UX Research Methods in 2024
In rapid technological advancements and evolving user needs, utilizing UX research methods is essential for creating customer-oriented and impactful UX design solutions. In this article, you will learn top-tier methods for UX research to drive outstanding digital products based on insights into online user behavior, needs, navigational challenges, likes, and preferences.
UX research experts frequently talk about user experience (UX) in product development nowadays to create digital products that are easy to use and helpful for people. Choosing and implementing the proper UX research method can help your business validate product design concepts, save development costs, and ensure the final result meets business and users’ needs.
This article reviews user experience research methods frequently used by our specialists in 2024 during design and development projects. We’ll teach you how to pick the correct method, like focus groups or a card sorting step-by-step.
What are UX research methods?
A UX research method is a technique frequently used by UX researchers to investigate the current state of your digital product and its usability issues.
UX researchers use common user experience research methods to better understand your client’s needs, wants, online behavior, decision-making process, and what motivates them to buy from you. Moreover, crafting a user story mapping allows you to visualize how customers perceive your products or services.
To our knowledge, there are over 20 different research techniques for you to look through and choose the right research method. It does not mean you need to use every available strategy. UX researchers carefully analyze project goals and requirements to pick 1–3 most suitable UX research techniques.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are various types of user research techniques. Depending on your research goals, available resources, and the stage of the product design process, you can use qualitative and quantitative, behavioral and attitudinal ways.
Quantitative research helps validate your design concept and assumptions related to UX design principles and collect measurable data about your users’ behavior. We recommend using quantitative research techniques to analyze the current state of your product and collect data to uncover user behaviors, conversion rates, drop rates, user journeys, and most popular navigational flows, to name a few. This information will help you make data-driven design decisions during the product development process.
Qualitative research, on the other hand, enables you to get insights into how users perceive your product and what they think about it. In particular, qualitative UX research methods can help you discover how users interact with your product and whether the information architecture is clear, learn about users’ pain points within qualitative data, and create users’ mental models.
Behavioral research is when you directly observe a person and their actions. Suppose you want to validate your assumption of whether your users will understand a new feature before implementing it. In this case, usability tests and user interviews can help you collect valuable user feedback for decision-making.
In a way, behavioral research bridges quantitative and qualitative studies and longitudinal research methods to quantify human behavior and collect new data.
Attitudinal research categorizes attitudes or collects self-reported data, usually in the form of quotations, that can help track or discover essential issues to address.
It’s important to note that the right combination of different methods can provide you with a holistic analysis of your product. Relying on either behavioral research or analytical data is not enough to validate your assumptions and make data-driven decisions.
We’ve also created this chart to help you better understand which methods are the most suitable for qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, and attitudinal analysis, with each technique explained in detail in the following paragraphs.
Types of UX research methods.
Top 14 user experience research methods
If you develop a new digital solution or redesign an existing product, you might wonder what user research methodologies will help you achieve your research goals faster.
As UX design agency in London, we’ve covered the top UX research methods our experts frequently use while working on design and research projects. These include, but are not limited to, usability tests, user interviews, field studies, focus groups, diary studies, online surveys, card sorting, five-second testing, A/B testing, design review, tree testing, eye-tracking, competitor analysis, and user personas.
Let us explain the most frequently used methods in detail.
1. Usability tests
Did you know that changes are 10 times more expensive to implement during the development phase than during design? Roger Pressman, a software engineer, and a book author, shared this conclusion in his book, “Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach.”
Based on our experience, a lot of bugs and fixes can be avoided by investing in early usability testing.
This is one of the UX design research methods UX experts use to see how users interact with an existing product or test a new design solution through a prototype.
You can test individual tasks, such as users’ perception of a home page, or complex navigational flows, like user registration flow.
Usability testing reveals where users face challenges in understanding your product or a prototype and what causes frustration. The output is valuable user feedback that you can implement to improve the usability of your product.
Usability testing is in progress.
2. User interviews
It is a qualitative UX research method that helps you get to know your users in person. It is usually a one-on-one offline or remote session with one of your former customers or someone from your target audience.
The goal of a user interview is to understand the pain points, motivations, and behavior of your target audience, which will help you get answers to your research questions.
We recommend asking open-ended questions during user interviews, making your test participants think and open up to you. Let them know there is no right or wrong answer. They should understand you are particularly interested in their experience and every opinion counts.
The following are a few question examples you can ask participants during the test:
- What would you like to achieve by using our product?
- Can you recall the last time you experienced challenges using our product?
- What do you like about our product?
- If you could change anything in the product, what would it be?
