Though it’s become more popular in recent years, User Research can still be met with resistance. Some think it slows projects down or hinders creativity. Others prefer to build the product right away, hoping that they can correct mistakes and learn from failures as they go. And some think they simply know better than their users. Many projects have proven these attitudes costly and ineffective, including Ford’s Edsel brand of cars that cost them $250 million at the time1 (about $2.5 billion today)
What is User Research?
User Research is the cheapest way to learn where your product, brand or service has room for improvement and it is the most effective way to ensure that user needs are met.
The term ‘User Research’ covers a broad range of activities; it’s any study of your target audience, typically looking at their wants, needs and issues. These studies can test existing assumptions or provide enough information to make new, safer assumptions. The goal is to gather whatever data you need to make informed decisions.2 The aim of your research might change as your project progresses but the steps to take remain the same:
- Form Questions
Decide on the scope of your research and choose the question(s) you want answered - Gather Data
Engage with users to conduct research around the question(s) you chose - Analyse Findings
Use your results to form answers to your question(s)
There is a strong relationship between these three steps; the questions you choose to ask will inform the research method you use, which then dictates how you collect the data and in turn, how you analyse results. This article will focus on the way research questions affect the research technique (and vice versa) by looking at some important attributes of User Research.
Qualitative and Quantitative
Qualitative research focuses on understanding needs and motivations; this type of study can tell you what users think or do, and why.3 Qualitative Research requires direct involvement of a researcher and may therefore take up more time and resources. An interview for example, is a qualitative research method; a researcher can pose open-ended questions that can give detailed insights into the topic at hand.
Quantitative Research on the other hand is mainly concerned with numerical data; it can tell you how many people behave or feel a certain way.4 It can also show how long or how successful a task is. Quantitative research is indirect; often data is collected passively, and though these studies may require more data to be collected, they require much less time from a researcher. Analysis of site usage statistics or Surveys are examples of quantitative research.
Questions in quantitative studies are usually closed-ended, making responses quick to capture and easy to analyse. Whereas questions in qualitative studies are open-ended, allowing more detailed responses. While quantitative research is good at clarifying or optimising how something currently operates, it isn’t able to find new insight or generate new ideas — only qualitative research can do this. For example, quantitative research could tell you which payment method is more popular on an e-commerce site but it won’t be able to inform you about alternative payment methods users would like to use.
Attitudinal and Behavioural
Attitudinal research methods are concerned with opinions or what people say, so they focus on listening to users. Surveys are a good example of attitudinal research because they can be used to capture feedback on a product or service.
Behavioural research methods revolve around actions and what people do, so these methods involve observing users. An example could be Visitor Statistics which show how users behave on a site.
It’s important to keep in mind that how users think and how they behave is often different, so a mixture of these approaches might be required to fully understand a problem.5
Four Research Categories
We can use this information to define four groups of User Research:6
- Quantitative-attitudinal
Indirect studies around user opinion - Quantitative-behavioural
Indirect studies into user behaviour - Qualitative-attitudinal
Direct studies around user opinion - Qualitative-behavioural
Direct studies into user behaviour
Before thinking about any particular research methods, we can start by deciding which of these four groups best fits our project. For example, if you’re interested in researching the emotions or opinions of users but you don’t have the time or budget to directly engage with them, you’re looking at the quantitative-attitudinal group. This means your research will involve indirectly listening to users, you’ll be passively collecting large amounts of data from closed-ended questions. Conversely, a qualitative-behavioural study will involve directly observing users, you’ll actively collect open-ended data around how users perform certain tasks.
With a group in mind we can picture the type of question that we might choose to frame our research. For example, we could set out a qualitative-behavioural study looking to answer the question “How do people share our content with friends?”. This doesn’t necessarily reflect the question(s) we will ask users but sets out the question we’re looking to answer with our research.
It’s important that we stick to the same research category through each of these decisions, deciding that a qualitative study suits your project but then framing your research with a question suited to a quantitative study will cause problems. Once we’re happy with our research question we can select a research method that best suits it. Below are just a few examples, we’ll be covering these research methods and more in future articles and you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter below to get notified when we do. Julian has also covered some of these methods in his video — Design Research Workshops: Unlocking Hidden Design Insights.
