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UX Research Cheat Sheet

February 12, 2017 2017-02-12

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User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

In This Article:

When to conduct user research.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

• Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now . The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.
• Do user research at all the stages . As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
• Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing , which is the most effective method to improve usability . If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what , but you often need to know why . So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all .

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

• Conduct field studies and interview users : Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.
• Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
• Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
• Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
• Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
• Do competitive testing . Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

• Compare features against competitors.
• Do design reviews.
• Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
• Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
• Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
• Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
• Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
• Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
• Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

• Do qualitative usability testing . Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
• Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies .
• Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
• Talk with user groups.
• Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
• Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
• Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

• Survey customers and prospective users.
• Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
• Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
• Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
• Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
• Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.
• Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

• Find allies . It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.
• Talk with experts . Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.
• Follow ethical guidelines . The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.
• Involve stakeholders . Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.
• Hunt for data sources . Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?
• Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.
• Follow Tog's principles of interaction design .
• Use evidence-based design guidelines , especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.
• Design for universal access . Accessibility can’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.
• Give users control . Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.
• Prevent errors . Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.
• Improve error messages . For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.
• Provide helpful defaults . Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.
• Check for inconsistencies . Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment . Meet expectations instead.
• Map features to needs . User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.
• When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy . Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.
• When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling . Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.
• Avoid waste . Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.
• Consider system usability in different cultural contexts . You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries . Translation is only part of the challenge.
• Look for perverse incentives . Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.
• Consider social implications . How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?
• Protect personal information . Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.
• Keep data safe . Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.
• Deliver both good and bad news . It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.
• Track usability over time . Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.
• Include diverse users . People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.
• Track usability bugs . If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.
• Pay attention to user sentiment . Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.
• Reduce the need for training . Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
• Communicate future directions . Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.
• Recruit people for future research and testing . Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

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30+ User Research Questions To Ask For Building Better Products

10 min read

The right user research questions will help you collect relevant data about your target audience and make informed decisions to propel growth.

However, if done wrong, you risk encountering confusion and skewed results. This article serves as your guide to avoid such pitfalls by showing you:

• How to craft your questions the right way and collect valuable feedback .
• Examples of questions you can copy or tweak.
• Best practices to adopt for effective results.
• User research questions are quantitative or qualitative questions you ask users to uncover insights about their mental models, needs, behavior, and experience with your product.

Broadly speaking, you can trigger research questions to:

• Understand user problems .
• Uncover user preferences.
• Gather information about the product experience.

Examples of user research questions to understand user problems:

• What problems are you looking to solve with this product?
• What is the main goal when completing [a task in the product]?
• How hard is it to accomplish [task]?

Examples of problem research questions to understand user needs:

• Describe the problem you are trying to solve as a [user persona].
• What tasks do you accomplish during an average workday?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how difficult is it to accomplish [a task]?

Examples of UX research questions to improve user experience:

• What were your initial expectations when you started using our product, and how did the actual experience compare?
• How would you describe the organization and clarity of our menu and interface labels? Are there any terms or options that are unclear to you?
• On a scale of 1-10, how was your experience with [task]?

Adopt these best practices to crush your UX research goals:

• Ask concise questions and be specific.
• Avoid asking leading questions so research participants can provide honest answers.
• Use a mix of closed-ended and open-ended questions for comprehensive insights.

Channels to collect UX research responses:

• Use in-app user feedback surveys to gauge satisfaction.
• Conduct user interviews to understand needs, preferences & experiences.
• Carry out user testing to dig deeper into how users interact with your tool.
• Effective user research hinges on employing the right questions, user interview strategies, and continuous experimentation to discover which techniques resonate best with your audience. Userpilot can help with that. Book a demo to learn more.

What are user research questions?

User research questions are quantitative or qualitative questions you ask users to uncover insights about their perception, needs, behavior, and experience with your product.

By analyzing the responses to these questions, you can make informed decisions about product design and development. Ultimately, research helps you build a product that users love, thereby driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Types of user research questions

User research is as broad as it comes, but generally speaking, there are three categories when surveying SaaS users:

User research questions to understand the problems

The questions in this category help you uncover the pain points and challenges your ideal customers face.

By triggering these questions and analyzing responses from the research participants, you’re better positioned to make continuous iterations and ensure your product evolves to meet user needs.

Use this category of questions when you want to:

• Brainstorm new product ideas .
• Design a product sprint.
• Design feature enhancements.
• Improve product usability.

User research questions to understand user preferences

These questions enable you to glean proper information about your target audience . By asking them, you’ll know what makes your audience tick, the factors that influence their buying decisions, and what tasks they accomplish each day.

Trigger surveys about user preferences early in the product development stage to:

• Design data-driven user experiences .
• Identify features that will drive product adoption.
• Understand the preferred pricing structure and your users’ WTP (willingness to pay).

User research questions about the product experience

The overall product experience shapes how users perceive your brand and determines whether they continue doing business with you. By conducting surveys about the user experience, you will uncover insights to:

• Improve the product experience and usability .
• Guide new features and enhancements.
• Discover churn reasons .

Examples of user research questions to understand the problem

Trigger the questions below to gain insights into problems your users face and identify solutions that will improve their experience.

Qualitative research question examples

• Can you describe a time when you were struggling to use [product/feature] and how you eventually overcame the challenge?
• Are there any recurring issues or problems that, if resolved, would significantly enhance your overall satisfaction with our product?
• What features or functionality are missing from our product that would make it more useful for you?

Quantitative research question examples

• On a scale of 1 to 7, how challenging do you find [specific features of your product] to use?
• How likely are you to recommend our product to others based on your current experience?
• What is the likelihood that you will switch to a competitor product in the next six months?
• How often do you have to contact our customer support team for assistance?
• Indicate your level of agreement with the statement: “The current version of [product] adequately addresses my primary pain points.”

Examples of problem research questions to understand user needs

Curious about user needs, preferences, and willingness to pay? Trigger the following qualitative and quantitative survey questions at the right points in the user journey:

Qualitative research questions

• What tasks do you accomplish in an average workday?
• Can you describe one particular feature you find most valuable in a product like ours?
• Are there any missing features you’ll be willing to pay extra for?
• How do you currently address gaps or limitations in our product? Are there workarounds you’ve developed?
• How important is mobile accessibility in your workflow, and what features would you consider essential for a mobile version of our product?
• When it comes to integrations with other tools or platforms, which integrations would be most beneficial for your workflow?
• What has been the biggest hurdle in using [feature]?

Quantitative research questions

• What are the top three tasks you complete most often with our product? (List the most common tasks in your tool to make it easy for users to simply click an option)
• To what degree do you value product updates and new feature announcements in maintaining your interest in a SaaS product?
• How likely are you to consider upgrading to a higher pricing tier for access to premium features?
• How much would you be willing to pay for a solution to [problem]?

Examples of product research questions to improve user experience

Trigger the following to learn more about the user experience and identify ways to improve usability and retention.

Qualitative UX research questions

• How can we improve your experience with the product?
• Are there any features you rarely use, and if so, can you explain why?
• Can you describe a time when you were struggling to use our product and how you eventually overcame the challenge?
• Have you used similar products or competitors in our industry, and if so, what aspects of their user experience do you find better or worse than ours?
• If you were to stop using the product, what would be the main reason?

Quantitative UX research questions

• On a scale from 1 to 5, rate how easy it is to use [product].
• How often do you encounter problems completing the following tasks with our product? (List the tasks)
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?
• How easy is it to find the information you need to complete tasks with our product?
• Indicate your agreement with the statement: “My overall satisfaction with [product] has increased over time.” (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree)
• How would you rate your overall experience with [product]?

Best practices when conducting user research

To avoid distorting your research results, it’s important you choose your survey questions carefully. One word or phrase could influence user responses and give you inaccurate data.

Below are three best practices when rolling out user research questions:

Ask concise questions and be specific

Concise questions help participants clearly understand the information you’re seeking. They prevent confusion and ensure participants can provide relevant insights.

Stay away from product or industry jargon, as not all participants might be familiar with them.

That said, focus on asking specific questions—ideally, one idea per question. This makes it easier for users to respond, and it also helps you analyze better and faster.

Here’s an example of an incorrect survey question: “How satisfied are you with the ease of navigation and the responsiveness of customer support in our product?”

This question combines two distinct ideas—satisfaction with ease of navigation and satisfaction with customer support responsiveness—into a single question. Respondents may have differing opinions on each aspect, making it challenging to pinpoint specific areas for improvement. It also doesn’t allow participants to express nuanced feedback on each element separately.

Avoid asking leading questions

Leading questions are intentionally or mistakenly worded in a way that suggests or pushes respondents toward a certain answer.

Example: “Was the product very easy to navigate?”

This question is leading because it suggests a positive outcome and assumes agreement with the statement. Respondents may feel compelled to respond positively even if they don’t genuinely believe the product has easy navigation. This can introduce bias and result in inaccurate data.

A better phrasing would be, “How would you describe your experience with navigating the product?”

Let’s consider another example.

What do you think about the survey question below?

“Is feature A better than feature B? (Yes/NO)”

Leading or not?

Binary questions can be tricky because the phrasings inherently imply comparison; however, the above question is leading.

A better way to frame it for unbiased responses is to ask: “Do you prefer feature A or B?”

Use a mix of closed-ended and open-ended questions

This is known as mixed-method research, and experts use it to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback for better insights.

Closed-ended questions provide quantitative data that you can quickly analyze to generate actionable insights. On the other hand, open-ended questions offer qualitative feedback, uncovering the “why” behind quantitative responses.

When designing your survey, strike a balance between closed-ended and open-ended questions. Ensure closed-ended questions cover key metrics , while open-ended questions delve into user perceptions and experiences.

Sometimes, it’s effective to start with quantitative questions to gather baseline data and then ask open-ended follow-up questions to explore nuances and gather rich qualitative data.

For example, you can trigger an NPS survey that asks users on a scale of 1-10, how likely they are to recommend your new feature, then send a follow-up asking the reasons for their scores.

How to collect responses to user research questions

There are multiple user research channels. The ones you choose boil down to your audience and research goals. For SaaS participants, in-app surveys, user interviews, and usability tests work great.

Let’s go over them in detail.

Use in-app user feedback surveys to gauge satisfaction

Meet customers where they are with contextual in-app surveys that let you collect input on the spot. This real-time feedback is valuable for understanding immediate user experiences and satisfaction levels.

For instance, triggering a CSAT survey immediately after a user interacts with your new feature lets you get more accurate feedback compared to when you wait to ask them weeks later in a one-on-one interview.

By integrating surveys into your app, you engage users without requiring them to switch to a different platform. This convenience encourages higher participation rates.

Conduct user interviews to understand needs, preferences & experiences

When it comes to understanding user needs and preferences, interviews work better. They help you interact closely with the research participants, ask follow-up questions immediately, and generate in-depth feedback to uncover underlying motivations and reasons behind user behavior.

All these are critical to building products your users will love, especially when building an MVP to test with a new audience.

In addition, direct interactions foster empathy as you can observe non-verbal cues and emotions, gaining a holistic perspective on user experiences beyond what may be expressed verbally.

Carry out usability tests to dig deeper into product usability

Usability tests help you gauge how user-friendly your product is. The tests focus on understanding customer satisfaction with your tool and their perception of its value.

Usability tests help pinpoint specific areas of your product that may cause confusion or frustration for users. By observing users during tests, you’ll gain insights into their natural interaction patterns, allowing you to make adjustments that align with user expectations and behaviors.

Popular usability testing methods include guerilla testing, lab testing, and remote testing. The approach you choose depends on your audience and research objectives.

User research isn’t a one-time task but an ongoing process of learning about users and making improvements.

Regularly conduct user research to keep track of changing customer needs and preferences. Doing this will save you from losing users to churn and ensure your product is competitive.

When you think about it critically, research boils down to asking the right questions. Your phrasing matters as much as the channels and timing. So, A/B tests different research questions to see which gives you better results.

Userpilot can help you trigger and analyze user research questions in-app. With our platform, you can:

• Design different kinds of quantitative and qualitative surveys.
• Segment users to determine who sees what.
• Set event-based triggers so your surveys are contextual. For instance, you can set your surveys to be sent after a user interacts with a new feature. This way, only users who hit that goal will see your surveys.
• A/B test different survey elements and get real-time results.

Book a demo now to get started!

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User Research

What is user research.

User research is the methodic study of target users—including their needs and pain points—so designers have the sharpest possible insights to make the best designs. User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities and find crucial information to use in their design process.

Discover why user research is a crucial part of the design process.

• Transcript loading…

User Research – Get to know your Users, and What They want

To call user research a crucial part of an interaction design process might seem overly obvious. Indeed, it’s the only way to discover exactly what these users need, having first found out precisely who they are. To set out to generate these facts, you must gather data from your users through a structured approach . First, you must choose methods that 1) suit your research’s purpose and 2) will yield the clearest information. Afterwards—to get the insights you want—you’ll need to interpret your findings from all that data, which can be tricky . You can apply user research anytime during the design process. Typically, researchers begin with qualitative measures, to discover users’ needs and motivations . They might later test their results by using quantitative measures .

“Research is creating new knowledge.” – Neil Armstrong, the First person to walk on the Moon

User research essentially splits into two subsets:

Qualitative research – Ethnographic field studies and interviews are examples of methods that can help you build a deep understanding of why users behave the way they do (e.g., why they leave a website so quickly). For instance, you can interview a small number of users and get sharp insights into their shopping habits by asking them open-ended questions. Usability testing is another dimension of this type of research (e.g., examining users’ stress levels when they use a certain design). Qualitative research requires great care. As it involves collecting non-numerical data (e.g., opinions), your own opinions might influence findings.

Quantitative research – With more-structured methods such as surveys, you gather measurable data about what users do and test assumptions you developed from qualitative research. An example is to use an online survey to ask users questions about their shopping habits (e.g., “Approximately how many items of clothing do you buy online per year?”). You can use this data to find patterns within a large user group. In fact, the larger the sample of representative test users is, the more likely you’ll have a statistically reliable way of assessing the target user population. Regardless of the method, with careful research you can gather objective and unbiased data. Nevertheless, quantitative data alone cannot expose deeper human insights.

We can also split user research into two approaches:

Attitudinal – you listen to users’ words (e.g., in interviews).

Behavioral – you watch their actions through observational studies.

Usually, you can get the sharpest view of a design problem when you apply a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research as well as a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral approaches.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Leverage User Research Methods throughout Development

Industry-leading user experience consulting organization the Nielsen Norman Group names appropriate user research methods for you to use during your project’s four stages . Here are key methods:

Discover – Determine what’s relevant for users.

Diary studies – Have users log their performance of activities or record their daily interactions with a design.

