UX Research Process 2023: How to Design For Positive Impact

What is the UX research process?

The UX research process or user experience research process is an integral part of the user-centric product design process that UX experts follow while creating digital products that meet users’ needs and business goals.

It involves researching and analyzing user behavior, current challenges, pain points, and goals. Learning about your users and getting their feedback helps eliminate guesswork for designers and make data-driven design decisions. We learned these insights through our in-depth experience in UX design and research. Furthermore, various studies confirm the positive impact of research on design and development works and, ultimately, business performance.

Example of the UX research process.

According to Interaction Design Foundation, companies investing in user experience research at the beginning of the product development process manage to reduce product development cycles by a whopping 33 to 50%!

This study proves it is more cost-effective to conduct preliminary research, create the data-based design concept, test it with real users, and incorporate research project findings into the final design than fixing a problematic design solution later.

A product design based on research insights not only helps reduce costs and makes the overall design process more effective but is also proven to level up business performance.

According to PWC, implementing a research learning spiral can help you earn more money!

Based on the research conducted by PWC, people are willing to pay more for the experiences that matter most to them:

• 43% of consumers would pay more for greater convenience;
• 42% would pay more for a friendly and welcoming service;
• Roughly 80% of US customers believe convenience, efficiency, knowledgeable service, and easy payment are the most important for good customer service.

PWC customer experience report.

As a UX design company, we believe investing in the user experience research process is the fastest way to create a new impactful digital product or improve the usability of an existing solution.

If you want to create a new product, conducting research will help you better understand your target audience, what challenges they face when using competitor products, where competitors fail to meet users’ needs, and what features will help your product stand out.

If you believe your existing product underperforms for some reason, conducting a UX audit and implementing recommendations before redesigning your product is a go-to strategy to improve your product’s usability and business performance.

Contact us if you need help with user experience research and design. At Limeup, we have a team of 40+ UX experts to help you cope with any UX challenges.

5 UX research process steps

Whether you have an in-house UX team or hire UX designers and researchers for remote collaboration, a solid action plan with to-do steps will help you allocate your resources effectively.

I dedicated this paragraph to explaining the UX research process steps in detail and how we approach UX research at Limeup.

1. Define your goals

Every project we work on starts with discussing the challenges and defining the goals. Our UX team and the client should know why we are working on this research project and what we want to achieve at the end.

Working without clearly defined goals is a waste of time and resources because you won’t know whether the results of your work are meaningful.

I recommend asking the following questions while discussing your project with a client and defining research goals:

SMART goals.

• Why do you want to conduct user experience research?
• What do you need to know that will help your product move forward?
• What information would be actionable?
• What company goals will this research support?
• Where are you in the product design process? (Are you developing a new product from scratch or improving an existing solution).
• Do you know your target audience?

These are just a few questions to help you drive the conversation and brainstorming. At Limeup, we recommend asking specific, practical, and actionable questions, like the ones above, that will help you critically assess the current state of your product and define the UX research process goals.

Let me give you an example of theoretical UX challenges and questions you could ask to define the research goals.

Let’s imagine you run an e-commerce website selling sports bags for women. You noticed that many users abandon their shopping carts for some reason. As a website owner, you believe redesigning the website might help improve its conversion rates. However, one of the UX experts in your team has recommended conducting user research to make data-driven design decisions. Now, you gathered your product team to discuss what research goals you should set.

Some of the questions to help you define the right goals could be the following:

• Can our users successfully navigate to the checkout page on our website? (Yes or No, and Why).
• Do our potential customers understand our unique selling proposition?
• What websites do women think of when they want to buy a sports bag?
• What criteria do women consider when choosing between different websites where to make a purchase?
• Which CTAs have the highest conversion rate?

Every question from the list above can be a separate future research goal and would require different methods for investigation.

Most importantly, each research goal helps discover answers that support your high-level business objectives.

There is one more point I’d like to bring your attention to here.

Asking questions from the beginning ensures you’ll focus on researching the actual problems instead of validating your ideas and solutions.

Once you know what you’d like to focus on and achieve at the end of the research, it’s time to pick the most suitable user research methods.

2. Pick UX research methods

A UX research method is an approach UX experts usually use to gather insights about your target audience.

