Read time: 5 mins
Thinking about conducting some user research? Wondering which techniques are most likely to provide useful results? Then look no further.
“Good design is about process, not product.”
— Jared Sinclair, Designer and Developer at Bloglovin
Here’s a list of seven excellent, tried and tested techniques. These have been proven to deliver real value in UX projects. Let’s take a look at each technique and see what it is and why it works:
Card sorting was originally a technique used in psychological research long before ‘UX research’ was a thing. It’s a simple concept: you write words or phrases on cards; then you ask the user to categorize them. You might also ask the user to label the categories.
The words or phrases you write on the cards depend on what you’re trying to find out from your users. For instance, if you want to find out whether your Information Architecture, or the way your website is arranged, is easy to understand, you could write the different pages of your website down and ask a user to sort them into categories. If, on the other hand, you’re interested to examine how users think about financial planning, you could write down different activities (“save money in a bank”, “travel once every year”, “look out for offers”, etc.) and ask your users to sort them by priority.
Author/Copyright holder: Yandle. Copyright terms and license: CC BY 2.0
Card sorting, an approach that UX research inherited from psychological research, is an excellent, and wonderfully simple, way of assessing what users’ priorities are and how their sense of order processes the existing nature of an item in question.
There are all sorts of card-sorting techniques, and choosing the right one is important. Better still, there are a bunch of online tools that let you do card sorting remotely, allowing you to use the technique globally and not just locally.
Expert reviews involve a single ‘expert’ walking through a product via the User Interface (UI) and looking for issues with the design, accessibility, and usability of the product. There’s no fixed process to follow, and the expert review can vary from professional to professional as well as from product to product. The more expertise the reviewer has in usability and UX design, the more valuable the input of that person will be (in most cases).
Knowing where your users are looking when they’re using your system can tell you a great deal about where your design’s effectiveness stands. Eye movement tracking helps with UI design, and it helps with knowing how to prioritize certain kinds of content. This technique was developed for academic research. Used extensively in medical research, it has become popular and cost-effective enough to be deployed by UX teams, too.
This is actually a number of techniques under a broad heading. It’s all about going out and observing users ‘in the wild’ so that we can measure behavior in the context where users actually use a product. Field studies include ethnographic research, interviews, observations, and contextual enquiry.
A firm favorite that has a long and prestigious history in UX research, usability testing is the observation of users trying to carry out tasks with a product. Such testing can focus on a single process, or be much wider in range.
Author/Copyright holder: Luca Mascaro. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-SA 2.0
Usability testing gives a very clear lens for observing users as they attempt to carry out tasks with a system—not for nothing does it remain extremely popular among researchers.
This is usability testing, but without the need to drag users into your laboratory environment. It was once complex and expensive, but technology has moved on, and now it’s fairly simple to set up and reasonable value for money, too.
User personas are a fictional representation of the ideal user. They focus on the goals of the user, that individual’s characteristics and the attitudes he/she displays. They also examine what the user expects from the product.
We created user personas from other forms of user research; thus, they offer an in-depth, real-life vivid portrait that is easy for the whole team to keep in mind when designing products. Each user persona has a name and a backstory. Moreover, personas inspire the imagination and keep the focus on the user.
There are many user research techniques, but these seven techniques have been used over the years, in many UX projects, with great results. Each technique provides a different output; so, you should use each one only to serve a distinct purpose.
To recap, the techniques are:
As designers who can double as researchers, we have a wealth of options at our command in the twenty-first century, options that hail from traditional, or unrelated, fields and ones that have grown with the technologies we have always concerned ourselves with. As the state of the art has lent power to the tools available to us, the price of these has dropped. Consequently, there’s no excuse not to use a combination of these techniques in the pursuit of the best design.
Intermediate course
User experience (UX) design requires you to understand the pains and pleasures of your users—and user research is the way in which to do just that. In that sense, it’s actually the largest part of the field… meaning it’s essential for you to have the relevant skills and knowledge if you want to be competing with the best. In our course User Research—Methods and Best Practices, you’ll learn the best practices for getting first-hand knowledge of your users, this enabling you to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’. In the course you’ll be equipped with templates that will give you pointers on how to effectively interview your users, conduct observations, and best present your findings to stakeholders. You’ve already downloaded this ebook, now take the next step and master the full range of user research techniques!
“I enjoyed the mix between video and text very much and I am sure that it improved my learning experience. In general the content of the course was very interesting to me and I consider it very useful for improving in doing user research. I really like the possibility to download templates about different methods because they enable me to easily look up the most important information.”
— Ulrike Bruckenberger, Austria
“A strength of the course was the instructors’ knowledge and examples from their own experience. I find it very useful when someone tells you stories, in this case about situations when they did research. The lessons where very easy to follow and understand.”
— Laura Gieco, Australia
“The course instructor has a lot of knowledge and experience, and can explain the topics without a problem.”
— Juan Esteban Arango Florez, Colombia