Contextual inquiries – Interview suitable users in their own environment to find out how they perform the task/s in question.

Explore – See how to address all users’ needs.

Card sorting – On cards, write words and phrases and then let participants organize these in the most meaningful way and label categories to ensure your design is logically structured.

Customer journey maps – Create user journeys to reveal potential pitfalls and crucial moments.

Test – Evaluate your designs.

Usability testing – Make sure your design is easy to use.

Accessibility evaluations – Test your design to ensure everyone can use it.

Listen – Put issues in perspective, uncover any new problems and spot trends.

Analytics – Gather analytics/metrics to chart (e.g.) website traffic and generate reports.

Surveys/Questionnaires – Track how users’ feel about your product/design via these.

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However you approach user research, always consider the pros and cons of each technique . Card sorting is cheap and easy, for example, but may prove time-consuming when you proceed to analysis. Moreover, it might not provide in-depth contextual meaning. The resources available to you are another constraint. These will decide when, how much and which type of user research you can actually do. Therefore, carefully choose only the most relevant method/s for your research . Also, get stakeholders from your organization involved early on . They can reveal precious insights and help keep your research on track regarding business goals. Overall, user research is a valuable way to validate the assumptions the design team makes concerning users in the field , cut the expense of the best deliverables and keep your product’s demand high and ahead of competitors’ in the marketplace.

User research methods have various pros and cons and involve activities ranging from observations of users in context to controlled experiments in lab settings.

Learn More about User Research

For a fuller grasp of user research, take our course here .

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of user research tips .

Find an extensive range of user research considerations , discussed in Smashing Magazine.

Here’s a convenient and example-rich catalogue of user research tools.

Questions related to User Research

User Research is a fulfilling career for individuals driven to comprehend user behaviors and work collaboratively with teams. As a User Researcher, you're instrumental in steering teams towards crafting user-centric solutions. If you're intrigued by a career that combines both analytical and creative insights, consider delving into this field. For a comprehensive understanding, explore the User Researcher Learning Path on our platform.

User Researchers are seeing competitive pay in the industry. On average, they can earn from $92,000 to $146,000 annually. In some smaller firms, user research duties might be combined with a broader UX role. To understand how salaries can differ by region or delve into a broader perspective on UX-related pay, check out this detailed guide on UI UX Designer Salaries for 2023 or Glassdoor's breakdown of User Experience Researcher salaries .

While both are integral to the user experience, User Research and UX Design serve different purposes. User Research delves deep into understanding user preferences and needs, paving the way for informed design strategies. In contrast, UX Design is about sculpting a product based on that insight, ensuring it's both user-centric and aesthetically pleasing. 

Sometimes, especially in compact teams, the roles might blur with a designer handling research. Want a comprehensive insight? Dive into User Experience: The Beginner's Guide to explore their interconnected dynamics.

Yes, there is! Think of UX research as a subset of user research. While both focus on understanding users, user research casts a broader net, examining topics like pricing or delivery preferences. UX research, meanwhile, zeroes in on how users interact with a product and their experience doing so. In short, user research looks at broader interactions, while UX research specifically studies product use. To dive deeper, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

User research utilizes varied techniques such as usability testing, A/B tests, surveys, card sorting, interviews, analytics analysis, and ethnographic studies. Every approach brings unique insights and is ideal for specific situations. It's essential to choose the proper technique based on your research goals and your audience. Discover these techniques further in 7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques . 

For a comprehensive understanding of usability testing, a popular user research method, check out our course on User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While a related degree can be beneficial, it's not strictly required to become a user researcher. Many successful user researchers have degrees in diverse fields like psychology, design, anthropology, statistics, or human-computer interaction. What's crucial is a mix of relevant education, hands-on experience, and continuous learning. Even if some employers might favor candidates with a bachelor's degree, it can be in something other than a UX-focused area. Only some degrees specifically target user research. To strengthen your knowledge, consider courses like Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX or User Research Methods and Best Practices .

While each user research project is unique, some standard steps guide most endeavors:

Determine the research question.

Choose the proper research technique.

Find participants.

Execute the research.

Evaluate the gathered data.

Share the results.

For a thorough understanding of these steps and more, check out User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

There's a wide array of user research tools to pick from, tailored to your research goals, organizational size, and project specifics. Some popular choices include:

For surveys: Typeform or Google Forms.

Card sorting: Tools like Optimal Workshop, Maze or Trello.

Analyzing user activity: HotJar or CrazyEgg for heatmaps.

Usability evaluations: Platforms like Userlytics or Lookback.

Analyzing qualitative data: Miro or Lucidchart for affinity diagramming.

Crunching numbers: Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel for quantitative insights.

Usability testing on prototypes: Tools like Adobe XD or Figma.

Presenting findings: Use Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Prezi.

These tools often boast extra features to amplify your research.

Dive deeper into their applications with User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

User research is paramount in creating products that align with users' genuine needs and preferences. Instead of basing designs on assumptions, it provides factual insights into how users feel and interact with products. By engaging in user research, designers can spot usability challenges, collect feedback on design ideas, and validate their design decisions. For businesses, this not only refines product offerings but also strengthens brand loyalty and reputation. A standout user experience gives a company a competitive edge and lowers the chances of product setbacks. Dive deeper into the significance of user research in design with Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX and User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide .

Literature on User Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on User Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about User Research

Take a deep dive into User Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

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Learn / Guides / Product research basics

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A step-by-step guide to the product research process

A strong product research process ensures product teams maximize resources, meet key business goals, and make confident decisions that will deliver successful products and features to create customer delight.

But, how do you conduct effective product research?

Just as there’s no single way to develop a product, no single research process fits all product teams. But there are key steps that will help you balance business goals and user needs for actionable product research . 

This article takes you through the factors you should consider to tailor product research to your desired outcomes and provides a step-by-by-step guide to doing research right.

Use Hotjar to streamline your product research process

Hotjar offers product teams a rich stream of quantitative and qualitative data that keeps you connected to user needs at every stage of research.

What to consider before starting product research

Before jumping into the research process , product managers prepare their team. Take time to consider the why and determine how you can design the process to meet your unique product requirements. 

Reflect on:

Why you’re doing the research

Get connected with the deep purpose of your research: what you need to understand to create a profitable and effective product .

Determine specific outcomes of the research process.

During the early product discovery stages, generating new product ideas for innovation and getting to know your users better will serve as a solid foundation throughout the research process. At later stages, look for concrete feedback on a new product, or possible upgrades and feature updates for an existing product. The why behind the research should guide your process. 

Categorizing your users

Determining customer needs and segmenting users are crucial steps that impact the success of any product research strategy. 

You might use a random sample of potential or existing customers; or segment users according to region, industry, or other criteria to spot patterns across different demographics.

Trial users can give immediate product feedback, which is usually incredibly easy to implement (a new theme, for example) or incredibly difficult, like an entirely new functionality or platform for your product. Your long-time users can give nuanced feedback, but they overlook what doesn't work due to their expertise.

Finding that middle ground of users who like what you offer but aren't stuck to your brand is essential. These users appreciate being treated like their insights matter most—because they do.

Finding impartial user insights can be tricky since many tools track users who’ve been paid or incentivized to click through to your website or product. Product experience insights software like Hotjar can help by providing organic, unbiased user data that gives you a clear picture of your customer experience (CX) .

Pro tip: Hotjar Highlights lets you sort and curate user insights and attributes, and share them with your product team. You can also watch Session Recordings of users from specific countries or industries—or filter recordings to see only satisfied or dissatisfied user experiences, which can provide valuable information on what’s working (and what’s not).

A Hotjar Session Recording

Your core business goals 

The best product research processes overlap with the overall organizational vision, so update your research goals in line with company goals to ensure alignment. 

Designing your research process with cross-functional collaboration in mind is a great way to eliminate any communication issues, ensure all departments collect data that tests product profitability, business goals, and user satisfaction.

 Your team’s methodology

Different product methodologies emphasize different aspects of product research throughout its lifecycle, so it’s important to consider techniques that will fit your team’s working stages.

Teams who use waterfall methodologies usually rely on bursts of intense research before development and again during pre-launch. They also make a clear distinction between the product’s research and development phases. 

Teams who use agile, lean, or DevOps methods usually integrate research with the broader product development process, engaging in continuous discovery methods. 

Whatever your methodology, infuse research into every stage of the product lifecycle to achieve business goals like increased revenue, acquisitions, and user adoption.

Choosing which research tools to use

When you’re deciding how to do product research, you’ll need to consider your budget and company size to pick out your tool stack.

Manual research techniques like user interviews can be time-consuming and cost-intensive, but useful to forge a personal connection with users and ask improvised questions based on their responses.

Automated research tools (like Hotjar 👋) increase speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, and reduce human error. They allow you to reach a larger target audience and ensure you’re getting clean, unbiased product feedback —in person, users are more likely to feel pressure to compliment your product or underplay their concerns, but with tools like Hotjar, you’ll get genuine, in-the-moment feedback from users as they engage with your product. 

Which team members will contribute

Involve different team members at each stage of the product workflow. For example, when you’re validating product ideas, you may want to include marketing and technical departments; and when you’re testing product usability , you may want to rely on the expertise of your engineers. 

It’s also important to consider what research other departments have done before launching your own process, so you don’t waste resources duplicating generic market research. 

8 steps for amazing product research

Amazing product research is all about doing smart research to unearth effective insights without getting lost in an information overload that derails your product workflow .  

Follow these eight steps to guide your product research strategies to achieve valuable, actionable product insights that will inform your product’s entire lifecycle, from ideation to execution. 

1. Define your research goals

First, set your high-level goals, which should test business objectives as well as customer-centric product discovery. These are often drawn directly from the product vision and strategy.

Then, create attainable, specific goals or questions for your team to focus on during each stage of their research. This might include: 

Conducting market research for the product’s adoption before its launch

Identifying areas where key features can be improved after the product launch

Evaluating the product’s performance throughout the product lifecycle

2. Understand your users

User needs are at the center of effective product research processes. 

Engage in user discovery—identify and understand your customer—as early as possible , even before you have definite product or feature ideas. Open-ended user research is a key source of product inspiration and innovation, and an essential step in determining product-market fit .

Then, when you have product proposals, prototypes, or a minimum viable product ( MVP) , you can start seeking more specific feedback. 

User research is all about interacting with your current or potential users and learning what they want and need . Developing a user-centric culture of ongoing research will help you gauge the market demand, position your product against the competition, and generate customer delight .

To create a user-centric research culture, conduct user interviews and create user personas. You can also connect more passively with your user demographic by looking at forums, Facebook groups, or sites like Reddit that are used by your customer niche. 

The more organic the research process, the better. It’s ideal to catch users in situations where they answer by instinct instead of having carefully crafted answers. It's what they say instinctively that leads to better product solutions.

Pro tip: use Feedback widgets to gather user feedback in a non-invasive way. 

Hotjar’s Feedback widgets are integrated into the product interface , so users can give quick feedback and then carry on with their tasks. This means you can survey your users and gain valuable insights by learning what they’re thinking and feeling as they interact with the product.

A Hotjar feedback widget

3. Do market research for your product 

Run thorough competitive and comparative analyses to test the business potential of your product against other solutions on the market , and engage in opportunity mapping to get stakeholder buy-in.

You can also use historical market data and trade reports to predict potential profitability and run keyword research to understand users and what potential customers are searching for to generate product ideas.

Once you’ve validated whether there’s a viable market for your product and determined how saturated that target market is, focus on your product’s unique selling points.

Pro tip: even if you already have a product established in a specific market, make sure to assess the market periodically. Markets and competitors change, and making assumptions because of your initial research processes can be a costly mistake. Work with your marketing team here to validate your ideas and avoid guesswork.

Evaluate your product regularly against the industry by creating a value curve. The value curve plots the product offerings currently available in the market on one axis, and the factors the industry is competing on and investing in heavily on the other. This can help you spot market opportunities, ensure product relevance, and get ideas for features you could add to increase user demand and open up new user bases.

Check out how Gavin increased conversions for his lead generation agency by 42% with Hotjar.

 4. Get to know industry trends

Next, combine your understanding of your users and market with research on technology trends that may affect user expectations of your product or its long-term viability. 

Stay on top of trends by regularly engaging with tech cultures —read trade magazines and news sites, listen to tech news podcasts, and follow key trendspotters on social media and specialist forums. You can also use tools like Google Trends , Trend Hunter , and PSFK . 

Another key source of tech trend information is your engineering team . Chances are, you have plenty of techies on your team who are up to speed on different aspects of technology and what’s forecasted to change.

Pro tip: rigorously analyze trends and put them into context to understand what has staying power, as you avoid jumping on every passing fad. Create a learning culture that embraces experimentation and gives team members the opportunity to share their knowledge. 

Analyze the latest trending topics and projects in mainstream open-source communities across the Internet such as GitHub. These communities are an incredible resource for identifying tech trends that are sustainable, disruptive, and have immense staying power. 

It's also important to subscribe to prominent tech publications and leading technology platforms such as Azure and AWS to get the latest tech news and new feature announcements delivered directly to your inbox. This way, your product team is always in the know about the most important tech trends that are shaping product development and product markets.

5. Validate ideas with current or potential users

Once you’ve developed a strong sense of your users, market, and technology, it’s time to start testing concrete ideas and solutions. 

Based on your early research, identify possible products, features, or upgrades that could meet user needs as well as business goals. Then, run concept testing to evaluate the user experience.

First, identify key users or user types to test. Recruit participants for customer interviews or focus groups, or deploy Hotjar Surveys , Incoming Feedback tools, and Session Recordings to test ideas with existing users. 

Then, ask questions or set tasks and observe user responses. You may just want to explain concepts to users at this stage—or you can use wireframes or mockups; or, at later stages, prototypes or MVPs. 

Make sure you account for confirmation bias and false-positive responses from users when designing the validation process. Include open- and closed-ended questions and use measures like purchase intent to determine customer adoption.

Pro tip: use fake door testing to gauge interest in new features across your existing user base. 

In fake door tests, you show users a call-to-action for a product action that doesn’t exist yet. Once they click to perform the action, they’ll be taken to a page that explains this feature isn’t available yet—you may also choose to include a short survey on this page to learn more about their interest. By reviewing answers to survey questions and the click-through rate , product teams can quickly validate ideas for new features or improvements with users.

6. Test your MVP

The next step in your product research process is to develop a Minimum Viable Product based on validated ideas and run tests to improve subsequent iterations. 

This is a critical stage in product research that you shouldn’t skip. Waiting for the fully developed product before running tests makes it harder to fix software and prioritize bug issues, causing major delays. 

