The king (or queen) of UX research methods, usability testing is most renowned. Used to identify problem areas, opportunities, and make design choices, it tests a product’s usability throughout the design and development phases. A UX researcher observes as a user completes a task and monitors the user’s successes, frustrations, and pathways.

A field study is a type of UX research that takes place in the user’s natural environment. These keep results as true to life as possible without the sway of being in an unnatural or new context. You can conduct other methods of research, like usability tests, with this approach.

A contextual inquiry is a field study where a UX researcher observes the participant using the product in their usual environment. This provides insight into user behavior and reasoning that may be unknown to the user themself. Researchers are either passive (strictly observational) or active (may interact with the user and ask questions).  

Contextual inquiries are different from usability tests because participants use the product the way they usually would without defined tasks.

You should design your digital products to be accessible and ADA compliant to be legally safe, contribute to a fair online environment, and ensure that all members of your audience can easily use your product. Accessibility testing is a type of usability research that discovers usability problems for the disabled, such as the hard of hearing and visually impaired.

Accounting for disabled users means considering factors like designing for the colorblind and writing alt text for the deaf.

Save yourself time by conducting accessibility tests before your standard usability tests on the general user base. If completed the other way around, you may have to redo the standard usability tests after making changes for accessibility.

Diary studies require users to track their personal experiences over a period of days to months. This type of user research uncovers trends in user behavior and emotion. It is optimal for conducting lengthy studies, when you’re tracking change over time, when user response is unpredictable or unplanned, or when direct observation would sway results. You may have users record their experience at defined times or respond to predetermined prompts.

Interviews are one-on-one conversations that help designers build personas and decide on design direction. You can conduct interviews with stakeholders to better understand their product, business goals, and brand. User interviews paint a picture of the user’s experience, thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

Competitive analysis is done at the beginning stages of the design process to gain an understanding of product competitors – their brand, USP, process, features, strengths, and weaknesses. This allows you to create a superior product that stands out while meeting user needs and expectations.

Task analysis is a design research method that puts into perspective the time and effort required to complete tasks so designers can simplify them. By listing all critical tasks and then all of the steps for each, you arm yourself with the knowledge to make a more efficient process. Task analysis is most effective when done by users because it gives a realistic perspective instead of the creator’s ideal scenario.

Persona building is the process of creating fictional characters that represent segments of your target audience. A complete persona calls to mind the audience needs, goals, and motivations discovered in prior research. These characters help designers get in the user’s shoes and create an effective, empathetic design.

From personas, a UX designer can create different narratives or scenarios for users, including their motivations, aims, and desired outcomes. A standard scenario includes what, how, why, and when descriptors that portray a user’s perspective without listing product features. Building scenarios that align with use contexts for product features can guide design choices for those features.

Journey mapping visualizes a user’s process from beginning to end, combining product features and users’ behavioral and emotional reactions. Creating a journey map allows you to comprehend the complete user experience, look for opportunities and bumps in the road, and design a smooth, successful product. A map may consist of several user scenarios.

Focus groups are moderated discussions with a small group of 5 to 10 people on a specific topic or product. Group discussion spurs answers and insights regarding motivations, desires, and frustrations that may not come up in a one-on-one interview. The moderator comes in with a list of questions to help guide and prompt discussion, but the conversation direction may change as discoveries are made.

You can improve user experience and lower the risk of making design changes by using surveys to obtain feedback on overall task experience, design adjustments, new features, or to follow up other research methods for further insight. Surveys can provide quantitative data (close-ended questions) or qualitative data (open-ended questions).

A prototype is a visual representation or tangible model of a product that allows for user and stakeholder feedback. There are low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, from sketches to digital models, that vary in how realistic and engaging they are and the time and cost to create them. The type of prototype used in design research depends on where you’re at in the design process. Use functioning prototypes to test how well a product design works, whether it meets the needs it’s supposed to, and catch errors before full-on development.

Also called split testing, A/B testing compares the effectiveness or user preference of two concepts. It optimizes design and UX by testing whether a design alteration performs better. Generally speaking, you only change one variable at a time to ensure that any difference in response is due to that variable. This change can be as simple as the color or word choice on a button.

Card sorting is a popular, cheap, and useful tool for designers working on a product’s information architecture (i.e., how you structure its content). In card sorting, users group cards labeled with product content categories in a way that makes sense to them. Designers then get a sense of users’ mental models – what users think they know. This inspires information architecture that supports UX because a user’s mental models will affect how they interact with your product.

Tree testing also works to improve your product’s information architecture; only, it’s used to test whether what you’ve already created is easy to navigate. Users are given a text-only version of your product and select where they would go to complete assigned tasks. These tasks can be anything from finding information to purchasing a product. The downfall to tree testing is that it doesn’t account for the visual elements of your product.

First click testing is yet another way to test product navigation, only it focuses on the first click a user makes when given a task. Users that start on the right track, or make the right first click, will complete their task 87% of the time, compared to 46% for those who make the wrong choice. You can conduct these tests on wireframes, prototypes, or fully developed products depending on where you are in the design process.

Eye tracking is a form of usability testing that uses infrared technology to watch where users are looking on a page and monitor unconscious responses to page stimuli by tracking eye movement and pupil dilation. This UX research tool is great for assessing what design aspects are drawing user attention and which are getting skipped over.

Benchmark testing is what most companies do when they track key performance indicators (KPIs) over time. It’s a repeat process of gathering the same UX usability metrics and comparing them to a baseline to assess goals, track progress, and compare success with other models or competitors. Gather your metrics consistently either from surveys, usability tests, or analytics tools.

Search engine optimization (SEO) for external search engines like Google has blown up, but few and far between are the teams using internal search engines for digital products. Including a search engine on your website better serves visitors and is a great way to gain user insight. Search-log analysis records the searches users conduct on your site and uses them to assess what users need and are looking for. It’s an effective way to determine what they are interested in (hello ideation) and what they have a hard time finding on your site.

Tracking online sentiment is the process of monitoring all mentions of a product or brand online and evaluating people’s opinions and feelings about it. Keeping up with online sentiment is an effective way to determine when users are satisfied or dissatisfied with your product. You can track sentiment through polarity (positive, negative, neutral), specific emotions (happy, sad, angry), or interest (interested or not interested). The easiest way to conduct sentiment research is through language processing and machine learning tools, but you can also evaluate responses from qualitative research with a DIY sentiment score chart.