Research: UX Research

When I began my career as a UX designer, many product developers shared the aspiration of building great products with numerous features. While building great products is a worthy goal, teams often paid little attention to users’ real needs when deciding what features to build, which is a great shame. App development is not just about creating a product but about solving a problem for users. As an essential part of human-centered design, user research helps us to crystallize users’ problems and create solutions that directly address them.

As a design lead, I make user research an integral part of my team’s design process. We use various approaches to interacting with users to help us tailor the end product to the audience’s needs. In this article, I’ll share some of my experiences conducting different types of user research, focusing mainly on in-depth user interviews, usability testing, and surveys, but we’ve used all of the approaches that Figure 1 depicts. You’ll learn how to use each of these types of user research and discover useful methods of collecting and analyzing users’ thoughts. Read More

For a long time, UX research moved slowly. We told ourselves that rigor took time, even when we spent most of that time watching recordings of which we already knew the outcomes or manually tagging participant quotations that all said roughly the same thing.

When stakeholders complained about our lack of speed, the answer was often: that’s just how research works. Then everything changed around us in ways that has impacted our work, as follows:

• Remote testing made it easier to run usability studies, but harder to keep up with the findings came out of them.
• Surveys got longer.
• Session replays multiplied.
• Support tickets became one of the richest sources of user insights, but also the easiest to ignore.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) arrived as a workaround. Someone turned on autotranscription and stopped dreading user interviews.
• Another researcher used a clustering tool just to see whether it could help, then realized that patterns had surfaced that they probably would’ve missed when tired on a Friday afternoon.

This article is about what’s already happening: AI is becoming embedded in UX research workflows, changing how teams prepare studies, connecting signals across data types, and deciding what’s worth acting on next. Read More

Starting a new user-research project can sometimes be intimidating—especially if you are a junior UX researcher. When I worked on my first UX research project, I battled impostor syndrome along with the anxiety of being a newcomer at my company. My intent for this article is to help other UX researchers—especially those who are early in their career—plan and conduct an effective UX research kick-off meeting—the first step in the research process.

What Is a UX Research Kick-off Meeting?

A research kick-off is a meeting that you should conduct prior to launching a UX research project. It involves all of your key stakeholders who can help you determine the scope of and plan your research project. Read More