Quality assurance (QA) testing, regression testing, and performance testing check the MVP’s functionality and show developers where they need to make product changes . 

User tests are also key at this stage. Different types of product testing , like tree testing and card sorting, can confirm whether users can easily navigate your product to find the functionality they need. 

A/B tests and multivariate tests , where you split your user base into groups and give them different versions of a product or feature, can help you decide which iteration to run with. Hotjar Heatmaps allow you to easily compare where users click and scroll on different versions of the product.

7. Continue research after the product launch

Consider doing a soft launch—or even canary deployment—where you release new products or features to a small group of users

Gather data to weed out bugs

Finally, adapt the product based on user responses

Then you can roll it out to all users.

But even once you’ve launched the final product, your research isn’t over. The best product teams stay connected with their users and regularly analyze market trends and tech changes.

After the product is released, either through a soft launch or a regular launch, implementing a data-driven approach to the go-to-market strategy is crucial in parsing consumer reports and validating trends and customer opinions.

Continuous research ensures that your product stays relevant and successfully meets customer needs, which will boost user metrics and business metrics alike.

So how can you continue your research throughout the product lifecycle? 

Watch session recordings to spot blockers and bugs where users are rage clicking or dropping off the product journey

Use heatmaps to understand which product elements are most popular—and unpopular—with users

Measure product analytics like click-through rate (CTR) and product conversion rate

Stay up to date on industry and market trends 

Incorporate regular opportunities for cross-team discussions to get different research perspectives

Schedule regular user and customer interviews

Use product experience insights tools like Hotjar to give you a steady stream of user feedback through Surveys and Feedback widgets

8. Turn research into action

The final step in any product research process is to organize your research and turn insights into action. 

Curate your research into specific, actionable themes to cut through the noise and gather valuable, user-centric insights.

Then, use your research to establish a strong product strategy and roadmap to guide your product development process. Make sure you compare the strategy and roadmap with new research at regular intervals and update where needed, though it’s important to strike a balance: these documents should be dynamic but relatively stable touchpoints.  

Your product research should also drive your day-to-day decisions and product backlog management , and form the basis of your product storytelling to help get stakeholder buy-in. 

Why creating a user-centric research culture is essential

Remember: at heart, all product research is user research. 

Product teams who are endlessly curious about their users—who they are, what they need, how they experience your product—can better meet the demands of an ever-evolving market, inspire customer loyalty, and increase their Net Promoter Score (NPS) . With a learning mindset and a commitment to customer-centric product discovery, you can transform research into innovation and sustainable business growth .

FAQs on the product research process

What is product research.

Product research is the process of gathering data about your product’s purpose, intended users, and market to meet user needs and achieve business goals.

What are the steps in the product research process?

The 8 steps in an effective product research process are: 

1) Define your research goals

2) Understand your users

3) Do market research for your product

4) Get to know industry trends

5) Validate ideas with current or potential users

6) Test your MVP

7) Continue research after the product launch

8) Turn research into action

Why is product research important?

Strong product research is critical to product management because: 

It ensures the product will meet customer needs and hit business targets 

It helps product managers (PMs) develop a data-informed product vision, strategy, and roadmap

It helps PMs make confident decisions on the product backlog and day-to-day tasks

It keeps the product team motivated and connected with the purpose of their work 

It helps the product team communicate product value to stakeholders to get buy-in and secure resources

Prioritize product features

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3 Keys to Practical User Research for New Products [“Define Your Product” Series]

User research for new products can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be.

Using simple, cost-effective methods, conduct user research at the beginning of a product development project. The relatively minimal effort will save thousands in the long run.

Aim to achieve these three deliverables from a user research initiative for new product development:

• User personas, a first-stage definition of potential target users
• Data and user information collected from contextual inquiries or user surveys
• A first-stage value proposition and product-need definition

Keep reading to discover the methods and tools needed to execute practical yet effective user research for new products.

This article is the second in a design-thinking series titled “Define Your Product.”

Read the first article in the series to identify and cultivate disruptive potential in your product: Cultivate Disruptive Potential in Your Product Concept.

Read the final article in the series, “How to Identify & Test a Product’s Value (Before Investing Thousands).”

Finding Out What You Don’t Know: Early User Research

The more research you can do before building a prototype, the more relevant and accurate your prototype will be. In an ideal world, your company will invest time and resources into some early-stage user research, collecting as much concrete information as you can about the people who will use your product and the context in which they will use it.

Conducting some form of any of these three types of user research is feasible and necessary for new products, even if you find yourself with an extremely limited user research budget.

Before You Begin: Create Provisional Personas

Provisional personas (also known as proto-personas) reflect what you initially believe about the intended users of your product. Together with your product strategist and one or two other stakeholders, formulate hypothetical bios that highlight the roles, behaviors, motivations and tendencies of the various people who you believe will use your product.

The resulting profiles serve as a starting point when performing user research for new products. They represent your perceived audience — the people you learn from before you know who to enlist for actual usability testing.

For instance, you may start your research by finding and speaking with people who match your provisional personas, only to find that the results point you to an entirely different person or circumstance.

Later on, you’ll replace provisional personas with more accurate user personas based on real user research.

How to Create User Personas for Digital Products

Create clear and compelling user personas in Sketch or Keynote using our free templates.

Download includes a guide to understanding user personas and six questions to ask during early user research.

>> Download the e-book and templates for creating user personas in Sketch and Keynote.

User Research Method 1: Contextual Inquiries

This is a user research activity for new product development that involves visiting perceived target users in the context of when and where they would be using your product. For example, if you have a product idea for enterprise software, you can visit an office where people who match your provisional persona are performing enterprise-software-related activities.

This type of user research is extremely helpful for new products when you don’t yet know what questions you should be asking to define your idea.

Follow these steps to conduct an effective contextual inquiry that gets to the heart of what you need to know:

1. Study. Carefully observe people’s behavior, fears, motivations and pains when doing the activities related to your product idea.

2. Hypothesize. Use your observations to further hypothesize who would use your product, and why and when they would use it.

3. More Research. Based on your hypothesis, write questions for more narrowly focused interviews or surveys to further piece together the people and scenarios surrounding your product idea.

Remember that what people say is often different from what they actually do.

Conduct contextual inquiries with the intention of discovering the true story behind why and how people perform activities the way they do. Look for insight that users won’t necessarily share or know to share in a survey.

User Research Method 2: Behavioral User Interviews

Ideally, you’ll pair this method with one or several contextual inquiries. Use your findings from the contextual inquiry to further define user personas and context. Then, find an even closer match of people to interview.

Focus your questions on validating or disproving your assumptions and getting to the heart of the motivations and fears surrounding relevant activities. We recommend creating a Jobs-to-Be-Done style interview to inspire deep discovery.

>> Learn more about “jobs to be done” in the first article from this series, “ How to Identify & Test a Product’s Value (Before Investing Thousands)”

User Research Method 3: User Surveys

User interviews and in-person observations dig deeper than the “yes,” “no” and multiple choice answers in a survey. That being said, user surveys can be a helpful supplement to user research for new products.

User surveys collect qualitative data through open-ended questions and quantitative data through closed questions.

Follow these guidelines to make the most out of user surveys:

• Best practice for user surveys often involves an initial round of open-ended questions that really allow you to see a full spectrum of possible motivations and fears.
• Based on responses, you can develop an informed set of closed-ended questions to validate your assumptions. It’s easier to consolidate large amounts of quantitative data, so the closed-ended questions will allow you to analyze a wider range of answers.

Value Proposition & Product-Need Definition

Using the results of your user research, compile a list of all the user-inspired factors that should influence your product’s value proposition:

Jobs to be Done Based on your research, why will people “hire” this product? What do they expect it to do for them?

>> How to Innovate Without Wasting Millions (And Why Jobs to Be Done Really Works)

Pain Points What user struggles will this product address? What solutions do people currently turn to in the absence of this product? What frustrates the with those current solutions?

Needs What are the core functions the product must perform well for the people who use it?

Environmental Factors No products are used in a vacuum. Consider your observations of the context in which the product will be used. What aspects of the environment will influence how the product should operate?

Lastly, synthesize your user research findings for the new product, and create a succinct and clear value proposition and product-need definition.

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How to conduct user research: A step-by-step guide

This is part one of a guide to User research.

Continue with part two: How to conduct user research: A Step-by-step guide

Continue with part three: What is exploratory research and why is it so exciting?

What user research did you conduct to reveal your ideal user?

Uh-oh. Not this question again. We both know the most common answer and it’s not great.

“Uhm, we talked to some users and had a brainstorming session with our team. It’s not much, but we don’t have time to do anything more right now. It’s better than nothing.”

Let’s be brutally honest about the meaning of that answer and rephrase it:

“ We don’t have time to get to know our actual user and maximize our chances of success. We’ll just assume that we know what they want and then wonder why the product fails at a later stage.”

If that sounds super bad, it’s because IT IS. You don’t want to end up in this situation. And you won’t.

After reading this guide, you’ll know exactly how to carry out the user research that will become your guiding star during product development.

On this page

Why is user research so important?

Step #1: define research objectives.

Go ahead – create that fake persona

Step #2: Pick your methods

Qualitative methods – the why, quantitative methods – the what, behavioral and attitudinal methods, step #3: find your participants, how to recruit participants, how many participants, step #4: conduct user research.

Focus groups

Competitive analysis

Field studies

What’s next?

User research can be a scary word. It may sound like money you don’t have, time you can’t spare, and expertise you need to find. That’s why some people convince themselves that it’s not that important.

Which is a HUGE mistake.

User research is crucial – without it, you’ll spend your energy, time and money on a product that is based around false assumptions that won’t work in the real world.

Let’s take a look at Segway, a technologically brilliant product with incredible introductory publicity. Although it’s still around, it simply didn’t reach initial expectations. Here are some of the reasons why:

• It brought mockery, not admiration. The user was always “that guy”, who often felt fat or lazy.
• Cities were not prepared for it. Neither users nor policemen knew if it should be used on the road or on the sidewalk.
• A large segment of the target market comprised of postal and security workers. However, postal workers need both hands while walking, and security workers prefer bikes that don’t have a limited range.

Segway mainly fell short because of issues that could’ve been foreseen and solved by better user research.

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, sums it up nicely:

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

? Bonus material Download User research checklist and a comparison table

Never forget – you are not your user.

You require proper user research to understand your user’s problems, pain points, needs, desires, feelings and behaviours.

Let’s start with the process!

Before you get in touch with your target users, you need to define why you are doing the research in the first place. 

Establish clear objectives and agree with your team on your exact goals – this will make it much easier to gain valuable insights. Otherwise, your findings will be all over the place.

Here are some sample questions that will help you to define your objectives:

• What do you want to uncover?
• What are the knowledge gaps that you need to fill?
• What is already working and what isn’t?
• Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? What is that problem?
• What will the research bring to the business and/or your customers?

Once you start answering questions like these, it’s time to make a list of objectives. These should be specific and concise .

Let’s say you are making a travel recommendation app. Your research goals could be:

• Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions.
• Uncover the different tools that participants are using to make travel decisions.
• Identify problems or barriers that they encounter when making travel decisions.

I suggest that you prioritize your objectives and create an Excel table. It will come in handy later.

Go ahead, create that fake persona

A useful exercise for you to do at this stage is to write down some hypotheses about your target users.

Ask yourself:

What do we think we understand about our users that is relevant to our business or product?

Yes, brainstorm the heck out of this persona, but keep it relevant to the topic at hand.

Here’s my empathy map and empathy map canvas to really help you flesh out your imaginary user.

Once you’re finished, research any and every statement , need and desire with real people.

It’s a simple yet effective way to create questions for some of the research methods that you’ll be using.

However, you need to be prepared to throw some of your assumptions out of the window. If you think this persona may affect your bias, don’t bother with hypotheses and dive straight into research with a completely open mind.

Alright, you have your research goals. Now let’s see how you can reach them.

Here’s the main question you should be asking yourself at this step in the process:

Based on our time and manpower, what methods should we select?

It’s essential to pick the right method at the right time . I’ll delve into more details on specific methods in Step #4. For now, let’s take a quick look at what categories you can choose from.

Qualitative research tells you ‘why’ something occurs. It tells you the reasons behind the behavior, the problem or the desire. It answers questions like: “ Why do you prefer using app X instead of other similar apps?” or “What’s the hardest part about being a sales manager? Why?” .

Qualitative data comes in the form of actual insights and it’s fairly easy to understand.

Most of the methods we’ll look at in Step #4 are qualitative methods.

Quantitative research helps you to understand what is happening by providing different metrics.

It answers questions such as “What percentage of users left their shopping cart without completing the purchase?” or “Is it better to have a big or small subscription button?”.

Most quantitative methods come in handy when testing your product, but not so much when you’re researching your users. This is because they don’t tell you why particular trends or patterns occur.

There is a big difference between “what people do” and “what people say”.

As their names imply, attitudinal research is used to understand or measure attitudes and beliefs, whereas behavioral research is used to measure and observe behaviors.

Here’s a practical landscape that will help you choose the best methods for you. If it doesn’t make sense now, return to it once you’ve finished the guide and you’ll have a much better understanding.

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

I’ll give you my own suggestions and tips about the most common and useful methods in Step #4 – Conducting research.

In general, if your objectives are specific enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to see which methods will help you achieve them.

Remember that Excel table? Choose a method or two that will fulfill each objective and type it in the column beside it.

It won’t always be possible to carry out everything you’ve written down. If this is the case, go with the method(s) that will give you most of the answers. With your table, it will be easy to pick and choose the most effective options for you.

Onto the next step!

This stage is all about channeling your inner Sherlock and finding the people with the secret intel for your product’s success.

Consider your niche, your objectives and your methods – this should give you a general idea of the group or groups you want to talk to and research further.

Here’s my advice for most cases.

If you’re building something from the ground up, the best participants might be:

• People you assume face the problem that your product aims to solve
• Your competitors’ customers

If you are developing something or solving a problem for an existing product, you should also take a look at:

• Advocates and super-users
• Customers who have recently churned
• Users who tried to sign up or buy but decided not to commit

There are plenty of ways to bring on participants, and you can get creative so long as you keep your desired target group in mind.

You can recruit them online – via social media, online forums or niche community sites.

You can publish an ad with requirements and offer some kind of incentive.

You can always use a recruitment agency, too. This can be costly, but it’s also efficient.

If you have a user database and are changing or improving your product, you can find your participants in there. Make sure that you contact plenty of your existing users, as most of them won’t respond.

You can even ask your friends to recommend the right kind of people who you wouldn’t otherwise know.