- How would you rate the product overall?
A user interview is in progress.
3. Field study
This research method is frequently used if you need to test product usage in “the field” and context rather than in a research room.
Imagine you want to test the usability of a new football fan app. Where is the best place to see how users interact with an app? Correct—the football stadium! This is the natural environment for football fans, where you can observe how they behave, when they use an app, and why.
Ultimately, field studies can help you:
- Observe how people interact with your product in the real world rather than in a lab or research room.
- Challenges your product helps to solve.
- Issues that you would not be able to discover in labs, such as poor wifi connectivity or multitasking, to name a few.
A field study is in progress.
4. Focus groups
It is a typical qualitative research method that involves bringing together a group of participants, usually 6 to 10 people, in a facilitated discussion to collect their feedback, opinions, perceptions, and recommendations on a particular topic or product.
Note that we’ve mentioned it is a facilitated process of data gathering. A moderator facilitates focus groups by guiding discussions and ensuring every typical focus group member has a chance to contribute.
Like user interviews, we recommend asking open-ended questions to encourage participants to share their pain points, thoughts, and feelings.
Based on our experience, this is an excellent method to gather ideas you would not have discovered in-house. We recommend running focus group interviews at the beginning of a UX design process.
Focus group interviews are in progress.
5. Diary studies
It’s one of the qualitative research methods that can provide you with a user’s personal insights, thoughts, and feelings related to a particular product or a service over a period of time.
This research process literally involves asking test participants to write a diary sharing their experiences for research purposes.
For example, imagine you want to know at what point in time and under what circumstances people open a food delivery app. You are also interested in their motivations and purchase experience.
At this point, you can ask a test participant to write a diary, including their feelings, experiences, and challenges. If you need this information while developing a new UX strategy, we recommend providing test participants with a template to fill out. This way, you’ll ensure that vital information will be included.
Diary studies let UX researchers capture in-the-moment insights and understand how users’ interactions evolve over time. They are exceptionally helpful in understanding users’ long-term habits, documenting their journeys, and evaluating the impact of design changes.
A diary study is in progress.
6. Online surveys
Online surveys are frequently used during the UX research process to collect quantitative data from a lot of participants. They are usually conducted through digital platforms, such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform, to name a few.
This is one of the common UX research methods because it offers a number of advantages, such as:
- Easy to scale.
- Ease of distribution through various online platforms and social media networks.
- Quick and efficient data collection.
- Easy to process the collected data and visualize findings in graphs.
- Cost-effective.
We recommend asking closed-ended questions with simple answers “yes” or “no” and multiple-choice questions. This way, it will be easy to process data and build graphs. Note that this method is designed to help you grasp commonalities with users. If you want to ask open-ended questions, using UX research methodologies, like user interviews or diary studies, is better.
The process of filling out an online survey.
7. Card sorting
Card sorting is helpful if your goal is to understand how your target audience categorizes information.
Imagine you offer multiple services related to product design and development. Now, you are in the process of redesigning your website, and you wonder how to group your services in an easy-to-grasp way. In this case, card sorting with your target audience will help you understand how people perceive every service and where they would natively navigate to find one.
Based on our experience, card sorting is exceptionally helpful in creating information structure and navigational website structures.
You can also use this user experience research method while working on complex websites with submenus.
Card sorting is in progress.
8. Five-second testing
This research method is designed to test the participants’ first impression of your product and discover what features and design elements they understand at first glance and which they don’t.
Why is it important?
According to a Stanford University study, consumers evaluate a business’s credibility based on their website design. Considering the fact that it only takes a few seconds to make a first positive or negative impression on your website, it’s essential that your website looks trustworthy.
That’s what five-second testing can help you achieve.
We recommend hiring a few test participants and showing them your current (or an updated) user interface design for five seconds. They don’t need to navigate anywhere. The purpose of this study is to catch their first impressions.
You can ask questions like:
- What is your first impression of the design?
- What emotions or feelings does this design evoke?
- What design elements caught your attention?
- What do you think this website deals with?
Five-second testing is in progress.
9. A/B testing
A/B testing is also referred to as split testing. It’s a simple but powerful research methodology that helps compare two or more variations of a webpage, an ad, or other design elements to determine what performs better.
It’s frequently used to improve usability and increase conversion rates.
The logic is simple.
Suppose you have a landing page where you’d like to raise the conversion rate. You don’t know what elements are the most impactful and directly influence the conversion rate. Therefore, you prepare several variations of your website’s landing pages with slight differences, such as background colors or fonts and different button sizes or copies, to name a few.
