of a UX researcher never ends, as human behavior is constantly changing. It is up to UX researchers to keep conducting studies and interpreting the results to better understand customer needs and expectations. This approach ensures that solutions will always bring the most value possible to your customers.

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What is a UX Researcher? The Ultimate Guide for 2024

The role of the user experience (UX) researcher is becoming more prominent, more specialized, and more in demand.

Uncovering user behaviors, needs, and motivations in order to design products and services that provide value is the crux of user experience research. When performed correctly, these methods have a huge impact on business.

So what is a UX researcher?

In this guide, we’ll take a look at what a UX researcher does and the UX research career path.

Although there is no singular path, there are four main steps to move a UX researcher forward: expanding knowledge of the user research field ; obtaining foundational skills ; crafting a portfolio; and building a network of industry peers.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is a user experience researcher?
• What does a user experience researcher do?
• What skills are required for a career in UX research?
• How to expand your knowledge of the UX research industry
• How to obtain the necessary foundational skills
• How to craft a convincing portfolio
• How to build a solid network of industry peers
• Final thoughts

1. What is a user experience researcher?

A user experience researcher has their hand on the pulse of user needs and goals. They are the empathetic, organized, critical thinker whose day-to-day is about the first stage of the design thinking process : empathize .

This isn’t to say that UX researchers’ work is totally separate from the rest of the process, but their work has arguably the most humanizing effect on the process. Here’s why— UX researchers know how to:

• Understand the problem or challenge at hand
• Apply a variety of methods and approaches to finding out how their users tick in the context of this problem or challenge
• Listen, observe, and ask the right kinds of questions to gather insights that can be turned into actionable ideas
• Synthesize their findings and communicate them to the rest of the team and to key stakeholders in clear, actionable, and even engaging ways

2. What does a user experience researcher do?

The purpose of the UX researcher (also referred to as “user researcher” or “design researcher”) is to unearth human insights in order to guide the application of design.

According to a recent job posting by IBM, as a design researcher, you will “help provide actionable and meaningful data-driven insights that represent the voice of multiple users. You will collaborate across development, design, and marketing teams to evaluate current and upcoming user research needs that help to improve product definition and drive business goals.”

Some typical tasks and responsibilities of the UX researcher include:

Research Planning and Recruitment

• Develop a well-crafted research plan with clear research objectives.
• Write usability research screeners and discussion guides.
• Recruit targeted end-users for specific research studies.

Data Collection

• Moderate one-on-one basic usability sessions.
• Help develop and implement quantitative surveys.
• Conduct stakeholder and client interviews .

Data Analysis

• Extract insights about user behaviors from web instrumentation tools.
• Translate user insights into actionable recommendations for the product team.

Presentation of Insights

• Craft personas and other “information radiators” (e.g. journey maps) to communicate insights across the design and development teams.
• Present design research findings to the larger team in a clear and organized fashion.
• Work closely with the product team to identify research objectives.
• Establish and implement an overall research strategy.

These are just a handful of tasks that belong to UX research. Ultimately, your job as a UX researcher is to build up a picture of your target users based on their needs, wants, motivations, and pain points. These insights enable the wider design team to create user-friendly products based on real user feedback—not just your assumptions.

As with most UX design roles, the UX researcher means different things to different companies.

To learn more about what might be expected of you as a UX researcher, browse various job sites and see how different companies advertise and describe the role. Here are some useful job portals to help you get started:

• UX Jobs Board
• Just UX Jobs
• User Experience Professionals Association
• AIGA Design Jobs

3. What skills are required for a career in UX research?

Now we’re familiar with some of the key tasks and responsibilities, let’s consider what skills are required for a career in UX research.

As such, being a UX researcher typically requires knowledge or experience in a relevant field that studies human behavior, such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, anthropology, sociology, or psychology. Ultimately, it’s important to be adept at reading people and empathizing with the user, and equally at home handling data and analytics.

Ideal candidates are typically “passionate, curious, and self-driven team players” who have experience working in fast-paced environments while applying both generative and evaluative research methods to build a larger understanding of users.

It’s also important to have a solid understanding of the design thinking process, as well as a passion and know-how for influencing design strategy.

Obtaining these skills can be done through identifying research opportunities with a current employer, volunteering for a design project with an external organization (e.g. VolunteerMatch), or completing research for a personal project of your own.

Overall, practice makes perfect, and refining these skills as often as you can prepare you for your future role. You can even get a design thinking certification by taking a course or program in the discipline, to show potential employers and clients that you truly know your stuff.

4. How to expand your user research knowledge

As already mentioned, there are four key steps to forging a career in UX research:

• Expand your user research knowledge.
• Obtain the foundational skills.
• Craft a portfolio of experience.
• Build a network of peers.

Let’s start with that first step: Expanding your knowledge of the UX research field. In addition to browsing job descriptions, there are plenty of things you can do to learn more about the industry — but where to begin?

Start with the basics and learn all about UX design in this comprehensive guide , and understand the critical role UX research plays in UX design in this article.

From there, learn about the difference between qualitative , quantitative , attitudinal, and behavioral research. Next, you can familiarize yourself with some common UX research methods, such as card sorting, usability testing, and user interviews.

You’ll find an introduction to some of the most important UX research methods on the CareerFoundry YouTube channel (and be sure to take a look at these free UX research tutorials ).