With that said, you should always be wary of including friends in your research . Sure, they’re the easiest people to reach, but your friendship can (and probably will) get in the way of obtaining honest answers. There are plenty of horror stories about people validating their “brilliant” ideas with their friends, only to lose a fortune in the future. Only consider them if you are 100% sure that they will speak their mind no matter what.

That depends on the method. If you’re not holding a massive online survey, you can usually start with 5 people in each segment . That’s enough to get the most important unique insights. You can then assess the situation and decide whether or not you need to expand your research.

Finally! Let’s go through some of the more common methods you’ll be using, including their pros and cons, some pro tips, and when you should use them.

Engaging in one-on-one discussions with users enables you to acquire detailed information about a user’s attitudes, desires, and experiences. Individual concerns and misunderstandings can be directly addressed and cleared up on the spot.

Interviews are time-consuming, especially on a per participant basis. You have to prepare for them, conduct them, analyze them and sometimes even transcribe them. They also limit your sample size, which can be problematic. The quality of your data will depend on the ability of your interviewer, and hiring an expert can be expensive.

• Prepare questions that stick to your main topics. Include follow-up questions for when you want to dig deeper into certain areas.
• Record the interview . Don’t rely on your notes. You don’t want to interrupt the flow of the interview by furiously scribbling down your answers, and you’ll need the recording for any potential in-depth analysis later on.
• Conduct at least one trial run of the interview to see if everything flows and feels right. Create a “playbook” on how the interview should move along and update it with your findings.
• If you are not comfortable with interviewing people, let someone else do it or hire an expert interviewer. You want to make people feel like they are talking to someone they know, rather than actually being interviewed. In my experience, psychologists are a great choice for an interviewer.

Interviews are not really time-sensitive, as long as you do them before the development process.

However, they can be a great supplement to online surveys and vice-versa. Conducting an interview beforehand helps you to create a more focused and relevant survey, while conducting an interview afterwards helps you to explain the survey answers.

Surveys are generally conducted online, which means that it’s possible to gather a lot of data in a very short time for a very low price . Surveys are usually anonymous, so users are often more honest in their responses.

It’s more difficult to get a representative sample because it’s tough to control who takes part in the survey – especially if you post it across social media channels or general forums. Surveys are quite rigid and if you don’t account for all possible answers, you might be missing out on valuable data. You have to be very careful when choosing your questions – poorly worded or leading ones can negatively influence how users respond. Length can also be an issue, as many people hate taking long surveys.

• Keep your surveys brief , particularly if participants won’t be compensated for their time. Only focus on what is truly important.
• Make sure that the questions can be easily understood. Unclear or ambiguous questions result in data on which you can’t depend. Keep the wording as simple as possible.
• Avoid using leading questions. Don’t ask questions that assume something, such as “What do you dislike about X?”. Replace this with “What’s your experience with X?”.
• Find engaged, niche online communities that fit your user profile. You’ll get more relevant data from these.

Similar to interviews. It depends on whether you want to use the survey as a preliminary method, or if you want a lot of answers to a few, very focused questions.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are moderated discussions with around 5 to 10 participants, the intention of which is to gain insight into the individuals’ attitudes, ideas and desires.

As focus groups include multiple people, they can quickly reveal the desires, experiences, and attitudes of your target audience . They are helpful when you require a lot of specific information in a short amount of time. When conducted correctly, they can act like interviews on steroids.

Focus groups can be tough to schedule and manage. If the moderator isn’t experienced, the discussion can quickly go off-topic. There might be an alpha participant that dictates the general opinion, and because it’s not one-on-one, people won’t always speak their mind.

• Find an experienced moderator who will lead the discussion. Having another person observing and taking notes is also highly recommended, as he or she can emphasize actionable insights and catch non-verbal clues that would otherwise be missed.
• Define the scope of your research . What questions will you ask? How in-depth do you want to go with the answers? How long do you want each discussion to last? This will determine how many people and groups should be tested.
• If possible, recruit potential or existing users who are likely to provide good feedback, yet will still allow others to speak their mind. You won’t know the participants most of the time, so having an experienced moderator is crucial.

Focus groups work best when you have a few clear topics that you want to focus on.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis highlights the strengths and weaknesses of existing products . It explores how successful competitors act on the market. It gives you a solid basis for other user research methods and can also uncover business opportunities. It helps you to define your competitive advantage , as well as identify different user types.

A competitive analysis can tell you what exists, but not why it exists. You may collect a long feature list, but you won’t know which features are valued most by users and which they don’t use at all. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell how well a product is doing, which makes the data less useful. It also has limited use if you’re creating something that’s relatively new to the market.

• Create a list or table of information that you want to gather – market share, prices, features, visual design language, content, etc.
• Don’t let it go stale. Update it as the market changes so that you include new competitors.
• If you find something really interesting but don’t know the reason behind it, conduct research among your competitor’s users .
• After concluding your initial user research, go over the findings of your competitive analysis to see if you’ve discovered anything that’s missing on the market .

It can be a great first method, especially if you’re likely to talk to users of your competitors’ products

Field Studies

Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context, rather than at your company or office. Some are purely observational (the researcher is a “fly on the wall”), others are field interviews, and some act as a demonstration of pain points in existing systems.

You really get to see the big picture –  field studies allow you to gain insights that will fundamentally change your product design . You see what people actually do instead of what they say they do. A field study can explain problems and behaviours that you don’t understand better than any other method.

It’s the most time-consuming and expensive method. The results rely on the observer more than any of the other options. It’s not appropriate for products that are used in rare and specific situations.

• Establish clear objectives. Always remember why you are doing the research. Field studies can provide a variety of insights and sometimes it can be hard to stay focused. This is especially true if you are participating in the observed activity.
• Be patient. Observation might take some time. If you rush, you might end up with biased results.
• Keep an open mind and don’t ask leading questions. Be prepared to abandon your preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs. When interviewing people, try to leave any predispositions or biases at the door.
• Be warm but professional. If you conduct interviews or participate in an activity, you won’t want people around you to feel awkward or tense. Instead, you’ll want to observe how they act naturally.

Use a field study when no other method will do or if it becomes clear that you don’t really understand your user. If needed, you should conduct this as soon as possible – it can lead to monumental changes.

We started with a user persona and we’ll finish on this topic, too. But yours will be backed by research 😉

A persona outlines your ideal user in a concise and understandable way. It includes the most important insights that you’ve discovered. It makes it easier to design products around your actual users and speak their language. It’s a great way to familiarize new people on your team with your target market.

A persona is only as good as the user research behind it. Many companies create a “should be” persona instead of an actual one. Not only can such a persona be useless, it can also be misleading.

• Keep personas brief. Avoid adding unnecessary details and omit information that does not aid your decision making. If a persona document is too long, it simply won’t be used.
• Make personas specific and realistic. Avoid exaggerating and include enough detail to help you find real people that represent your ideal user.

Create these after you’ve carried out all of the initial user research. Compile your findings and create a persona that will guide your development process.

Now you know who you are creating your product for – you’ve identified their problems, needs and desires. You’ve laid the groundwork, so now it’s time to design a product that will blow your target user away! But that’s a topic for a whole separate guide, one that will take you through the process of product development and testing 😉

PS. Don’t forget -> Here is your ? User Research Checklist and comparison table

About the author

Oh hey, I’m Romina Kavcic

I am a Design Strategist who holds a Master of Business Administration. I have 14+ years of career experience in design work and consulting across both tech startups and several marquee tech unicorns such as Stellar.org, Outfit7, Databox, Xamarin, Chipolo, Singularity.NET, etc. I currently advise, coach and consult with companies on design strategy & management, visual design and user experience. My work has been published on Forbes, Hackernoon, Blockgeeks, Newsbtc, Bizjournals, and featured on Apple iTunes Store.

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UX Research Methods for New Products

Question : What do you need for a solid user research process?

Answer : Users!

Question: What do you do if you’re just starting off and you don’t have users or even a ready product?

Answer: You skip the UX research phase.

Wrong answer!

This might sound a bit like a catch-22 situation, but it’s not. UX Research for new products is not only possible, but it’s strongly recommended. Just like with any other UX project, skipping the research phase will leave you with wrong product assumptions and questionable UX deliverables.

After building over 100 projects from an idea to ready-for-the-market products, we’ve listed some of the most common and practical UX research methods you could use if your product is not live yet. Follow them all and your growth graph will be sending you “thank you” notes in a few months when you will have invested hundreds of hours in development, marketing and distribution.

Competitors user profiling

The first place to start understanding your potential users is analysing the customers of your direct competitors and other products/services in your space. Their visual identity and tone of voice say a lot about who they’re targeting, but you can also investigate their social media audience, email marketing campaigns, online reviews platforms, and any other channel that deals directly with users. You will see their pain points, identify their weaknesses and you’ll be left with an abundance of ideas on how the product you’re building could address what’s currently missing.

Competitors’ users are ultimately your potential users. Of course, you might be targeting a different demographic and have a very different proposition, but more often than not you’ll be relying on some of these people to be your early adopters, so understanding their pains and gains is a must.

Jobs-to-be-Done

We have written a number of posts on how to practically use the Jobs to be Done methodology as part of the UX design process and the more we use it, the more we realise how powerful it could be. Every product design sprint we run starts with the exercise to detach the team from the product concept and focus on what the user currently needs, what jobs they’re trying to get done, what obstacles they face, and how their needs are currently being met. We then move to write the most pressing job statements.

It’s surprising how often such a simple exercise makes it clear that:

a) some of the jobs/needs are over-served and there’s no need to focus on solving something that’s not really a current pain point;

b) some of the planned features and sometimes the whole product positioning might need to shift or completely change, as the real user needs were not addressed with the initial concept.

Spending a couple of days researching the user “jobs” and then a few hours on identifying the job statements and how they fit within the product might save you months of wasted work.

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Focus groups and user interviews

It goes without saying that if you don’t have current users, you must connect with people who would be your potential users and run interviews and focus groups the way you’d usually do with existing users. Of course, the nature of the conversation should be different, but speaking to real people, with real problems is an invaluable source of product insights and a powerful idea generator for UX hypotheses testing.

Usually, they would be users of competitor products or people you acquired for beta testing.

Two things should be avoided when interviewing prospect users:

• asking them directly what could be done better than what they’re currently using. This is for you to identify. What you need to find out from them is what is not working up to their expectations from the existing options, not how they want it done differently.
• “would you use this product/feature” type of question. Most of them will be nice and say “yes” which will prevent you from challenging your own product assumptions. And that’s the whole point of having the user interviews – spotting what you might have missed!

Similar to the JTBD exercise, the aim here is to identify loopholes and gaps in the market, rather than looking for solution ideas.

Usability testing on a prototype level

You’ve probably come across the popular “myth” that testing with just 5 users would usually identify 85% of the usability issues. The statement has been backed by a number of UX experts, including Rolf Molich, the co-creator of the method of heuristic evaluation with Jakob Nielsen, and the company MeasuringU.

Here’s the thing – we don’t think this is a myth, it’s the reality and we’ve seen it over and over again. Of course, you can’t conduct an in-depth UX research with just five users, but you can identify fundamental product issues with only a handful of people which will end up being the most important ones.

Doing user testing on a prototype level is so crucial. You can do this long before the product is live, with a clickable prototype. This is will save you thousands in development fees and preventable product iterations later on.

Depending on the type of product, you can recruit the testers yourself (if it’s a very niche product), or you can use platforms like maze.design (for consumer products). It’s best to test with as many people as possible, especially if you’re using a platform to facilitate this, but as mentioned above a few users is much better than skipping this phase just because you underestimate the value it’d bring (or you’re in a rush to ship your latest feature).

A/B testing with paid ads

This one is our secret sauce. You can build a few landing pages and run social media ads (the easiest would be Facebook or Instagram) to A/B test UX headlines, product concepts (or just a feature idea), brand names, and anything else that doesn’t require the use of the actual product. Based on the ad performance and the landing page conversion rate you can evaluate which option might be more attractive.

The landing page itself could be just for lead generation with the appropriate copy and branding assets.

It’s important to use this research tactic with caution. You should not mislead potential customers with false promises about the product’s capabilities, as this could impact its adoption later on. Another potential risk is not analysing the results of the test correctly and taking major product decisions without substantial insights.

This method is great for testing creative ideas, UX copy (headline, slogan), branding elements (logo, illustrations), product concepts (which features might be more attractive than others), but should not be overused for key UX decisions.

Social media listening

Another not so traditional user research technique is using social listening tools to monitor what’s happening in your industry, the sentiment around your competitors, and what people are talking about specific topics. You can spot rapidly growing trends before they take off and become mainstream ideas.

Good places to start are Emplifi , BrandWatch and Explodingtopics – they all offer slightly different features and are more powerful than Google trends for the purposes of user research.

The habit of using social listening will keep you one step ahead in your industry and might subsequently lead to new product ideas and UX hypotheses worth testing.

All of the above ideas could be done without a hefty budget for user research and will have a huge impact on the final UX and the product development process. It’s critical to never let assumptions about the market and the consumer needs to lead a new product idea into the unknown. As Paul Graham wrote, “the best ideas look initially like bad ideas”, so only a good users research will help you distinguish mediocre ideas from the great ones.

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Product Research: The Building Blocks of a User-Centered Solution

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Product research is a foundational step in building user-centric products. It allows you to understand customer needs, preferences, and market trends, informing the development of successful solutions to user problems. Read on for the ultimate guide to product research, including methods, processes, and best practices—plus our favorite tips from the industry’s leading experts.

Product research 101: Definition, methods, and best practices

You may only build new products once, but you iterate on them continuously. The ongoing evolution of a product’s user experience (UX), informed by user insights, is pivotal to staying ahead of competitors and giving your users exactly what they need. In chapter one of this guide, we’ll explore what product research is, give an overview of key methods (and when to use them), plus best practices to follow.

What is product research?

Product research is any research you conduct to better inform your product and understand your user and market. Unlike user research , product research goes beyond evaluating the user experience and includes market analysis, pricing, feature prioritization, and assessing business viability.

Product research is a broader term than UX research—you can conduct research on the user, the interaction, the market, or your business strategy.

Matthieu Dixte , Product Researcher at Maze

It helps you understand the world you are bringing your product into, and what your users expect to do with a product like yours—so you can use their insights to influence development and design decisions.

Product research can be conducted in multiple ways, such as talking directly to users in focus groups or user interviews , or through product experimentation, usability tests and competitive analysis.