Based on my experience, various user experience research methods can help you achieve specific goals, such as collecting user feedback on your product or measuring your product’s usability. However, understanding which research method to use in different cases is one of the most important skills any UX expert should have. Ideally, you should use a combination of 2–3 methods during the UX research process. It’s up to your team to decide which ones are the most suitable for your particular case.

Landscape of user research methods.

I believe it’s also worth mentioning that all common UX research methods can be categorized into two broad user groups based on the various data collected and output: qualitative and quantitative methods.

Quantitative methods will help you collect measurable user behavior data and validate your assumptions. I recommend using analytical tools to measure your product’s performance. They help gather data about your users’ navigational flow, user journeys, most popular pages, conversion rates, drop rates, and retention rates, to name a few. Furthermore, quantitative research insights can help you make data-driven design decisions.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that quantitative studies alone cannot reveal all insights into why users behave in certain ways. That’s where qualitative research can help you discover more human insights.

Qualitative methods are used in behavioral research to learn users’ feedback on your product, their online behavior, pain points, and goals. If you want to know your target audience’s opinion on a particular question or validate whether they’ll understand a new product feature, the following are a few methods to collect qualitative data: the usability test and user interviews.

As a UX design company with 10+ years of experience, we know that roughly 5 user tests are enough to reveal over 80% of usability problems in your product. You can conduct user interviews with some of your customers and ask open-ended questions to learn more about their opinion and experience related to your product.

While conducting the discovery phase, usability tests, market research, card sorting, and user behaviors analysis, ensure your personal opinion is not passed to your test participants and does not alter findings.

Mixing qualitative and quantitative user research methods gives you a holistic overview of your UX problem.

I prepared a table with the most commonly used UX research methods to explain what every method means and when it’s best to use them.

Before picking any method from the table, I recommend you consider the pros and cons of every technique.

For example, running online surveys is easy and cheap, but you’ll have to design surveys in a way to be able to collect data and analyze it effectively. On the other hand, user groups interview is time-consuming and costly. However, they will most likely reveal more insights about your users and provide in-depth contextual information.

While choosing the right method, I recommend you keep in mind the time frame, available resources, and your research goals.

3. Create a user research plan

A UX research plan is usually a document that clearly outlines the objectives and different research methods used during the user experience research process.

As a UX designer, I’d say it is critical to put together a user research plan since it helps ensure that research is conducted systematically and efficiently.

Based on our experience at Limeup, a well-crafted user research plan should contain the following:

1. Brief research study overview (including the title, purpose, scope, and timeline).
2. Team setup (a UX team, stakeholders, product managers, etc).
3. Problem statement (outline the challenges the research is intended to address).
4. The goal of the research (what you aim to achieve at the end of the study).
5. Methodology (what user experience research methods will help you achieve your desired user flow goals).
6. Research participants (how many participants you need for a research study to collect the required data).
7. Incentives (how you will incentivize people to take part in your research).
8. Timeline (how long the study will take).
9. Location (where the investigation study will take place: online or offline).
10. Budget (how much money you will allocate to this study).

Limeup UX research study plan example.

A detailed research plan will help you prepare for the research and clarify who’ll be responsible for communication, participants’ requirement, and running customer interviews.

Working at a UX design agency in London and with companies worldwide, I assure you that communicating the details is essential for success. Otherwise, your UX researchers might forget to record user sessions or take notes during the UX research process. Missing essential details might adversely impact product design in the future.

Therefore, plan UX research carefully.

For your convenience, I’ve prepared an example you can use together with your product team and stakeholders.

4. Recruit participants

At this point, you already know the research goals and have a detailed step-by-step plan of how the UX research process will be organized.

As a next step, your task is to find and recruit research participants to help you answer your research questions.

As a senior UX designer at Limeup, I’ve assisted UX teams in recruiting research participants.

Here is our recruitment process at Limeup you can easily replicate:

1. Identify your target audience (your research questions will help you grasp who to invite to the interview).
2. Create a screening questionnaire (it will help you define the most suitable test participants among all applicants).
3. Find test participants (we use the power of social media to find the target users).
4. Prepare research incentives (Amazon vouchers or local store vouchers will help incentivize people to take part in your market research).
5. Define what methods to use (usability tests, user interviews, or task analysis, to name a few).
6. Schedule sessions with the participants (inform participants about the date, time, and place of the test).

