4 UX Research Methods and When to Use Them

After planning your research framework and defining your objectives, it is time to find the most suitable technique for your project’s goals and gather valuable insights. 

Research is crucial in the UX design process as it should inform every design decision. In this article, we’ll go through the most common research methods, and you’ll choose the right one.

What are UX research methods?

A UX research method is the process of generating insights into your users and how they behave.

These methods can help you:

• Learn about your users’ behavior;
• Find the challenges and pain points in your product or site;
• Create better user personas or definition of your ICP (ideal customer profile);
• Run experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.

Using research methodologies like surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, and card sorting to look for user challenges and turn them into a goldmine of opportunities to enhance the user experience.

Before we get into the methods, you must answer two questions:

• What stage are you in during the development process?
• What types of insights are you trying to uncover?

Stages of Web Development

The web development process can be broken down into four stages:

• Discover: Understand your users, their needs, and whether the service you’re planning to offer will truly solve their problem;
• Create: Develop early versions of your digital service with user needs guiding every step of the process;
• Test: Put your designs in front of real users—whether wireframes, prototypes, or fully functioning websites—and evaluate how well they work. Iterate, refine, and test again.
• Review: Launching isn’t the final goal. Continue gathering feedback, monitoring performance, and refining your service to ensure it remains user-friendly.

Types of UX Insight

User testing generates two main types of insight. Some research methods capture one, while others reveal both. Remember that what users say doesn’t always align with what they actually do.

• Behavioural (what people do): Reveals intuitive, automatic behaviors. This helps you understand how easy or natural it is for users to interact with your digital service;
• Attitudinal (what people say): Captures conscious, reflective feedback. This lets you know what users actually want, how they feel about your service, and whether it meets their expectations.

Best UX research methods

There are many UX research techniques, each serving a special purpose and offering unique insights into user behaviors and their needs. Here, we’ll look at the most common research methods you should know and try out. Let’s start!

1. User interviews

User interviews are qualitative research methods that involve open-ended and guided discussions with users to gather detailed insights into their experiences, needs, behaviors, and motivations.

You should typically ask questions about a specific topic during an interview and analyze the responses. The result will depend on the questions you ask, how you ask them, and how you follow up on their answers.

It’s our responsibility as researchers to drive users to the problems they are facing. The narration of events can help you gather details related to user behavior. That’s why you should:

• Begin with a broad context: Ensure that your questions don’t begin with your product;
• Ask questions: Keep asking questions that focus on tasks that users are trying to complete;
• Invest in analysis: Get transcripts and share the result with your team.

When to conduct user interviews?

This method is usually applied at the beginning and the end of a project. At the start of the project, you can focus on understanding your target users, their perspectives, and how they’ll interact with your product.

By the end of the project, conducting new user interviews—often with a fresh group—serves as a crucial test of your product’s usability and appeal. These insights offer firsthand perspectives on user experiences, highlighting strengths and uncovering opportunities for improvement.

2. Field studies

Field studies (also known as ethnographic research) are activities conducted in the user’s environment instead of within a lab or office. They are an excellent way to uncover context, unknown motivations, or constraints that affect the user experience.

The benefit of field studies is observing people in their native environment, offering a glimpse of the context in which your product is used. It’s crucial to understand where users complete tasks, learn about their needs, and collect valuable stories.

When to conduct field studies?

This can be used at every stage of your project – the two times to conduct field studies are:

• As part of the discovery stage to define direction and understand the context of when and how users interact with your product;
• During the usability testing phase, to evaluate the solution you offer in real-world contexts.

3. Focus groups

A focus group is a qualitative research method that involves studying a group of people, their beliefs, and opinions. It’s generally used for market research or gathering feedback on products.

Focus groups can help you better understand:

• How users perceive your product;
• What users consider the most important features of a product;
• The problems that users experience with the product.

It’s important to prepare a UX research plan before conducting the research:

• Write a script to help guide the conversation;
• Ask open-ended questions that focus on the topic you want to learn about.

When to conduct focus groups?

This research technique works well to explore user preferences and generate ideas if you’re still formulating your concept, product, or service. During the early stages, you have flexibility and can make bigger changes without high costs. Some researchers also use focus groups after a product launch to collect feedback and uncover areas for improvement.

4. Surveys

Even though surveys are generally used for quantitative research, they also offer qualitative data depending on the type of questions:

• Closed-ended questions: These have a predefined set of answers, including a rating scale or multiple-choice formats;
• Open-ended questions: The questions are usually open-text questions where test participants give their responses freely, resulting in qualitative data.

Ensure that your questions:

• Are easy to understand;
• Does not guide participants to a specific answer;
• Include both open-ended and closed-ended questions;
• Respect participants and their privacy;
• Are consistent in format.

When to conduct surveys?

Even though surveys can be used at every project development and are excellent for continuous product discovery, the specific purpose can vary depending on your research purposes. For example, you may run surveys at:

• Conceptualization phase: To identify patterns, gather preliminary data, trends or potential user segments
• Post-launch or during iterative design cycles: To gather feedback on their satisfaction, feature usage, or improvement suggestions

Which is the best UX research type?

The right research approach depends on your project, goals, and stage of development. The best method is one that delivers the insights you need while making the most of your available resources.

For instance, generative research helps uncover user needs, spark new ideas, and explore opportunities during the early ideation or product discovery phase. As you progress into design and development, evaluative research and quantitative data become essential for refining and validating your decisions.