Other research terms you might come across

Ultimately, all research falls under the 'product research' banner if it influences the final product. For some product teams, ‘user research’ and ‘product research’ may be interchangeable. But there are some subtle differences between various research terms that it can be helpful to know. Here are the distinctions between key terms you might hear, explained by Maze's Product Researcher, Matthieu Dixte:

• Market research: Discover who is leading the market, who your direct and indirect competitors are, and what similar products are available to your users at what price
• User research: Understand the user, including their needs, pain points, likes and dislikes, and characteristics—both as a consumer and user of your product
• User experience (UX) research : Learn how your user perceives and interacts with your product—where they click, which paths they follow, and where they search for information on-page
• Product discovery : Uncover what your users’ needs and problems are, validate ideas for potential solutions before development, and apply user insights to your product strategy
• Continuous product discovery : Adapt the mindset of an ever-evolving product and user; conduct research continuously throughout the product lifecycle and ensure all decisions are informed by user insights

For example, let’s say you’re thinking of developing and launching a note-taking app for teenagers. You’d need to conduct market research to see if there are any similar products in high demand to gauge if your tool is something customers want. In parallel, you should run user research to discover who your user persona would be and what their pain points are.

You also have to do product discovery to identify the best way to build and design your potential product to make it appealing for teens. And, if you want to know how your users will feel about your product compared to other options, you need product research .

Lastly, run UX research tests on your mobile and web app to gather feedback, and improve the experience. You should continue to talk with users regularly after launch by adopting a continuous product discovery mindset (and ensure you’re always updating and offering the right product).

Talk to more users without needing to grow your product team

Recruit and test users from Maze’s high-quality panel to get more eyes on your product, without increasing payroll.

Why is product research important?

Are we making the right assumptions? Is this product what users really need? Can they use it effectively?

Research answers all those questions. But product research goes a step further by placing those answers in the context of your niche and the market. It empowers your team—not only to create unbiased, user-centric products—but also to create best-selling products that are based on a robust business strategy and deep understanding of the market.

Product research will also help you:

Head in the right direction

Conducting types of product research like competitive analysis gives you inside information on what your users value in a similar product—and what they’re missing. It ensures you’re heading in the right direction by only working on aspects of your product you know will succeed. This helps you speed time-to-market, reduce the cost of fixing future mistakes, and achieve higher goals.

Product research allows you to “define the total addressable market and north star metric, based on the customer segments that found your idea and product valuable. We would fail at achieving product-market fit without doing customer research,” explains Prerna Kaul , Product Lead for Alexa AI at Amazon.

Make the right decisions at the right time

User data can inform your decisions and help you prioritize them according to the goals of the business. “Make choices regarding the evolution of your product and find the right balance between what you want to deliver to improve the user experience, and the benefits it’ll bring to your company,” advises Matthieu. Without product research, you’re building products in the dark with no idea whether your target audience will like or buy them—which could mean wasted resources and sinking revenue.

Get stakeholder buy-in

You’ve probably found yourself explaining multiple times to stakeholders why you need to prioritize one feature over another. Conducting product research enables you to “clearly articulate the customer value proposition to leadership, tech, and science counterparts,” says Prerna. Having quantitative and qualitative user insights provides reassurance to stakeholders and speeds up sign-off—while ensuring the wider organization is aligned on your product ideas.

In short, product research provides you evidence you need to start evangelizing research among your organization, and get the whole team on board.

Understand the position your users hold in the market

User research is about getting to know your target audience and building ideal customer profiles, but product research is about discovering where your potential customers are located in the market and which trending products to take note of. If your audience is already using a similar product, this means finding out: Which one? Why? Are they willing to switch to a different product? What would it take for you to get them to switch?

“Analyzing the market lets you determine which areas could be ripe for disruption or creation. By analyzing existing products and doing conceptual thinking you can build a picture of how you can get your product to gain traction in the market and offer something new, nuanced, or better than the current options,” says Nick Simpson , Head of UX at Airteam.

Challenge your assumptions and anticipate problems

When Prerna worked at Walmart Labs, her team introduced a feature for users to scan products in the Scan and Go app. “We initially believed that all of our inventory was available in a common database and accessible through the app. However, during research and user testing, we identified that some rare products were not in the online database,” she explains.

This caused test users to drop off the app, so her team had to take a step back and prioritize fixing inventory issues before launching the product. Without conducting product research, you can be left guessing at the cause of user problems, or wondering why they prefer a particular product. Research offers your team a chance to challenge what you think you know, and pre-empt what you don’t.

Product tip 💡

You can use Maze to conduct multiple tests on your product through development, such as Five-Second Tests or Content and Copy Testing , or get insights on your live product through Live Website Testing .

Product research methods

There are many different product research and UX research methods , all of which offer different kinds of data and insight, depending on your objectives. If you’re looking to conduct product research to better understand your users, market, or competitors, here are eight product research methods you should consider to help you build winning products.

1. Customer interviews

Interviews can take place at any take of the product development process and consist of direct conversations with current or potential customers. You may choose to conduct interviews with a market panel during concept testing and idea screening to validate your ideas, or you may want to speak to current users after the product goes live to gather post-launch feedback. Interviews are a varied and flexible product research method.

During customer interviews, you should ask open and unbiased research questions to gather insights about customer needs, preferences, and experiences regarding their pain points, your product, and competitors.

2. Voice of customer (VoC) analysis

Gauge what current and potential customers are saying about your products or competitor products online. You can do this using VoC tools , by reviewing what people post on social media, looking at Google Trends, or reading reviews on websites like G2.

You should conduct customer voice analysis continuously throughout the lifecycle as it can help you gain a competitive advantage. “Review what’s publicly published, check feature requests, and ask sales, customer success, or support teams for feedback coming from the user,” adds Matthieu.

For example, if a competitor gets acquired by a bigger firm and users start to complain about them removing a feature, you can use the opportunity to develop a similar functionality or improve the one you have. You can also make it more visible on-page and get the sales and marketing teams to use the information to advertise your product.

3. Diary studies

Diary studies involve users self-reporting behaviors, habits, and experiences over a period of time. This is often used during the discovery phase with a competitor product, or later down the line with a prototype. By observing how users feel prior to, during, and after using your (or a competitor) product—and their experience throughout—you can gather valuable, in-the-moment insights within a real life context.

You can conduct diary studies on paper, video, or online on a mobile app or a dedicated platform.

Data from diary research can turn into new product ideas, new features, or inform your current project. For instance, if you have a social media scheduling tool and you identify that users open a time zone calculator when they’re scheduling posts, you instantly have a new feature idea, to add a widget with different time zones.

Learn more about the types of diary study and how to conduct diary research here.

4. Competitive analysis

Analyze competitors' products and strategies to identify what works for them and identify any gaps in the market. The idea behind competitive product analysis is to explore your competitor’s products in-depth, sign up for an account, use them for a while, and take notes of top features, UX, and price points. You can run competitive analysis during the discovery, concept validation , or prototyping stages with direct and indirect competitors, or aspirational businesses.

Matthieu Dixte, Product Researcher at Maze, notes the value of competitive analysis is in understanding your users perspective: “We conduct a lot of competitive analysis at Maze because it's really important for us to understand if the market is mature regarding a particular topic—and to identify the current ground covered. This helps us understand the pros and cons our customers perceive when they choose between our product or another tool.”

Surveys can be a great way to get feedback or gather user sentiment relating to existing products or future concepts. You can also use them to dig deeper into the data gathered during other tests, and understand user issues and preferences in context.

For example, if you ran an A/B test and discovered that certain copy was causing potential users to churn, you could follow-up with a survey with targeted questions around their demographics, preferences, and personal views. This would help add qualitative insights to your quantitative data, and help understand what your users are looking for from your product.

Remember, you can create surveys at any stage of the product development to collect data from users in small or large volumes. You can use different types of surveys and survey principles to validate or debunk hypotheses, prioritize features, and identify your target market. For example, you could ask questions about your product, competitors, and prices or even your customer’s preferences and market trends.

Surveys can have a high drop-out rate, harming the validity of your data. Check out our survey design guide to discover the industry’s top secrets to an engaging survey which keeps users hooked.

6. Usability testing

Since conducting product research is also about understanding how well your customers navigate through your product and if they find it usable, you can run usability or prototype tests . Usability testing evaluates the usability of your product by asking test participants to complete tasks on your tool and seeing how they interact with it.

While typically conducted as a pre-launch check, usability testing is now widely understood as a building block of continuous research. Conducting regular usability tests is crucial to staying familiar with users, taking the pulse of your product, and ensuring every new product decision is informed with real data.

Conduct usability tests on a product research tool like Maze and record your participant’s audio, video, and screen with Clips . This offers you a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to learn why participants take certain actions to complete test tasks.

7. Fake door testing

The fake door testing method, also called the ‘painted door method’, is a way to validate whether your customers would be interested in a particular feature. “It works by faking a feature that is not actually available and implementing a tracker to know how many people click on it,” explains Matthieu.

When people click on the feature, they see a message explaining it’s not available at the moment. If the click-rate is high, you can assume there’s interest in the feature and conduct further research to identify how to design and develop it.

While it’s a quick way to gauge interest, fake door testing runs the risk of frustrating users, so if you’re using this method on a live product, you should be cautious and set a short testing period to avoid creating false expectations in your users.

8. Focus groups

Focus groups are when you gather a group of users to try your product and discuss their thoughts on the design, UX, usability, or price. You’ll offer them prompts or ask a series of user research questions to spark conversation, then observe and take notes.

This can be an expensive or admin-heavy method, as you need to rent a space, find participants who are willing to attend, and compensate them for their time. However, you can also conduct focus groups remotely through video conferencing tools. These groups are a good way of generating new product ideas or gaining deep insight in a short space of time, as you can hear directly from your users and adjust your questioning to follow up on important topics or opinions which participants mention.

When to perform product research

Source: 2023 Continuous Product Discovery Report

According to our 2023 Continuous Product Discovery Report , most teams conduct research at problem discovery (59%) and problem validation (57%), with only 36% researching post-launch.

The consensus is that product teams don’t think that’s enough—78% think they could research more often: which means there’s a big opportunity for you to implement regular research at all stages of the product research process .

Here’s when to conduct research on your product:

• At problem discovery stage to outline a hypothesis based on user insights
• During problem validation to prove your hypothesis
• During solution generation and concept development to see if you’re moving in the right direction
• As you’re screening different ideas for prioritization to identify the ones your users value most
• At solution definition and once you have your initial design to test early wireframes
• After developing a prototype to see assess usability and direction
• During validation and testing to review changes made to previous prototypes
• After development, and post-launch to get feedback and plan your future steps
• Before launching a new feature or doing product optimization to gauge users’ perceptions

Best practices for effective product research

If you only have time to consider one best practice for product research, we’ll keep it short. Just start.

Any research is better than none, and there’s a wealth of knowledge out there waiting to be discovered. If you don’t use it, your competitors will.

Now, here are six other best practices to help you improve your results and get the best insights possible:

1. Conduct research continuously

Your product is never done, at least not while the market, your customers, and technology are evolving. So, for your users to keep choosing you, you need to grow with them, adapt to trends, and keep iterating on your product. The right way to make product iterations is by conducting continuous product research, having frequent communication with your users, and actively listening to the market.

Did you know that user-centric organizations achieve 2.3x better business outcomes? 📊

By putting customers' needs front and center, research-mature organizations are driving better customer satisfaction (1.9x), customer retention (2.4), and increased revenue (4.2x). Learn more in our Research Maturity Report .

2. Focus on the business problem when presenting to stakeholders

It’s easy to get so involved in the product that you forget to mention how it helps the business when presenting research findings. To get stakeholders on board and to build great products that are profitable, always keep the business needs in mind. There’s no product without business success, so always align with your stakeholders and bring it back to team KPIs and business metrics. To convey your story, it’s a good rule of thumb to start each cross-team meeting by presenting the business problem, then sharing how adding a certain feature decision will help you solve it, before getting into the data that backs this up.

3. Embrace your curiosity

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in product research is letting cognitive biases take over the process. Work in teams and ask questions out of curiosity—consider research a way to disprove your hypothesis or challenge your assumptions, rather than a way to prove them right. As Prerna Kaul, Product Lead for Alexa AI at Amazon explains, you often gain more insight from an answer you don’t want to hear. “A huge trust-buster is when researchers sell an idea to customers and reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.” Doing so makes the user tell you what you want to hear but not what you need to know. It’s better to know that you have the wrong assumptions early on and build products that solve the right problem.

It’s non-negotiable to ensure that you are solving the right problem for the customer. Your solution is a painkiller, not a vitamin.

Prerna Kaul , Product Lead for Alexa AI at Amazon

4. Focus on the end goal rather than specific features

When you work closely with a product you’re passionate about, it’s only natural to think of all the possibilities, and minute details and features of the product. However, it’s crucial to understand that, while you might be the one making the internal decisions, the user will have the final call. Getting hung up on specific features will get you frustrated if users disagree, or lead you to make biased choices. To overcome this, you can write a research statement explaining the big problem you’re trying to achieve with the product. Come back to this before and after each decision, to keep your choices grounded in what’s best for the user.

“We always ask: Are we solving the right problem by creating this product? Is it going to have a measurable benefit to people?” says Nick Simpson, Head of UX at Airteam. “Then, we try to answer those questions through research methods to determine whether this investment will be worth it, to both business and users.” By thinking of the overall end goal at all stages, you get to build profitable products and features that really respond to that intention.

5. Take notes of everything

This one might go without saying, but it’s crucial to keep track of everything. Not just to inform future research and remind yourself where decisions came from, but to democratize research and bring the entire organization into your research process .

Set up a centralized research repository that anyone can access, and share it with your wider organization. Within the product team, keep a record of all user insights, even if they sound impossible to achieve at first. “These ‘futuristic’ thoughts or ideas are the ones that can either inform future iterations of the product or that you can creatively turn into something more feasible to design and build,” explains Nick. Keeping an organized information bank enables everyone on the team to get to know the user, the market, and why you’ve made certain decisions in the past.

6. Combine user feedback with data

While your users should be at the center of your business, don’t rely solely on their comments without checking other data. In reality, not everything people say is exactly what they do . Research participants can be influenced by any number of factors, mostly unconscious, so it’s important to use qualitative and quantitative data to reinforce each other.

For example, the users you interviewed might tell you they love a certain feature, but when you contrast those comments with heatmap data and time on page, you see that only a small percentage of your customers actually use it. Consider what research can be conducted to ascertain why this is, how you can improve those metrics, or whether it’s more helpful to refocus efforts on a different feature with a higher profit margin.

Keep learning about product research

In this chapter, we’ve covered a lot about product research:

• What product research is (and what it’s not)
• How researching your product is beneficial to your business
• The different methods you can use to conduct product research
• When to conduct product research
• Best practices for your research

Now, it’s time to kickstart your product research process in the next chapter. We’ll also talk about how to conduct product experiments and competitive analysis, so stay tuned.