The following are a few tips on how to make your research sessions with participants more productive and gain the required information.

Based on our experience, at least 5 client interviews are needed to answer one research question. Therefore, we recommend recruiting up to 10 participants in case some sessions won’t be informative, or some participants won’t show up.

5. Analyse and present findings

You are at the last step of the UX research process, with a bunch of qualitative and quantitative data for review.

At this point, your task should be to analyze this data yourself or pass it to a dedicated team member who’ll do it for you. For example, at Limeup, research data is collected and analyzed by UX researchers.

Here is what we do to process the obtained research data:

1. Get research notes organized (if there are any).
2. Watch session recordings and document the highlights.
3. Define what features were the most important for users.
4. Define the most common challenges faced by users.
5. Check if users mentioned any opportunities for improvement.
6. Categorize data based on users’ challenges, questions, and recommendations.

Types of reports with UX research findings.

The research highlights are added to the report with the key findings, usability issues, design issues, best practices, and actionable improvement recommendations.

We also recommend adding video snippets and user quotes to back up your research findings.

One more important thing to mention here is to keep your UX research report succinct! Your product team and decision-makers don’t need to know all the details and peculiarities of the process. Your task is to communicate the key findings and propose a list of improvements.

There is no single best format and a way to present the findings and recommendations. Depending on what you want to communicate, you can choose a pdf file or create custom slides. Ultimately, the best format is the one that helps your audience quickly understand what you are trying to communicate.

At Limeup, we’ve helped many startups and established companies organize and conduct user experience research. Contact us if you need help with UX research. Our team of 40+ UX experts is ready to assist you.

Our user research process example

Besides giving you some theoretical knowledge of what the UX research process is and how to implement it, I’d like to show you one of the projects our UX team worked on.

We’ve partnered with HousePro, a US property management company, to design and build a real estate platform from scratch.

This was a rather complex project since our experts had to conduct user experience research, create a validated design concept and build a new web and mobile application in roughly 5 months.

Let me share how we approached, planned, chose the research tool, and organized the investigation study process for HousePro.

The initial challenge was to come up with research questions to conduct user interviews with the target audience. Furthermore, our UX team worked together with the client’s product team to define ideal user personas.

At Limeup, we had to understand who’s the end user before planning user tests and recruiting participants.

Here is one of the user personas we’ve created for HousePro.

Limeup created user personas for HousePro.

As a next step, our goal was to understand what areas we wanted to explore and research questions to get answered.

HousePro knew that existing real estate platforms do not address users’ concerns and fully meet their needs.

So, our goal was to research users’ challenges and define what we could potentially design and develop to help HousePro gain a competitive advantage.
In particular, we wanted to understand:

1. What real estate platforms do people currently use and why?
2. What problems do they solve by using those platforms?
3. What challenges do they face while using those platforms?
4. What would be one crucial factor or feature that would make them switch to another platform?

Our UX researcher prepared interview scripts and then started organizing the recruitment process. Our goal was to find and recruit people who have either worked in the property management industry or actively used existing solutions.

The user group was rather specific. Therefore, we spent 3 weeks recruiting participants and running an interviews campaign.

User research insights helped us understand that people wanted to learn as many details about the apartments as possible before arranging visits. Such information as interior design, price history, and legal documents was frequently requested and mentioned by our test participants.

Together with the HousePro product team, we designed a unique solution to address people’s needs and concerns by letting them experience properties through virtual tours.

Augmented reality and virtual property tours.

The virtual property tours feature was one of the solutions developed to help potential tenants, and buyers assess the comfort and the interior of properties without visiting them.

Besides, we’ve also created dedicated financial dashboards reflecting essential information, such as purchase price, renovation costs, and equipment costs, to help people make informed decisions faster.

Our UX strategy, backed up by previous research study findings, helped us design and build a validated real estate platform for HousePro.

In total, we’ve designed over 60 screens and adaptive versions, 80 screens for a mobile version, and a corporate website for HousePro.

Need help with UX research?

Contact us, and let’s discuss how we can help you analyze the current state of your product, and plan and organize a UX research process from A to Z.

Limeup is an established UX design company that creates custom UX design and development solutions for startups and enterprises worldwide. We have a team of design experts, developers, researchers, and consultants dedicated to helping your business grow.