Research Fundamentals
Understand different research methods and how they can be used to inform product development
Research is critical for building and validating any design. Research
fundamentals help you get a broad understanding of different research
techniques that can be used to make your product useful, usable and
desirable. There are a few common methodologies that you need to learn to start off with research
Introduction to Research
The various types of research range from in-person interviews to A/B tests (and everything in between), though they are different methods, all of them stem from the same key methodologies: observation, understanding, and analysis.
- Observation: The first step of conducting research is learning to observe the world around us. Much like beginners in photography, as a beginner in research, one should learn how to see. Observe your users, keeping an eye out for non-verbal clues as to how they are feeling and behaving.
- Understanding: Develop an understanding of the user’s mental model. What does the user anticipate when using a certain product? Based on their previous understanding and usage of different techniques/products, understand how they will perceive this product.
This helps researchers to accurately identify the user’s mental model, he or she can share this information with the design team to accommodate the model in design. - Analysis: Research on its own can be valuable, but in order to use the insights to inform design, it needs to be analyzed and ultimately presented to a larger team. Analyze the insights you’ve gathered and try to identify patterns and trends. Eventually, these insights will drive the decisions you make about the product and how it is designed.
There are different research methods that are widely used to gather the data throughout the product life cycle.
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At the start of the product, design research is focused on learning about the needs and goals of the end-users, learning about project requirements from stakeholders. Researchers will conduct interviews, collect surveys, observe current users, and review existing literature, data, or analytics. Then, iteratively throughout the design process, the research focus shifts to usability. Researchers may conduct usability tests or A/B tests, interview users about the process, and generally test assumptions that will improve the designs.
1. Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Research
In Behavioral Research you will observe the actions that a person takes, whereas Attitudinal Research refers to directly or indirectly asking a person about their opinions. [1]
There are some methodologies that need both observation and discussion.
For example, In a moderated usability test, you need to observe a user’s interaction without influencing them, but also ask several contextual questions about the why’s, value and expectations which is more attitudinal.
UX professionals rely more on Behavioral Research because in most cases what participants report in Attitudinal Research might be biased data and might not match what they actually end up doing. [1]
2. Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is any method that can be used to get numerical findings. It will answer the questions such as “What is the click rate of this call to action” or “what percentage of users scrolled to this specific area?” It is also valuable in understanding statistical likelihoods, such as “80% of the users are dropping off during the payment process”.
a. How to analyze qualitative and quantitative data
Gathering the data itself will not help you in identifying the issues, you need to analyze the data to get to a specific direction. And that differs for quantitative and qualitative.
b. Analyzing quantitative data
Quantitative data is based on numbers. These numbers are analyzed by comparing and drawing patterns between different cases. The findings are reported mostly in the form of graphs and charts.
Applications such as Excel & SPSS can be used to calculate things like:
- Average scores
- Number of times an answer got repeated across the data of participants
- The reliability and validity of the results
Qualitative research is sometimes called “soft” research. It will help in getting the answers to questions such as “Is the call to action identifiable on the homepage?” and “What information did users feel was more valuable on the homepage?”. It often takes the form of interviews or conversations. Qualitative research helps you to understand why people do the things they do.
a. Analyzing qualitative data
When compared to quantitative data, Qualitative data requires more effort to analyze as the data comprises text, images and videos which are contextual to each user.
Eg: Thematic analysis: This analysis is about observing the data keenly in different contexts and drawing patterns.
The above images explain the landscape of questions that can be answered by research methods
- Behavioral research — Used to understand “what people do”
- Attitudinal research — Used to understand “what people say”
- Qualitative research — Used to understand “What is the context of each individual while facing an issue, and understand the depth of the issue”
- Quantitative research — Used when to understand “how many users are facing the issues & what is the impact?”
How to do research
Research is done to understand the user’s needs, behaviours, experiences and motivations through various methods. Research has three parts:
- Gathering data
- Synthesizing that data to establish patterns
- Drawing insights from the data to ultimately inform product development and potentially new design problems to solve
a. The Context of Product Use in Research Study
This refers to conditions in which participants how and whether participants in the study area use the product or service in the process. This can be described as:
When studying how a user is naturally using the product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behaviour or attitudes as close to reality as possible. This provides greater validity but less control over what outcome you want from the study. Intercept surveys and data mining or other analytic techniques are quantitative examples of this. [1]
A scripted study is done to focus on the insights on specific usage aspects, such as a newly designed flow. For example, a usability study is usually very tightly scripted and more quantitative in nature, so that it can produce reliable usability metrics.
The hybrid method is a creative form of product usage. For example, Few research methods allow users to interact with and rearrange elements in the design that could be part of a product experience, in order to test how the solutions that they proposed would better meet the needs and to understand why they made certain choices. Concept-testing methods can give a rough approximation of a product or service that matches with what it would provide (and not at the details of the experience) in order to understand if users would need such a product or service. [1]
How to Approach User Research
1. Step 1: The first thing to do before doing any research is to ask the correct research questions. What is your research goal? What are you trying to understand? These are the central questions that have to be answered by the research findings
Example:
a. Research goal: To assess how people make travel decisions
b. What are you trying to understand: I want to understand how people make travel decisions in order to improve that decision-making process.
2. Step 2: Once your research goal is ready, now identify the research questions that need to be answered in order to achieve the goal
Example:
a. What is the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions?
b. What are the different tools participants use to make travel decisions?
c. What are the problems or barriers they encounter when trying to make travel decisions?
d. What are the improvements participants might make to their current decision-making process?
3. Step 3: After identifying research questions, pick the technique that helps get answers for these questions and have a test plan according to the technique chosen.
Writing a test plan will vary for different research techniques (listed in the table below).
Let’s take an example of how to write the test plan for user interviews. A researcher questions people that use a product or a process and records their answers. The nature of the questions depends on the intent of the research, but the main goal is to extract useful insights that can be used for product ideation and improvement.
Example:
a. Research goal: To assess how people make travel decisions
b. Research questions: What is the end-to-end process of how participants are making travel decisions?
c. Test plan questions for a user interview
- Question 1: Think about the last time you travelled. Please walk me through your decision-making process.
- Question 2: Please explain how you felt during that process.
- Question 3: What other factors influenced your decision to travel?
There are different methods to do research in a design process, Every method has a unique process and outcome that can be accomplished from it.
One of the important things to consider while making a choice on a research method is the phase of the product and its objectives.
The image below describes the methods that are preferred in these stages.
Research should be an ongoing process — it’s returned to repeatedly throughout the process. You should iterate the designs after the test.
- Research
- Design
- Prototype
- Build
- Test
It’s important that this process is a loop that we run through repeatedly. By undertaking user research, we can frame a problem, design, prototype, build it, and finally, return to our users to test our assumptions.
Tips / Best Practices
- Be specific about the research goal
- Choose the appropriate method for the respective outcomes by referring to table 2.0
- Be focused and relevant to what you’re trying to understand in the research
- Always try to write Research questions in the form of a question
Checklist
- Understand at what stage of design you want to do research
- Have all the research goals and research questions documented
- Pick an appropriate technique to get answers for questions that matches your intent
Related Topics
Quick Question
Imagine that you have a problem of structuring your navigation. Which research technique is more appropriate to solve the problem?
a. Card Sorting
b. User surveys
c. Ethnography
d. Contextual Inquiry
Leave your answer in the comments section below!
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