Product research process

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The best user research methods for every stage of product development

Let’s review how each user experience research methods work

Intuition and experience will only take you so far when building user experience designs in your product. User research is vital to the development and long-term success of your product.

To optimize your research budget, an experienced UX researcher will consider your product’s life cycle stage and your goals when developing a research strategy. A typical product goes through  four stages  during its lifetime:

• Introduction

This product life cycle assumes you’ve already built your product, so it starts with you introducing your new product to the market. However, if you don’t have a product yet, you need to spend some time planning and building it first. At this initial stage is where the importance of carrying UX research comes into play, despite being a methodology that can be applied during all stages of the product life cycle.

Defined as the methodical study of a specific group or target users to solve specific problems, find crucial information and design opportunities, UX research is a methodology and a set of tools that aids the design process while providing the essential foundation that allows for the creation of a design strategy. UX research not only helps founders and entrepreneurs create the best products, but, most importantly, provides data that serves as a great resource for making informed decisions, thus creating products that are truly relevant for your users.

Following the old UX maxim that states that “You are not your user”, UX research stems from the common thread that we should spend time with our users to understand them. Despite there being many different user research techniques, conducting these activities is essential to identify, address and deconstruct our own biases and misconceptions about our product and user base, which could be otherwise detrimental to our success, in terms of user adoption. Since this methodology allows one to get a deep understanding of a products’ user base, it helps in the discovery of valuable feedback and commentary on a product, especially if it’s something new, still to be launched or a product that still doesn’t have an established user base.

To create products that both truly satisfy user’s needs and are visually appealing, we first need to research who our target audience is and what their wants, needs and wishes are. In turn, you’ll need a UX researcher that will collect, study and analyse users data to enrich your product’s design process. Their role is key in this process since they’re the ones in charge of acquiring vital information that will then translate into important decisions related to your project.

In this article, we’ll discuss common types of quantitative and qualitative research studies and the best stage in your product’s life cycle to use each of these testing methods. Taking into account that every product has its own unique set of features, there are multiple User experience research methods that can be combined in every step of a products’ life cycle. For example, there are qualitative and quantitative studies into a comprehensive research strategy. Qualitative data is descriptive — think demographics, colors, feelings, location, etc. By contrast, quantitative data provides numerical metrics, e.g., 36 seconds is the average time on page, 70% of users require feature Y, 30% of new users skip onboarding, etc.

But before deep-diving into the multiple user experience research methods that can be implemented in every step of a products’ life cycle, we’ll briefly mention what a UX researcher is, what their main tasks are, and why their role is so important in the design thinking process.

What is a UX researcher?

UX researchers are the ones in charge of carrying out UX research and are clearly a vital element of the whole Design Thinking process. They possess a distinctive set of skills that allows them to easily communicate and collaborate with different teams and stakeholders so as to create the best product, mainly since they are the players in charge of understanding user’s expectations, goals, frustrations, and reasoning process to help develop solutions to real needs. They also have a critical vision about the appropriate methodology they’ll choose and the research questions they will ask, as well as a sense of curiosity that can prompt them to ask insightful questions that will lead them to discover meaningful insights.

Having a UX researcher on your team will not only allow you to create a consumer-centric product, as extensive user research and evaluation will ensure that your project is an accurate representation of your customer base and its needs, but it will also allow for efficiencies related to time and costs reduction and, overall, a better decision making process.

Since UX research is part of the design thinking process, which is a tested and proven methodology that consists of a series of organized steps and techniques that improve efficiency and are time-saving, it allows for the better flow of information and the improvement of the decision making process, mainly because the accuracy of the decisions implemented is better when backed up by a well researched framework. Another relevant aspect of the role that UX researchers play in this process is that they help with the creation of products that have a competitive advantage over their competitors, thus providing a higher Return of Investment (ROI) and the possibility of growth for their project. By carrying UX research thoroughly, they prolong, adapt and understand users needs, thus providing a product that actually fits your target market.

User research methods for planning

Whether the methodology chosen is qualitative or quantitative, an important fact to bear in mind is the functionality of the data that the UX researcher will be validating and testing, as well as the scope of the information collected. The power of UX research lies on what your team can achieve and how your product will be enhanced with the data collected.

Qualitative research methods for planning

Observation.

One of the best ways to learn about your target audience is to observe them in their natural environment. Watch how they accomplish tasks, the order they do things, what frustrates them, and what makes the task easier and/or more enjoyable for your subject.

As you’re observing, take note of your subject’s:

• Behavior: what they do
• Attitude: how they feel about what they’re doing
• Casual remarks: spontaneous comments about what they like or don’t like

While going on location is best, users can also be observed virtually or in a lab setting. The point is to gain a deep understanding of what it will be like to use your product from your end user’s perspective.

The results of an observational field study can be used to help you develop  personas , or profiles of your customers. These personas are then used throughout the entire design process and shared cross-functionally, helping develop user empathy across the entire product team.

Competitive analysis

Reviewing the most successful products in your space is a great way to take advantage of others’ research. Your competitors are successful because they’ve already found a winning combination of usability and features. Learn from their success, and then build on it through your own product.

Researching competitive products gives you the information you need for an MVP, or  minimum viable product , and helps you identify market differentiators. This method is also useful when trying to position your product in a specific market, specifically if you’re trying to understand where it actually stands in comparison to the competition. It’s also of vital importance to firstly understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, so you can truly focus on a target market while accentuating your product’s differentiator and deliver something that truly solves users’ problems, wants or needs. When completing a competitive analysis study, include the feature set and pricing options but also look for:

• Branding elements like tone, imagery, and market position
• Customer reviews, both positive and negative
• Support options and help content
• Industry or complementary information
• Partnerships or integrations with other companies

Analyzing both industry leaders and up-and-comers will help you refine your value proposition, ensuring your product will stand out from the crowd.

Quantitative research methods for planning

Surveys and questionnaires.

A carefully crafted survey with mass distribution is a fast way to get the lay of the land when you’re entering a new market or to gain deeper insights into a market where you’re already a player.

Use online surveys to:

• Quantify the value of individual features
• Evaluate  price sensitivity  in your market
• Measure the market’s perception of your competitors

While surveys are relatively easy to execute, don’t underestimate the importance of the wording used in your questions and answer options. An experienced UX researcher will avoid hidden biases and ensure your respondents are answering the intended questions.

Surveys allow UX researchers to collect data from a group of people and gather meaningful information. They can be both qualitative and quantitative: since they can be used to ask for open-ended feedback and comments, as well as collecting quantitative data by asking a wide range of questions.

Clustering qualitative comments

Clustering provides insight into motive and reasoning  by combining qualitative and quantitative research. Because qualitative results are often smaller in number, the overall significance of each response is easily exaggerated. By grouping comments of similar content or tone and then plotting those groupings on a graph, you can see trends of similar reactions that would otherwise be hidden.

User research methods for building

Once you’ve completed your planning research, you’re ready to build your product. The user research studies executed during the build validate the UX team’s deliverables before investing in the technical development.

Qualitative research methods for building

Building includes creating both UBuilding includes creating both UX artifacts, like design comps and UI components, and developing the actual product. With wireframing and prototyping work well underway for your new product, this is a great time to get some initial user feedback with a couple of common user experience research methods. This feedback will allow you to create something from the start that’s aligned with your users’ needs.

Desirability studies

Desirability studies gDesirability studies get the work of UI designers in front of users before technical development begins. These studies shed light on potential design flaws early in the process. This helps the visual and UX design team to ensure their designs are evoking the right emotional and attitudinal responses from users. This kind of study is guided towards getting more concise responses, as the team of Researchers can expect to receive feedback in the form of a list of adjectives or attributes that show how the participant involved in the experience emotionally reacted to a particular topic, direction or aspect of the product’s prototype.

Desirability studies create an opportunity for you to validate design decisions before passing them on to the development team. For example, you can show users the same feature in multiple layouts to see which design they prefer, or you can allow users to share their desired workflow and potential clickstreams.

Focus groups

Generally involving 5-10 participants,  focus groups  include demographically similar individuals. Unlike desirability studies, which can be completed individually, a focus group is just that — a group. The study is set up so that members of the group can interact with one another. Focus groups could be carried out as face-to-face meetings as well as remotely through video conferencing tools.

Besides learning about the participants’ impressions and perceptions of your product, focus group findings also include what users believe to be a product’s most important features, problems they might encounter while using the product, as well as their experiences with other products, both good and bad. The conversational style of a focus group appears free-flowing and natural. However, an experienced UX researcher is needed to moderate the group. Your moderator presents the correct series of questions, in the correct order, and guides the conversation to get the results you need. As it happens with any qualitative research method, the quality of the data collected through the focus group is only as good and useful as its preparation: it’s important that UX researchers carefully consider the goals, questions, topics and the right amount of participants of the focus group.

Quantitative research methods for building

Card sorting

If you’ve ever built a website or a digital product, you know the importance of information architecture (IA). While field labels, contextual help, and search functions are part of information architecture discussions, navigation structures are the most commonly debated IA topics.

Card sorting is a user research method that allows a UX designer a peek into how their users think. By placing words or topics on cards, users are asked to categorize and order the cards as they would expect to find them in your product. Card sorting tells you where your users expect to find certain information or complete specific tasks. This is especially useful for products with complex or multiple navigations and contributes to the creation of an intuitive user architecture and user experience. Card sorting is a great research method to understand the mental model of our users, and is one of the best ways to reduce question biases in our team by validating ideas with real users.

Tree testing

While card sorting shows you what users think is the appropriate categorization and order of our navigation, tree testing is putting the card sorting results to the test in a prototype or similar presentation. Instead of grouping words and topics, users are asked to find a particular item using a prototype built from the card sorting study results.

Card sorting and tree testing are often used together. First, a card sort is completed to define the navigation in theory, and then a tree test validates (or not) the card sort through practical experience.

User research methods for introduction

You’ve launched your product, and you’re ready for your first users. Now it’s time to optimize your product experience and establish your position in the market. To accomplish this, you’ll need to understand how your new customers actually use your product.

Examples of how you’ll use this information include:

• Driving the development road map
• Reducing churn
• Encouraging upgrades/add-ons

Let’s talk about how to do that.

Qualitative research methods for the introduction stage

Usability testing.

Whether in person, virtually, or through online UX testing tools, usability testing is an excellent research method. The best usability tests allow you to see how a user moves through your product to accomplish tasks and hear what they think as they go along.

Because your product is still acquiring new customers, you need to perform usability testing on existing and potential users. Existing customers are familiar with your product and may have already found ways to work around pain points. They are a great source of ideas for new features or enhancements. Potential users have never used your product and can offer a fresh perspective on your current user flow and design.

By getting your audience to follow and complete a list of tasks, Usability testing also allows you to evaluate your product with said target audience, all while observing and noting their interactions. The desired result of conducting usability testing is understanding if the design proposed is intuitive and if there are any usability problems. Usually, this method is introduced at the early stages of product design or at regular scheduled intervals, mainly since it allows for a constant validation and feedback of what’s being designed.

User interviews

Another user research method for both existing and potential customers is the interview. This is a one-on-one conversation where you gather insights into how your product works and where it’s lacking. Existing customers share their experience using the product, while potential customers share their expectations and specific drivers that will influence their purchasing decision.

User Interviews not only allow UX researchers to get a deeper understanding of their expectations, but also provide valuable qualitative data that can deliver context for the way users behave. Nevertheless, the backbone behind any interview is a set of questions that is well researched, organized and focused on the product. Asking the right questions is the key step to getting actionable insights!

Quantitative research methods for the introduction stage

A/B testing

A/B testing is commonly used to evaluate product attributes like price, plan features, onboarding steps, and workflows.

You need both a valid test plan and an appropriate sample size to achieve definitive A/B test results. Did the A side perform better because of the content or the placement of the buttons? Did each side have enough users to represent your entire customer base accurately? An experienced researcher will prevent testing mistakes and ensure you obtain meaningful results.

This methodology has many benefits, which include the democratization of design and the distribution of the decision making power to the hands of users. A/B testing transfers designers’ power to create things based on their personal preferences and biases to users, letting them choose something that actually solves their issues and resonates with their needs.

Eye tracking

UX teams are responsible for guiding users through your product experience. The user interface, workflow, and content must work together to lead a user naturally through the process to accomplish the task at hand.

Eye tracking is a technology that allows you to see if your users are focusing on the right areas at the right time. If not, you’ll learn what is drawing their eye, and thus their attention, away from where it needs to be. According to  Adobe , Eye tracking is the only method that can objectively and accurately record and analyze users’ visual behaviour, since it allows us to uncover usability issues without altering the natural user experience and behaviour. The biggest advantage that eye tracking brings to the table is that implementing this research method doesn’t depend on participant’s reports or memory, as all data is collected automatically when users are navigating through the app or website. It further allows to directly see through your users eyes; UX researchers can watch users’ live interactions with their apps, platforms or websites and immediately understand possible issues and behaviours.

User research methods for growth and maturity

If you’ve reached the growth stage, congratulations! You’ve built a great product that’s been embraced by your market. Take some time to celebrate, but get ready because you’ve got more work ahead of you.

Next on your to-do list is growing your product by increasing your customer base and then eventually reaching maturity and making a profit on your hard work. Luckily, some of the same research methods you used to plan and build your product are used during the growth and maturity stages, too.

Along with a robust marketing plan, growing your product involves building new or advanced features to satisfy specific customer segments. As you plan and build these enhancements, go through the same research and testing process you used to create the first release. The same holds true for enhancements as well as a new product build — user research ensures you’re building the right thing in the best way for your customers.

Qualitative research methods for the growth and maturity stages

Conducting competitive analysis studies at least every quarter is the best way to maintain your edge over the competition and keep your product relevant within the market.

Especially in the maturity stage, innovating and adding new technologies will help your product remain profitable. Assessing your competition will keep you current on their innovations and may give you some ideas for your own product improvements.

One of the most important things is to never stop talking to your customers. During the growth stage, your interviews will focus on how your product is working or if it’s missing any features. These interviews will enrich your knowledge about your product and user base, allowing you to be able to test your current features, discover new possibilities of including additional features or discarding already existing ones. The latter is especially important since you’ll want to ask about what features they’re not using. If your customers aren’t using certain features, it might be time to stop supporting them. This will reduce costs and help you grow your profits during the maturity stage.

While you’re talking with your customers, don’t forget to ask for a review or if they will give you a testimonial. This type of customer feedback raises your brand perception and invites new customers to purchase your product.

