A Beginners Guide to UX Research

So this blog is mainly for UI designers, but let’s get a little more functional and instead focus on an incredibly important part of the websites/software/app design process and that is UX research.

So most companies nowadays ascribe to the 5 steps of design thinking and/or the double diamond approach to design. Which basically aligns to the process of: Epathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

So basically the starting process of any large website/software/app project is the Empathize stage, which to put it simply means the ‘understand the user and their problems’ stage. What this involves is different for every project but at its core it mainly involves UX research and competitor analysis.

And what is UX Research you ask?
UX research is the act of interviewing, researching and observing users to understand their pain points and opportunities for fixing or negating those pain points.

Now, if you’re building a brand new website/app/system (let’s abbreviate these 3 to WAS for now) then you don’t have any users to research right? Well that’s wrong, you can either research similar user groups with interests in your WAS or you can interview people who use similar programs, hey you can even just interview your friends and family, it’s all valid and helpful just to varying degrees.

So how do I do UX Research?
Well I’m glad you asked, once again I need to say: “It’s different for every project” but in general terms I would go through these steps.

1. Do a kickoff meeting
   This is the monster session that’s 2–3hours long where you really clarify a huge amount of things, from the background of the project to scope, people involved, an action plan and a definition of success. This should be a really meaty and long conversation with everyone involved and at the end you should have hundreds of notes that you’ll need to compile into a clear map of project details.
2. Create 1–3 Clarifier Workshops
   Once you’ve finished your initial kickoff meeting you need to do further meetings with all or some stakeholders to clarify everything from the kickoff meeting. Here you should be starting to define user groups and general high-level customer journeys and processes which you build on over time.
3. Define your stakeholders, also known as user groups
   After all of that clarification you should have a really good idea of who the main users are of the WAS. So you now need to group them into around 2–8 groups (also know as personas) and then it’s time to define each of those groups needs, actions, motivations, pain points and opportunities.
4. Write a research plan (and get it signed off, if you’re dealing with a client and this thing you’re making is not a personal project)
   This may come before step 3, or after, the order is not set in stone, but what it should include is; what you’re attempting to do in your research, what you want to achieve and who and when you’ll be interviewing users and stakeholders.
5. Create an interview list and schedule interviews.
   Once the research plan is defined and signed off by the project sponsor (the main person who is in charge of the project) it’s now time to draw up a list of people you want to interview and the really, really hard part of all of this: scheduling interviews. This is especially tricky as so many people nowadays are busy and don’t answer emails but you need to persevere and schedule in everyone you can.
6. Write a script and interview questions unique for each user group.
   This doesn’t need explanation but basically make sure before writing questions you define the user groups and their wants and needs, then base your questions around these. It can be really useful to intially write ‘How might we’ questions (I would google this term) based on each user’s motivations to help you brainstorm what are the best questions to ask.
7. Write down all their answers in short sentances, as post-its (digital or physical).
   As you interview each user write down notes in post-it form, each note can be either an observation of a process, a pain point, an opportunity or an interesting quote.
8. Group these notes into similar categories, this is known as affinity mapping.
   Now it’s time for affinity mapping. For each user group, compile all of your hundreds of post-its and group them into similar categories. Same again you’ll need to google this process.
9. Pull insights from these affinity maps.
   Once you’ve completed your affinity mapping based on user groups, it’s time to decide on insights based on these. Write them all out and try to define which are the most important and which really need to be focused on when building a new WAS.
10. Write your research report including findings and key insights.
    Once you’ve compiled and reviewed your findings and insights you need to build out a visually interesting and concise research report containing such things as who you interviewed, how you interviewed them, what other processes were involved in researching the WAS, what pain points, insights and opportunities appeared and also include any user journeys, personas, process maps or service blueprints too.
11. Define a clear set of next steps as part of the ideation phase.
    So you’re all done! But finally you need to provide the client/project sponsor a clear set of ‘next steps’, define exactly what needs to happen now that the Emphasize/Reseach has been completed, basically you need to explain to the project sponsor what’s going to happen in the next stage; the ideate phase. Which we’ll tell you about another day.

Best of luck, this has been an extremely high level overview of UX research, but maybe these steps can helpinform you in future, especially if you know very little about UX research or service design.