Research Methods Articles & Videos

  • Making UX Research Goals Specific

    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.

  • Five User Interview Mistakes to Avoid (in 5 Minutes)

    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.

  • Creating Engaging Reports & Asynchronous Presentations

    To keep your stakeholders and team members engaged, incorporate storytelling techniques such as writing for your audience, adding anecdotes, and using analogies in your asynchronous research deliverables.

  • 6 Mistakes When Crafting Interview Questions

    How you ask questions in a user interview impacts the reliability and utility of the data you collect. Here are 6 ways you can improve your interview questions.

  • Secondary Research in UX

    Secondary research is an essential foundation for UX work, necessary to explore the problem space and scope of prior projects and to identify important questions and best practices in the field of study. It also helps to focus the scope of your own project and often saves money.

  • Handling Observers in User Research

    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.

  • Assessing User Reactions to Visual Design

    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.

  • Probing in User Interviews

    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.

  • What Are Contextual Inquiries?

    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.

  • Problems with Contextual Inquiries

    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.

  • Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX

    Sympathy acknowledges that users are having difficulties, but empathy goes further by understanding the users' needs and motivations.

  • UX Research Made Agile

    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.)

  • Ethnography in UX

    Good UX design requires understanding the context and patterns of human behavior, especially in new products or features that solve real needs. The 5 steps to rapid corporate ethnography lead you to these discoveries.

  • Recruiting and Screening Candidates for User Research Projects

    Know the inherent biases in your recruiting process and avoid them in order to recruit study participants that are representative for your target audience.

  • How Many Participants for a UX Interview?

    In the early stages of a UX-design project, recruit enough people to gain an in-depth understanding of users’ experiences and needs. The number of people needed for an interview study is often smaller than you think.

  • Better UX Deliverables

    Communicating UX work and findings to the full team, stakeholders, and leadership requires engaging deliverables. Amanda Gulley shared her experience improving the design and usability of UX deliverables at a UX Conference participant panel.

  • Advanced User Testing Methods for Accelerating Innovation

    Two user research methods allow you to quickly test a large number of design alternatives, thus accelerating UX innovation. Rapid iterative design and within-subjects testing of multiple alternate designs aren't for every project but are great when they do apply.

  • Triangulation: Combine Findings from Multiple User Research Methods

    Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.

  • Quantitative Research: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about quant research, quant usability testing, analytics, and analyzing data.

  • Identify and Document Your UX Methods

    For each research or design method you employ, create a document that defines this method and can be used to educate other team members on UX activities.