Quantitative research methods for the growth and maturity stages

Before you invest in advanced features or innovative technologies, conduct quantitative studies like surveys or questionnaires to make sure these features will not only pay for themselves but will bring in additional customers and revenue for your product.

Common A/B testing during growth and maturity occurs within your sales and onboarding processes. You’ll want to test different prices and offers to optimize your margin on each sale. Making sure you have a smooth onboarding process increases your conversion rate and reduces waste in marketing spend — improving your bottom line.

User research methods for decline

The decline stage of a product is when your product has reached the end of its useful life. Either the need no longer exists, or it’s been replaced with new techniques or technologies. While user research can help during this process, most companies prefer to execute this phase as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Some areas where user research can help during this stage include:

• How to transition existing customers out of your product
• Data and information users need to take with them
• The best way to end the product: a gradual reduction of features or a single shutdown

Especially if you have a large customer base or have loyal, long-term customers, you owe it to them to make the transition out of your product as painless as possible.

What results can we expect from UX research?

Now that we’ve mentioned the different methodologies that could be introduced in all stages of a product’s lifecycle, we aim to highlight the results that carrying UX research brings to a product. As stated, UX research is a tool that not only helps entrepreneurs create the best products, but it also provides valuable data that sustains the decision making process, and thus, should be taken into consideration when evaluating the results it contributes to the creation of said product. The three main results we can expect from UX Rresearch are: developing a product that’s relevant to our user base, the creation of a design that’s easy and pleasant to use and, lastly, a return on investment of said UX Design.

Firstly, developing a product that’s relevant to your user base is clearly the fundamental and most important result derived from a well carried out UX research. Understanding your target users feedback allows you to create a design that is relevant and, thus, successful. This information is also vital to the development process, since the data gathered during the UX research stage will directly translate on fundamental decisions related to the product’s lifecycle. Moreover, UX research allows you to empathize with your users, by opening a direct channel of communication and interacting with them in all the different instances and as your project progresses. Validating your ideas and asking for constant feedback is as important as applying these methodologies, and allows you to ensure that you’re still on the right track.

Another result of implementing UX research into the design process of a product has to do with creating designs that are easy and pleasant to use. By continuously carrying out user tests, your product will achieve a high level of usability and a high user satisfaction. By following various guidelines it also avoids a lot of usability issues, as the ongoing research will bring light to newer issues that maybe weren’t there before.

Lastly, studies show that the return on investment (ROI) on UX research efforts are totally worth their weight, but calculating it involves more than demonstrating that design can improve the customer experience, it rather involves the positive impact and value that everything related to UX and UI has on the company’s broad business goals. By focusing on the outcomes of our UX research activities (for example, the valuable insights gathered) and not the outputs (the persona artifacts your team created), you will be able to create a product that has a defined and well-researched background as well as the potential tools to generate growth in the long run.

Let the product life cycle guide your research

While we’ve shown you some common qualitative and quantitative user research methodologies, and the appropriate time in the product life cycle to use them, it’s important to know that user research strategies are unique for each product. For the best results, consult a senior UX researcher to help you define a strategy best suited to your product.

Qubika has experienced professionals with a proven history of helping companies navigate the complexities of UX research and determine the most appropriate research techniques. We’d love to be part of your UX research team and help you reach your goals. Call or email us  today!

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User Research Methods for Each Stage of Product Development

Learn how to start product development on the right foot by understanding your audience through proper user research.

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As Ralf Speth, CEO at Jaguar, says: “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”

In all business decisions, failure to anticipate a customer’s expectations can end in disaster. For example, do you remember New Coke ? Tropicana’s 2009 package redesign failure ?

Both were costly mistakes due to misunderstandings of the customer’s point of view. Without proper user research to back their product design decisions, these companies built products that customers didn’t want.

User research involves investigating your audience’s needs, pain points, and behaviors, so you can design the best product for them. Comprehensive research consists of multiple tactics, such as interviewing your customers and running prototype tests to collect feedback.

However, the user research methods you choose for each stage of product development — discovery, concept development, and product testing — need to fit the needs of that stage. That way, you can easily go from product ideation to building a functional solution for customers.

User Research for Product Discovery

At the product discovery stage, you learn more about the market, the needs of your audience, and whether you’re trying to solve a big enough problem for customers. The user research methods you’ll be using during this stage focus on getting customers to open up about the challenges they face that your product might be able to solve.

User Interviews

Talking directly to customers about their experiences, either face to face or remotely, is a great way to find insights you might not have considered as a product manager. Conduct your user interviews with a clear hypothesis by asking the right questions and actively listening to your customers.

Guide the Interview With a Hypothesis

Before starting the user interview, make sure to have a set of assumptions ready to test based on user insights, such as feedback forms and product reviews. It serves as a starting point you can use to better guide the user interview. Follow this framework to create your hypothesis.

• “We believe that [creating this experience] for [persona] will [achieve this outcome].”

So, if you’re managing a virtual event platform and trying to develop ways to make users feel more secure, your hypothesis might look like:

• "We believe that [including two-factor authentication] for [meeting participants] will [make users feel more secure by only allowing expected participants to join the call].”

Ask Customer Discovery Questions

To run effective customer interviews, you need to stay objective. That means avoiding leading questions that can unintentionally push your customers to the answer you want, rather than the truthful answer. Otherwise, you risk believing to have found the perfect product idea, only to build a solution that the market doesn’t want.

“Leading questions are those which create a bias in the users’ mindset while answering,” says Pooja Dhaka , UX Researcher at SkipTheDishes , in an article for Flipkart Design. “Hence, they should be avoided while conducting interviews.”

Instead, the conversation should focus on validating the pain points you’re trying to solve. That means focusing on the user’s future actions rather than on hypothetical situations. Good discovery questions are open ended, leaving room for the customer’s point of view:

• “Can you describe the last time you experienced [a problem]?”

In our example from above, that might look like:

• “Can you describe the last time you experienced [a security problem during a remote meeting]?"

The goal here is to listen to your customer, not to sell them on your product idea. If you’re too focused on pitching a product that’s not even out yet, it distracts you from listening to the customer’s pain points.

Out of politeness, some customers might even validate your product idea, even though it’s something they don’t really want. Instead of pitching your product, let the customer do most of the talking. Eventually, they’ll mention valuable insights about their challenges. You can use these insights later to determine solutions to the customers' pain points.

For more tips on writing good interview questions, check our article on the 11 best customer discovery questions you can use for your next user interview.

Be Open To Negative Feedback

Harsh feedback can be hard to swallow, but it prevents you from building a product the market doesn’t need.

“Asking the hard questions should give you the most excitement if you’ve fallen in love with the problem, but getting defensive is a sure way to stop learning in its tracks,” says Angela DeFranco , Head of Product at SevenRooms , during an interview with Founder Playlist .

The whole point of the user interview is to investigate your hypothesis. If what customers want doesn’t align at all with your initial assumption, then it’s best to move to another product idea.

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys offer a quick way to collect feedback on your customers’ experiences, their needs, and challenges. You can then leverage those insights to find the best ways to address any difficulties with your product. Here’s how to structure your customer surveys to get the best results:

Use Open-Ended, Task-Driven Questions

Like user interviews, include questions that give customers a chance to tell you what they think. That means avoiding questions that prompt a desired action from the customer and confirming your bias. Questions should be open ended, and task driven.

Let’s say that you’re managing a social media monitoring tool like Buffer , and you’re in the process of redesigning the app. Here are examples of questions to help collect accurate feedback from your users:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the onboarding process?
• What do you like the least about our current social media monitoring tool? What do you like most?
• How would you judge the usability of our tool, and why?
• Which features do you use the most within our app? What features could you live without?
• What features are currently missing that you’d like to see?

Maximize Survey Responses

Send the Survey at the Right Time

The time you send your survey can significantly impact its response rate. According to research by SurveyMonkey, users are more likely to respond to customer surveys around 9–10 a.m. The day of the week and device type matter as well, so make sure you’re considering all angles before you send your survey.

Make Your Survey Easy to Complete

To maximize your survey completion rate, you need to ensure that it’s as straightforward as possible. Another study by SurveyMonkey shows that surveys longer than 7 minutes have completion rates that are 5–20% lower than those of shorter surveys.

Include an Incentive

To drive the most users to complete your survey, you can offer an incentive, such as a small gift or a chance to win a larger one.

According to Staff Product Researcher Andrew Rajaram at Shopify , financial incentives such as gift cards are one of the best incentives to offer to users because they are easy to transfer or adjust. You can also offer ways for users to save money, such as a free trial period, suggests Rajaram.

Diary Studies

A diary study is a long-term research method in which target customers log their experiences using a product or completing an activity. This technique gives you a glimpse into a user’s habits by asking them to track their behavior.

Financial software company Intuit often uses diary studies when conducting user research to improve their product. According to Intuit CFO Neil Williams in an interview with Business Insider, diary studies give their product design/development team a glimpse into the pain points that their customers experience, such as how often they are interrupted doing their taxes.

“Many people are probably not even mindful of how many interruptions they get or how many things distract them as they work on finances.”

Here’s how to run effective diary studies in four steps:

Set Triggers

Something to think about when conducting diary studies is when to trigger participants to write down their feedback. You have two different triggers to choose from:

• Interval-contingent trigger: The participant has to write their log at specific intervals that you assign, such as once a day or once a week.
• Signal-contingent trigger: The participant writes their diary entry at any time that’s most convenient to them or after completing a certain task, such as doing their taxes.

Use Diary Study Tools

Third-party apps can make the diary study process more efficient and reduce the manual work involved in monitoring participants.

Indeemo allows the users in your diary study to record audio and video as they complete tasks remotely. The app will also allow you to schedule tasks and run studies across different countries. You can also interact with participants via comments, reminders, and push notifications.

Dscout is another remote diary study tool that helps run your user research. Once you launch the diary study on the app, you can sit back and wait for the feedback from participants to come. As a bonus, it comes with an “expressiveness” feature that identifies your most eloquent participants, whose comments and responses you can use in highlight reels.

Another perk of diary tools is you can set up weekly reminders, so customers remain accountable and keep their diaries up to date. You can also push reminders to email or SMS.

Analyze the Data

Don’t just wait until the end of your study to analyze your data. Follow up with your participants throughout the process and observe how the behavior of your target audience evolves throughout the study.

After the study is done, sit down with your team to identify critical patterns from your customers. To do this, use the data to create a user journey map to understand the steps your participants took during their experience:

It will provide you a clear view of their needs and expectations, which you can use for product ideas.

User Research for Concept Development

Once you’re in concept development, you can use the customer’s perspective to understand if your information structure makes sense for the customer. From there, you can use these insights to build a functional prototype you can test.

Card Sorting

Card sorting involves asking customers to organize information from your website or app into categories that make the most sense by using virtual or physical note cards. It’s a way to identify the best way to design the information architecture of your prototype.

There are three types of card sorting methods — open , closed , and hybrid . Each type of card sorting focuses on different elements and is used at different stages of product development.

Open Card Sorting

With open card sorting, each participant receives a set of cards with topics or keywords on them. You ask the participant to create categories that describe these different topics and then organize the cards into those categories.

Open card sorting works best if you’re looking for fresh ideas for categories or a new way to organize the content in your product.

Closed Card Sorting

With closed card sorting, instead of allowing participants to create their own categories, you provide them with a predefined list. Participants then have to organize their cards into those categories.

Closed card sorting is great for understanding if your current structure is easy to follow.

Hybrid Card Sorting

With hybrid card sorting, participants (and you) get the best of both worlds. Users can sort items based on a predefined set of categories and create their own categories.

Use hybrid card sorting when you want to be sure your planned structure aligns with customer expectations and get suggestions simultaneously.

Usability Testing

Usability testing helps gauge whether your design is easy to use by asking customers to complete a set of actions and collecting their feedback. That way, you can identify potential errors before building a prototype.

Nick Babich , Editor in Chief at UX Planet , says you should always test usability on real people . “The feedback from the testing session will help you understand what part of your design requires improvements,” he says. For a successful usability test session, follow these tips.

Record Customer Feedback

As the customer goes through your usability test, take notes of their recurrent feedback. Here are the various ways that you can record the feedback:

• Vocal recordings
• Surveys that you can send to users
• Video recordings of users going through the product in action

Whichever way you decide to record the customer feedback, you can then share the data with other stakeholders on your team.

Analyze the Data and Prioritize Usability Issues

Go through your data and identify the problems that you must fix. During this stage, you want to sit down with all the critical stakeholders involved in the product development process and look for patterns in usability issues that you must overcome in the final prototype.

The next step is to prioritize those identified issues based on severity. It helps you get an exact idea of which ones you should tackle first. According to the Nielsen Norman Group , you should group usability issues into these five different levels:

• 4 – Usability catastrophe: These severe issues block the user from achieving the intended task and must be fixed immediately.
• 3 – Major usability problem: Problems in this group create significant frustration in the user experience and should be assigned high priority.
• 2 – Minor usability problem: These are usability issues that may not prevent users from completing their tasks but create a bit of friction.
• 1 – Cosmetic problem only: Cosmetic problems are minor issues that don’t negatively impact the user experience, such as a misspelling.
• 0 – No issue: Problems in this category are issues that some users may report but do not need to be fixed now.

From there, use this data to determine the next steps you should take to improve your product concept.

User Research for Product Testing

After doing research on your customer’s needs and measuring to see if they can understand your product concept, it’s time to get started on a prototype and test your audience’s reaction. This is different from usability testing, which measures how easy it is for people to use your product concept.

Beta Testing

One of the goals of beta testing is to ensure your customers are happy with your software before its official release. This type of research will tell you whether customers will actually want to use your software. According to Luke Freiler , CEO of Centercode , in an article with Forbes Magazine, successful beta testing needs a plan with clear goals and a specific timeframe .

“Build a plan with your goals as your core. Without it, you risk your project unraveling,” Freiler said.

Get the most out of your beta testing session with beta testing tools and feedback analysis.

Integrate Beta Testing Tools

Beta testing tools make the process of testing your software and collecting user feedback much more efficient by reducing manual work. They help you get the best results for your beta test so that you can prepare yourself for a successful launch.

TestFairy is a mobile testing tool with features such as video recording, in-app feedback, and integration with issue management platforms. That way, you can easily monitor your user’s experience with your beta test, keep track of complaints, and improve the quality of your beta test reports. It also keeps all of your beta testing data secure through features such as encryption and private cloud hosting.

Another beta testing tool you can use is Ubertesters . The platform comes with the unique aspect of having access to professional beta testers worldwide to get feedback on your product. Professional beta testers have a lot of experience under their belt with running technical tests, which means they can accurately identify defects and guarantee a clean product lead.

