Conduct practical and insightful user research to improve the performance of your product. From start to finish, you'll define your research, hypothesis and its risks, determine the best approach, find participants, run successful sessions, analyze the data, and create actionable outcomes that ensure success!

Researching UX: User Research

All SitePoint web design and UX books plus short videos and online courses on how to design a better web

Design & UX

UX, short for User Experience, is the discipline in charge of understanding how people interact with computer systems or digital products

Mobile Design

UI Design

Preface

Starting a research project can feel manic. There’s lots to organise: briefs to write, objectives to agree, and stakeholders to bring on board. It’s easy to feel like you’re being swept away on a sea of madness. But with a bit of organisation, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you get the setup right, the rest of the process will be less stressful and more productive. 

Begin the Project

Once you’ve conducted your kickoff session, stakeholder interviews and desk research, you’re ready to design your research methodology. 

Choose an Approach

Once you’ve started your research project, planned the logistics of how you will run your fieldwork, and decided on your approach to your analysis and outputs, you need to find your participants: the people who you’ll be interviewing, observing, or asking to try your product. 

Finding Participants

It sounds obvious, but your research sessions will be better if you think them through beforehand. You do this by imaginatively playing through what might happen, plotting out how to achieve your aims, and weighing up different questions and activities you might use. Most of this planning takes place in your head, but it also has a physical product, which goes by the name of the discussion guide . 

Writing a Discussion Guide

If you want your research sessions to run smoothly, you will want to take some time in the days beforehand to prepare. That way, you can be sure that everything you need is ready, the project team know their roles, and you’ve got time to fix any problems that come up. Research sessions are pretty full-on, and you want to be able to concentrate participants without getting distracted or disrupted on the day.

Set Up Your Sessions

The big day is here. You are about to run your research sessions. As we discussed in Chapter 5 , you’ll have done a lot of your preparation in the days beforehand, which takes most (but not all) of the stress out of it. 

Running Your Sessions

In this chapter, we’ll show you how you can get better at running user research sessions. We’ll cover interviewing techniques, managing tasks, and how to deal with tricky situations that can throw you off balance. As we mentioned in Chapter 6 , interviewing is only one of the activities that takes place while you’re running the session. But because it’s so important, it gets a whole chapter to itself.

Interviewing

Analysis is the core of the research process. It’s where you transform your raw data (in other words, your observations about what users did or said) into insight and ideas. It’s where you organize your evidence and agree upon a shared understanding of the facts. It’s the foundation of good design work to follow. 

Analyzing Your Data

You’ve designed an elegant project. You’ve recruited the right participants. You’ve run great sessions. Your analysis has been thorough and revealing. But if you don’t succeed in turning your research into action, then you’ve probably been wasting your time.

Researching UX: User Research

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James Lang

Emma Howell

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Researching UX: User Research