Research Methods Articles & Videos

  • How to Collaborate with Stakeholders in UX Research

    When teams become involved with users, they become better at preventing problems and faster at delivering usable software.

  • UX Research Cheat Sheet

    User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

  • The Sketch Test: How to Test and Improve Your UX Deliverables and Other Documents

    Test your infographics, reports, and UX deliverables with representative colleagues to refine them and prevent potential stakeholder misunderstandings.

  • How to Maximize User Research Insight (Keynote address)

    Increase the reliability and validity of your research findings by incorporating multiple research techniques and following study-design best practices, as explained by Jakob Nielsen at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.

  • UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity

    No matter which prototyping tools you use, the same tips apply to preparing a user interface prototype for the most effective user research.

  • How Can We Study Website Credibility?

    Find out why asking users directly won't accurately measure a website's credibility -- and what you can do instead.

  • 28 Tips for Creating Great Qualitative Surveys

    Qualitative surveys ask open-ended questions to find out more, sometimes in preparation for doing quantitative surveys. Test surveys to eliminate problems.

  • When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

    Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.

  • Are Your Personas Outdated? Know When It’s Right To Revise

    Up-to-date personas result in a better UX design process. Data from 156 companies provide a baseline to understand how often to revise personas. Knowing when and how frequently to make updates will help you craft personas that are both accurate and effective.

  • Usability Testing of Icons

    To ensure that people understand the meaning and purpose of icons, conduct multiple types of tests at various stages of the product-development cycle.

  • How Much Time Does It Take to Create Personas?

    The size of the company and the approach taken influence the time needed to create personas, ranging from 23–103 staff hours across 216 companies.

  • No More Pogo Sticking: Protect Users from Wasted Clicks

    Misleading links and omitted information force users to bounce back and forth in a hub-and-spoke pattern between a routing page and subpages linked from it, increasing the interaction cost and decreasing engagement over time. Use web analytics tools to identify and monitor pogo-stick behavior on your site.

  • Pilot Testing: Getting It Right (Before) the First Time

    Pilot testing (a session or two before the real test) helps fine-tune usability studies, leading to more reliable results.

  • Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Ditch Your Old Design So Soon

    Testing your site’s existing design along with a few competitor websites provides valuable insight for new designs. Competitive studies help you avoid developing unusable new features.

  • Segment Analytics Data Using Personas

    Persona-inspired segments can be used in website analytics to uncover trends in data and derive UX insights. Better than (a) lumping everybody together or (b) segmenting on demographics that don't relate to user behavior.

  • Low Findability and Discoverability: Four Testing Methods to Identify the Causes

    Use IA- and UI-focused user research to determine if low findability and discoverability are caused by site information architecture or navigation design.

  • Define Stronger A/B Test Variations Through UX Research

    Complement A/B split tests with user research to identify true causes and develop well informed design variations.

  • Five Essential Analytics Reports for UX Strategists

    Google Analytics is filled with very useful information for UX Strategists defining a baseline and tracking trends in order to define goals, strategies, and concepts for a brighter tomorrow.

  • Talking with Participants During a Usability Test

    Talk less and learn more by being prepared to use 3 sound, practical techniques for interrupting or answering users while facilitating a usability test or other behavioral research study.

  • Three Uses for Analytics in User-Experience Practice

    In order to make the most of analytics data, UX professionals need to integrate this data where it can add value to qualitative processes instead of distract resources.