Collect and Analyze Feedback

With your stakeholders, take a deep look at the suggestions and feedback of your beta users. What do users report as a missing part of the product experience? What features do they want to see? Based on this data, you can make design changes to your product before its final launch.

On the other hand, you also want to identify the features within your product that excite users the most. What positive feedback about your beta product most frequently pops up? It helps you understand which features contribute the most to user satisfaction.

As a final question, you should ask beta users to give you an NPS rating , which measures their level of enthusiasm around your product. It’s a score out of 10 that rates how likely the user is to recommend the product to others.

Like surveys, it’s considered best practice to offer an incentive to your participants. A discount or promo code works great.

Build the Best Product for Your Customers

Product development will always fail without proper user research. User research will help you build a product that aligns with the customer’s needs, which will improve your retention and customer lifetime value.

To begin the user research process, you can start by setting up customer interviews, which you can do without a lot of hard data. That way, you can start the product development process by accurately understanding their needs and pain points. You can find customer interview participants through third-party platforms such as User Interviews .

User Research in Product Management: Strategies and Best Practices

Why User Research Matters

• Identify user pain points and unmet needs
• Validate product ideas and features
• Understand user motivations and behavior
• Prioritize features and improvements
• Reduce the risk of product failure

Types of User Research

Qualitative research.

• Focus groups
• Observations
• Diary studies
• Usability testing

Quantitative Research

• Analytics and usage data
• A/B testing
• Market research

Best Practices for Conducting User Research

1. define clear research objectives, 2. choose the right research methods.

3. Recruit a Representative Sample

4. analyze and interpret your findings, 5. communicate your insights, 6. integrate user research into your product management process, key takeaways for product managers and user research.

• Define clear research objectives and goals.
• Choose the right research methods for your objectives.
• Recruit a representative sample of your target users.
• Analyze and interpret your findings systematically.
• Communicate your insights effectively to stakeholders.
• Integrate user research into your product management process.

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User Research to Validate Product Ideas

Author: Gabriela Araujo

Updated: January 24, 2024 - 7 min read

What is user research ? How to leverage user research techniques to validate customer demand for new products and features? In our recent event, Michael Burk took us through the best UX practices, different user testing experiences (Moderated & Unmoderated) and how to analyze user flows.  

Michael Burk is a Product Manager with a lot of experience. Most recently he worked at Scoot as the Vice President. Before that, he’s been at companies of different sizes like BigCommerce , Electronic Arts and Myspace . He holds a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts and enjoys working at start-ups. 

Let’s talk about user research

Michael admits that user research is a broad topic that can’t possibly be handled in one presentation as some people devote their whole careers to it. In his presentation, he talked about how user research has been useful to him, what it is and how it’s relevant to Product Managers. He also mentioned different types of user research, went through the research process step by step, and presented a framework for leveraging research in the product. 

What is user research?

Michael defined user research as “building a deeper understanding of your users, their needs, their motivations and the way they are using your product. It helps Product Managers understand whom the product is for and why it is valuable.” “The goal of user research is to get actionable or testable data that can be used in the future for another iteration or research process,” he added.  

How to do it?

There are different ways to collect the data. Observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies are examples of data-collecting tools. They are divided into qualitative and quantitative research.

The purpose of quantitative research is to tell, for example, how people use the product or how they would like to use it. Examples of this type of research are surveys and analytics directly from the products. For quantitative research, you need quite large data sets. This type of research is good for validating or invalidating the hypothesis.

On the other hand, qualitative research is good for getting individual one-on-one insights from customers. Qualitative research can be, for example, interviews and open-ended questionnaires where the respondent has to give an answer instead of just choosing his answer from a scale of 1-10. Qualitative research is more individualized and less structured, and it gives more freedom to the respondent to say what he wants in his own words. 

The research process

Michael presented the research process as a five-step loop. The different stages are objectives, hypothesis, methods, conduct, and synthesis.

The first step is setting a goal for the research. Why and what are questions that need an answer and also determining whether a lot of data is needed at the end or just a few most important points. Is there already an existing hypothesis? What data do you have already? If there is some, use that to your benefit.

Secondly, go through what you already know about the users. Think about “what assumptions need to be true for the product to be successful,” Michael said. Next, you have to choose the right research method. It should be effective in achieving the goals set for the research and suit the situation the best. Is it better to choose a qualitative or quantitative research method? “The form and method of the research are determined by the goals,” Michael stated.

The fourth stage is conducting the research. Choose the test subjects and just do it. In the last stage, you synthesize the data. You analyze it and make the gained data actionable. Questions, such as, “did we validate or invalidate the hypothesis,” “did we learn anything unexpected” and “was the research successful” will be answered. The main point in research is gaining data that defines what the next step is. 

Five-step product market strategy framework

Identify the target user(s)

Determine differentiating features

Determine table stakes feature (core feature)

Use the research to identify feature gaps and quality deficiencies

Prioritize based on maximum impact

“User research improves the odds of success for building products that meet (or exceed) your customers’ expectations,” Michael said and continued that “user research is mainly about understanding the features the customers value the most.” 

Questions from the members of the audience 

When conducting especially open-ended research what are the most effective methods of reaching the users.

I think it’s really easy. People make it more complicated than it needs to be. Just pick up the phone and call them. It can be that easy. Especially as a Product Manager, you would be amazed by how willing people are to talk to someone who builds a product that they use. If you’re talking about doing open-ended feedback where you want to get qualitative answers and hear things in their own words, the best way is to pick up the phone and reach out to them.

In some cases that may be viable and in others not. I had the luxury at Scoot to walk to one of the locations where you could park your scooter and talk to people about it. I was able to just walk there and interact with people directly. Depending on the type of product that you’re working with, you might be able to do something like that.

At the very least you can reach out through emails, in-product messaging, or notifications on a website. Hopefully, you can get away with getting feedback from people without incentivizing them to do so because there are all kinds of pitfalls that come if you incentivize people to do the surveys. You might get some false information, and it might not be a good representative sample, so you have to treat the research appropriately. 

If you have an existing product with users and data but you are just getting started, so your product doesn’t have metrics or analytics where do you start?

Here you are at the stage where you’re creating a lot of assumptions and hypotheses. In fact, much like in start-ups which I referenced a lot tonight everything that you’re doing is an assumption until you get it in the hands of your users and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that it’s just the stage that you’re at.

You have to continue to make some of those assumptions and then think about how you can figure out whether or not they’re true. In terms of users and people, you want to do user research with you have to have at least a hypothesis about who your target user should be and who are you solving this problem for.

If you don’t have that you have to find it immediately because you need to know who has the problem and if no one has it then go and find another problem to work on. Knowing that people have a problem gives you some assumptions about who they are and then it’s a matter of thinking about who they are and getting into their shoes a little bit. Think about what the day in the life of that user looks like . That process can be very valuable because there can be all sorts of opportunities right there.

Conducting research isn’t really as complicated as it sounds, but it is time-consuming. The whole process as Michael presented has many stages, and from the start to the end it can take a while. However, just like experimenting and testing, in the end, it’s worth it. Without doing it, you wouldn’t get valuable data about the users to help your company grow.

Updated: January 24, 2024

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Google goes all in with AI as it merges research teams

by Leigh Mc Gowran

57 minutes ago

Image: © Andreas Prott/Stock.adobe.com

Google is combining its research teams and its various product teams to speed up its AI research and bring more AI-powered features to its users.

Google is making some significant restructuring moves, by organising various product teams into a single entity while streamlining its AI development teams.

In a blogpost, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the changes are linked to the tech giant’s efforts to “simplify our structure and improve velocity and execution”.

Last year, the company combined its Google Brain team with its DeepMind team. Pichai said this combination was highly beneficial for the company’s AI research and helped with the development of its Gemini models .

“Now, to accelerate this progress, we’re going to consolidate the teams that focus on building models across Research and Google DeepMind,” Pichai said. “All of this work will now sit in Google DeepMind and scale our capacity to deliver capable AI for our users, partners and customers.

“This will simplify development by concentrating compute-intensive model building in one place and establishing single access points for PAs looking to take these models and build generative AI applications.”

Meanwhile, the company’s AI focus is influencing its other services such as Android, Chrome, Search and Photos. Google is merging its devices and services teams with its platforms and ecosystems teams into a combined Platforms and Devices group.

“Having a unified team across platforms and devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners,” Pichai said. “It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster – as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making.”

The new Platforms and Devices team will be led by Rick Osterloh, who said on X that he is excited to take on the new challenge and “accelerate AI innovation across the Android ecosystem”. Osterloh was previously SVP of Devices and Services at the company.

“I look forward to working with Christiano Amon and his team and increasing our strategic collaboration with Qualcomm and Snapdragon for Android, not just in mobile but across compute, XR and auto.

Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on  Spotify , on  Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Related: AI , Alphabet , Android , Google , research

Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

[email protected]

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36% OF MARIJUANA USERS REPORT REDUCED ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION SINCE USING CANNABIS PRODUCTS, NUMERATOR REPORTS

CHICAGO, April 18, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Numerator, a data and tech company serving the market research space, has released a new analysis that examines the impact of cannabis on consumer behavior. The report, Budding Behaviors: Insights into the Modern Cannabis Consumer, includes an April 2024 survey of nearly 6,000 present and past self-reported THC & CBD users, as well as an analysis of the verified buying behaviors for these same individuals. Overall, cannabis user profiles vary significantly based on substance type, with THC / marijuana users skewing younger and using cannabis on a more regular basis than CBD-only users, who tend to be older and less frequent users. THC users also spend more of their grocery dollars on snacks and beverages and are more likely to say their alcohol consumption has decreased since they started using cannabis products.

Cannabis Purchase Data Findings Include:

• THC users spend more of their grocery dollars on snacks and beverages. Compared to non-users, THC users spend a larger portion of their grocery dollars on categories like sports & energy drinks (1.7x), beer (1.3x), frozen sandwiches (1.3x), spirits (1.1x), frozen pizza (1.1x), and frozen appetizers (1.1x). Daily THC users have even more pronounced spikes in almost every category studied, with notable differences from regular THC users in candy, herbs & spices, frozen potato snacks, and packaged sweet snacks.
• THC usage impacts alcohol consumption, and more frequent users spend less than infrequent users on alcohol. More than 1 in 3 THC users (36%) say they have reduced their alcohol consumption since they began using cannabis products — yet they are still more likely than non-users to buy alcohol (73% vs. 65%). Daily THC users spend 15.3% of their grocery dollars on alcohol, infrequent users spend 18.1%, and non-users spend 14.3%.
• Fast food and delivery services win with THC users. Compared to non-users, THC users are more likely to have visited a limited-service restaurant or used a food delivery app in the past three months (ending 3/31/23). They are 61% more likely to have ordered from Doordash, 35% more likely for Uber Eats, 31% for Little Caesars Pizza, 28% for Jersey Mike’s Subs, 22% for Taco Bell, 22% for Jack in the Box, 19% for Pizza Hut, 19% for Dominos, 17% for Wawa, and 16% for Popeyes. These behaviors are even more pronounced among daily THC users.

Cannabis Survey Findings Include:

• Frequent use and higher price points result in higher cannabis spending among THC users. 31% spend $100 or more on cannabis products monthly (compared to 7% of CBD-only users), and their main purchase locations are in-person dispensaries (61%), personal acquaintances (29%), smoke shops (19%), and online dispensaries (14%).
• CBD spending occurs at both dispensaries and mainstream retailers. The top places for CBD users to buy cannabis products are alternative health stores (31%), in-person dispensaries (25%), online dispensaries (19%), and traditional retailers (16%).
• Nearly all surveyed activities are 2-3x more popular when using THC compared to CBD. When asked which activities consumers engage in while using cannabis products, relaxing and sleeping topped the list for both THC and CBD users. However, THC users are much more likely to watch movies (49% vs. 24% for CBD users), listen to music (43% vs. 19%), socialize with friends (41% vs. 18%), spend time alone (37% vs. 23%), clean or organize (35% vs. 17%), enjoy nature / outdoor activities (31% vs. 15%), eat or snack (31% vs. 10%), cook or bake (25% vs. 11%), or be creative (23% vs. 7%).
• Gen Z consumers are more than twice as likely to eat or snack while using THC. Among THC users, 17% of Boomers said they eat or snack while using THC products –– rising to 27% of Gen X, 43% of Millennials, and 50% of Gen Z.
• Edibles and topicals are the preferred products for CBD users. 58% of CBD users opt for edibles and 44% opt for topicals. Less popular products are tinctures (19%), vape cartridges (17%), and concentrates (12%).
• Three-quarters of past cannabis users are open to trying again. 74% of past users say they would consider cannabis again in the future. Their primary reasons for discontinuing use at this point in time were changes to lifestyle or life stage (29%), no longer enjoying use (23%) or focusing on other priorities & interests (17%).

Numerator’s cannabis usage survey was fielded from 4/3/24 - 4/9/24 to 5,709+ present (4,709) and past (1,000) self-identified THC & CBD users. THC users are defined as those currently using THC or THC+CBD products. CBD users are defined as those using CBD-only products. Survey findings are layered with verified purchase behavior for the same individuals. Insights are limited to individuals ages 21+ who reported living in a state where marijuana is legal.

About Numerator:

Numerator is a data and tech company bringing speed and scale to market research.  Numerator blends first-party data from over 1 million US households with advanced technology to provide 360-degree consumer understanding for the market research industry that has been slow to change. Headquartered in Chicago, IL, Numerator has 2,000 employees worldwide; 80 of the top 100 CPG brands’ manufacturers are Numerator clients.

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Promotest product update in kazakhstan.

PromoTest is a unique tool for monthly monitoring of recalls about pharmaceutical companies’ promo activity. This enables the assessment of the competitive situation and promotion efficiency with a high level of reliability and clear visualization. The project team is constantly working on its development.

In year 2024, two more specialties have been added to the 16 medical specialties (allergists/pulmonologists, obstetricians/gynecologists, gastroenterologists, dermatovenerologists, cardiologists, neurologists, otolaryngologists, oncologists, orthopedists/traumatologists, ophthalmologists, rheumatologists, pediatricians, therapists/family doctors, urologists, surgeons, endocrinologists) among which the study is conducted:  

• neonatologists  
• psychiatrists  

Data on new specialties is being actively collected and will soon be available in the reports.  

In total, 19 specialties are currently presented in the project (18 medical specialties of 2 types of medical institutions: clinics and hospitals + pharmacists) in 15 cities. PromoTest data contains history since 2016.  

Please, contact Proxima Research to learn more about the products.  

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