The goal is to determine a landing page with the best performance and understand why it performs better than the other ones. Based on our experience, a CTA (call-to-action) copy has a strong impact on a conversion rate. Therefore, it’s one of the elements we recommend for A/B testing.
It is crucial to have a sufficiently large sample size to get statistically significant results. Moreover, altering only one variable at a time is vital to grasp users’ favorite version and why.
A/B testing example.
10. Design review
A design review is a quick assessment of your digital product’s interface by UX experts.
You can conduct a quick design review in-house if you have a UX team. Alternatively, you can hire UX designers to help you with an expert review.
This UX research method is helpful when you need expert advice on the problematic user flows in your product. Suppose some of your website users don’t finish a registration flow and drop for some reason. In this case, UX designers and UX researchers will holistically review your website, its information architecture, and navigation to detect usability issues.
It’s essential to take into account that a design review does not include usability testing and user interviews with your target audience and former clients. Instead, it represents your UX experts’ opinions and points of view on the product’s UI and UX.
A design review can help you:
- Get a fresh perspective on everyday challenges
- Improve your product’s usability at a low cost
- Prioritize development efforts to focus
- Reduce development time and costs
Design review example.
11. Tree testing
The tree testing method assesses the information architecture of a website or an application.
The data collected from tree testing helps you understand where users navigate first when they land on your digital product and whether they are able to find what they are looking for in three clicks.
Why three clicks?
An unofficial three-click rule to navigation states that users should always be able to find their desired information in less than three clicks. Jeffrey Zeldman, an American entrepreneur, and a web designer, first mentioned this rule in his book “Taking Your Talent to the Web.”
It’s important to mention that users are exposed to a text-based version of your product, which represents a hierarchy (or a “tree”) of all topics. As a next step, you give a particular task to test participants, such as finding a piece of information or navigating to a specific web page.
We recommend making the tests up to 10-20 minutes long to ask test participants to complete several tasks simultaneously.
Tree testing research methodology provides valuable insights into how users perceive and interact with your product’s navigation, leading to improved findability and easier access to information.
Tree testing example.
12. Eye-tracking
Eye tracking is a research method to measure the eye gaze. In particular, UX researchers use dedicated eye-tracking devices to record test participants’ eye movements for the purpose of analyzing the data and defining issues related to usability.
This research helps answer such questions as:
- At what part of the web page is a test participant looking?
- How much time did the test participant spend looking at a particular design element? Why?
Having this research data, UX design companies can design more usable products, direct users’ attention to particular design elements, and create more catchy ads.
Nowadays, many affordable alternatives offer screen-based tracking. Online tools like Hotjar or Mouseflow can help you track user mouse movements, scroll depth, and clicks. This quantitative data can help you better understand whether your current product design meets users’ needs and whether users perform actions you want them to do on a particular web page.
Eye-tracking example.
13. Concept testing
Concept testing is about asking your target audience about your new product’s ideas, values, features, and services before launching any.
You can run surveys with close-ended questions with “yes” and “no” answers and multiple choice questions as a part of concept testing or ask open-ended questions to collect users’ feedback.
The following are a few cases when concept testing can be helpful for you:
- You want to develop a new product and learn your target audience’s point of view on pricing and features.
- You want to add a new feature to an existing product.
- You want to redesign a homepage and ensure users will understand the value proposition.
- You want to update a current logo and need users’ insights before implementing new design ideas.
You can use images, videos, logos, or variations of one web page for concept testing. Being exposed to visuals, your test participants can compare several concepts side by side and immediately provide you with their feedback and preferences.
Concept testing example.
14. User personas creation
It is a user research method that helps classify different target audiences with similar online behavior, which you can serve with your product or service.
User personas are usually created by UX experts who conduct user interviews and analyze the target audience’s needs, wants, challenges, and motivations. Collecting this research data and putting it together in a table (like in our example below) helps designers create a user-centered product design. Moreover, it makes the overall product design and development process much more manageable.
As a UX design agency in London, we recommend including the following information while creating user personas:
- Users’ educational background
- Lifestyle
- Interests
- Online behavior patterns
- Goals
- Frustrations related to your product
- What they like about your product
- Their opinions and suggestions
The image below shows one of the user personas our product designer and UX researcher created when developing a healthcare platform.
User persona example.
How to choose a UX research method
By now, we’ve listed and reviewed 14 frequently used research methods. However, how do you know which user experience research method to use and when?
As a UX research agency, we know that too many types of user research methods can be confusing. Besides, some of them might sound similar, leaving you puzzled.