Be sure to watch the video below, in which CareerFoundry graduate and professional UX designer Maureen Herben explains the different techniques and tools used in qualitative user research:

As part of your own research into the UX research field, you’ll also want to consider things such as salary and career options. Sites like Glassdoor and Payscale provide up-to-date salary reports for a range of different locations.

If you can, reach out to people who are already donning the UX researcher job title. Do they tend to work remote or in-house? What kinds of companies employ UX researchers? Again, job sites can help you out here if you don’t have any contacts in the industry (yet!).

Before you commit to the UX researcher route, it’s important to learn as much as you can about the industry and what the role entails.

5. How to obtain the foundational skills necessary for a career as a UX researcher

If you’re keen to forge a career in UX research, you’ll need to start learning some of the key skills. As with any profession, it’s important to build a solid foundation of knowledge before jumping into real-world problem-solving.

Assuming that you already have some knowledge in a related area (cognitive science, sociology, psychology, etc.), there are plenty of ways to learn the fundamentals of user research. Let’s consider those now.

• Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Perspective : learn about the foundational topics about one of the precursors to UX design. As well as being a neat introduction to HCI , this book includes historical context, the human factor, interaction elements, and the fundamentals of science and research.
• User Research: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Products and Services : learn about all the key research methods including face-to-face user testing, card sorting, surveys, and A/B testing.

Online resources

Industry blogs are a great way to start learning the ins and outs of the field. Some useful (and trustworthy!) sources include:

• Nielsen Norman Group
• UX Collective
• Inside Design

Conferences and meetups

If possible, consider attending a UX research conference or a local meetup. You’ll find a list of the top UX research conferences to attend in 2019 here , and can search for local UX research groups on meetup.com .

In addition to the examples above, finding an apprenticeship or a more senior researcher who is willing to let you shadow their process is a great way to immerse yourself in the context of a UX researcher while learning “on the job.”

6. How to craft a convincing UX research portfolio

As with any design role, a compelling portfolio is key to proving you’ve got the right skills for the job. So how do you go about creating a convincing UX research portfolio ?

As you practice refining your skills, keep a record of your work to present to future employers. Crafting an online portfolio is a great supplement to a resume or CV when highlighting case studies that show hiring managers what you can do. According to Senior UX Recruiter Tom Cotterill:

“Your portfolio should show cultural suitability for the company where you are applying. Don’t be afraid to add a touch of character or your own style to your portfolio. It’s your chance to wow the hiring manager and demonstrate that you stand out from the crowd. A good portfolio indicates, in short, that this person has taken time to represent themselves in the best possible light, and they’re clued up enough to showcase their most relevant work in an aesthetic and logical way.”

Ultimately, your portfolio should include the following sections:

• The problem or design challenge your research aimed to solve.
• The team you collaborated with.
• The research process (how did you go about solving the problem?).
• The tools you used to recruit, collect and analyze data, and present insights.
• The final outcome and the handoff of the design for development .

For more insight on how to refine a great UX research portfolio, check out How to Wow Me With Your UX Research Portfolio and How to Create a Powerful Case Study for Your UX Portfolio . Another great resource for inspiration is  Bestfolios , the largest curation of best UX research and designer portfolios, resumes, case studies , and design resources.

7. How to build a network within the UX research industry

You’re in the process of mastering the right skills and crafting your portfolio. Now it’s time to network! Networking is one of the best ways to meet people in the UX field and potentially land a new job.

Let’s consider some of the best opportunities for making industry connections.

Current Co-Workers

If you are currently employed, look to see if there are any user experience researchers in your organization, and ask them what it’s like! Also request to shadow them during a research session and take notes.

Future Employers

Informational interviews are also a great way to get candid feedback with people working at great companies, such as IBM, Google, or Amazon. Using LinkedIn or Twitter to find and invite UX researchers for coffee is a solid way to get an idea of what it may be like to work for your company of interest, and also how to get in the door.

Online UX Communities

Actively participate in online UX communities (e.g. Facebook groups) relevant to your professional interests and learning goals. Here are a few to start with:

• Useful Usability
• The UX School

UX Research Organizations

Lastly, join 1-2 user experience research organizations, such as the User Experience Research Professionals Association or the Design Research Society to see if there are any upcoming events you can attend.

8. Final thoughts

UX is a growing field, and the role of the user experience researcher is becoming more and more pivotal. Equipping yourself with the necessary skills and knowledge, and learning to conduct UX research like a professional , while surrounding yourself with peers in the field who you can learn from are essential to becoming a UX researcher yourself.

Overall, the value of understanding the needs of the customer cannot be ignored, and user experience researchers will have an increasingly valuable role to play in the future of design.

If you’d like to learn more about UX research, check out the following guides:

• What is the UX research salary?
• A 5-Point Roadmap For Any UX Research Project
• How to conduct a UX audit
• Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your UX Research Portfolio
• Interview Toolkit: Top 5 UX Research Questions to Prepare For

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• May 03, 2024
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Video Transcript

On Wednesday, May 1, 2024, social scientist Mario Small (Columbia University) joined Chicago Booth's Nick Epley to explore who we turn to when navigating difficult times. One might assume we rely most on close relationships, but Small's research finds that we often confide in more casual acquaintances with whom we have less-complicated relationships. 

This event was part of the Think Better speaker series  hosted by the Roman Family Center for Decision Research. 

A full recap and transcript are forthcoming. 

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