Rule #1 for all user research is to study participants who are representative of the target audience. 5 best practices for recruiting screeners will improve the validity of your research.
User research is often initiated during a sprint, after a design is implemented, or is part of the MVP. But, mindfully planning research earlier reaps far better results.
Barriers from all angles can make doing user research seem impossible. But recognizing the challenges and knowing you are not alone in having them, makes them easier to overcome so that you can get user data after all.
The question of "how many users" has 3 answers when doing contextual inquiry: users per visit, visits per day, and the total number of visits in a study (which again varies depending on the type of design project).
Directed user research where you ask people closed-end questions can bias the outcome in favor of those things that are being asked about. Unguided studies are often better at revealing true user preferences.
Qualitative user research aims at insights, not numbers. Metrics for individual users help tell the story of how each person did, but mean values across a small sample won't be reliable.
There will never be firm rules for every detail of good user research, but cultivating a researcher's mindset will help you make sure that your research findings are valid.
Field studies and diary studies are two research methods that help you learn about your users' real-world context, which is important for good design. They have different advantages and downsides.
Both UX research techniques help you gain quantitative insight into user behavior. Each method provides different types of information and can answer different kinds of research questions, however.
User research studies need research goals: what are you trying to learn? Too broad, and you may have no actionable insights to drive the design process.
Probing vs. leading. Saying enough to make your participant comfortable, but not so much you derail the research. 5 pitfalls in the user interview process are demonstrated so that you can avoid them the next time you talk with users.
Design team members should observe user research sessions, but this should be planned and managed to avoid having the observers distract and bias the study participants.
4 user research methods for assessing visual design (and when and why to use each): preference explanation, open & closed word choice, and numerical rankings for brand attributes.
Follow-up questions in user interviews gather more detailed information from participants than they provided in their initial answers to our planned questions. This video provides examples of two main forms of probing questions.
Contextual inquiry is a user research method that is helpful to define requirements, improve processes, learn what's important to users, and spark ideas for future projects.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