That’s why we’ve written this paragraph and outlined the key factors to consider while choosing a research methodology for your project.
1. Define the research goals
Every method helps tackle a particular UX problem. However, it would be best to understand what issues you want relating to your product and what data you need to solve the problem with the right user research method.
In other words, you have to set research objectives and evaluate the research impact on UX before choosing user research techniques.
Suppose you are in the process of a website redesign. You believe your website’s design is outdated, which results in high bounce rates. This is your assumption, which you will be able to test by using the right UX research method.
Some of your research goals could be the following:
- Define the needs of my target audience.
- Understand where users struggle after landing on my website.
- Clarify what is missing on my website that makes users leave.
Setting clear objectives will help you understand what answers you expect to get from user experience research and what methods can help you do it.
Once you define your research questions, we recommend determining your product development stage.
2. Define your product development process stage
There are several steps in the product development stage, such as product discovery, UX research, UX audit, prototyping, product design, iteration stage, development, and implementation.
Depending on your research objectives and the product development process stage, you’ll use different user research methods.
For instance, if your team is at an early stage in product development, doing exploratory research or descriptive research using such methods as field studies, user interviews, and focus groups will help you collect valuable research insights to shape your future design and development decisions.
On the other hand, if you want to test a design concept and get users’ feedback on a product prototype, then evaluative research methods such as remote usability testing, split testing, or online surveys will work best.
3. Consider available resources
At this point, you should already know your research objectives and where you are in the product development process. You might also already know which methodologies to use to gain the required information.
However, we recommend one last step before you start — consider available resources, including time, budget, and team setup.
Based on our experience, some user research methods require more time, effort, and expertise than others.
For example, usability testing requires a UX researcher to recruit test participants from your target audience, conduct remote usability testing or onsite interviews, record sessions, analyze the findings, and put together a report with essential findings for UX designers.
Conducting research can sometimes take several months before a researcher can present valuable insights.
Keep in mind that there might be instances where is no right UX research method. In this case, the best approach is to use a combination of ways to get a well-rounded view of your users and their needs.
When should you do user research?
The statistics indicate that 91% of unsatisfied customers never complain about their bad experience, leaving without giving feedback. Through this aspect, we’ve briefly explained the most commonly used methods and how to choose one depending on your research goals, product development process stage, and available resources.
Let’s cover cases where using UX research methodologies is essential and highly recommended.
1. Develop a new product
If you build a new product based on your assumptions and market knowledge, you’ll most likely miss something vital for your users.
That’s why we always stress the importance of conducting UX research at the early stages of the product development process to understand user needs, goals, and pain points. This helps in defining the scope and direction of the product.
2. Validate a design concept
Suppose you’ve created multiple UX design examples for your future product. How do you know which is the best and will meet your users’ and business needs?
If you are at this step now, we recommend conducting several usability tests to see whether users can easily understand and navigate your product. Based on our experience, 5 usability tests are enough to discover around 80% of all usability problems.
This way, you’ll save significant resources in developing a product or feature.
3. Improve the usability of an existing product
User experience research methods like usability testing, heuristic evaluation, and analysis can help you assess the usability and user-friendliness of a product, identifying areas of improvement.
If you know what areas of your product cause frustration and misunderstanding, you can improve your product’s performance by implementing users’ feedback.
Based on our experience, it’s often faster and more cost-effective to conduct UX research, implement impactful data-driven design decisions, and then redesign the entire product.
4. Get feedback on new feature ideas
Research techniques are not limited to specific project phases. Instead, you can use them continuously to gather customer feedback and insights to support ongoing improvements and updates to the product.
Suppose you want to develop a new product feature. As a UX design company, we recommend a proven-to-work approach with optimal time and resource allocation — test your ideas with your target audience, implement their feedback, and then develop a user-centered product design.
This way, you’ll ensure that your current and potential users need the new feature and will be able to understand and use it easily.
Final thoughts on UX design research methods
User experience research is still a new addition to the design process for many UX design agencies and worldwide. We’ve worked with and educated many partners on the business value of UX design and research.
We believe the demand for research will continue rising in the foreseeable future as more companies will rely on data-driven design decisions.
In this article, we’ve covered the most used UX research methods by designers and researchers to create delightful user experiences and help users solve their problems.
Concluding this article, we want to remind you that your project’s specific context and goals should drive the choice and application of methods. By utilizing appropriate research methodologies, your product team can create digital products and services that meet your users’ needs and your business goals.
Contact us if you need help with UX research. At Limeup, we create user-centered UX design and development solutions for startups and enterprises worldwide.