It’s 2022, remote UX research should be fast, efficient and cheap… And it is.

In the last decade, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the research and testing world. When I started out in product design, the options were either DIY participant recruitment which was slow and time-consuming or professional consultants which charged a small fortune for access to their participants and wasn’t typically much faster.

Fast forward to 2022 and the availability of fast, effective and cheap research tools & services has, in my opinion, given product managers, designers and UX professionals CHEAT-MODE. So much so, that there really aren’t any excuses for not involving users in any design process now.

Below is my current user research stack that has evolved and worked great for me over the last couple of years. I’m not here to advocate that what I’m doing is superior to any other process, or that the tools are better than any other. The main point of this article is that a process should be adopted. What you choose should work for you and your team. And if you do something radically different, great. Share your methods too :)

1. Miro and Whimsical for planning and visualisation

Both tools are great for collaboration with a remote team to help plan your research efforts.

For example, research maps are a great way to brainstorm and visualise research goals and help formulate the methods and questions involved. I find Whimsical a bit faster when working alone and Miro has stronger collaboration support. You can’t go wrong with either really.

You also can, and I have used these tools along with Google Docs as a repository for the findings and as a method of presenting back insights to clients/stakeholders, but I’ve since found a more efficient way of doing this (see 5.)

Usabilityhub.com for market research and preference testing

Whilst limited in its testing features when compared to tools like Usertesting.com and Userbrain.com (it records answers only and doesn’t record the user session) I find Usabilityhub.com my go-to tool for quick market research and preference testing.

It’s cost-efficient at only $1–2 per participant and often delivers results within minutes. Whilst it doesn’t include a qualification gate for participants (It can’t at this price point) it does have a great results UI that allows you to filter down to the cohort required.

I mainly use UH for surveys when I need to understand users’ attitudinal opinions toward a potential problem or solution, or when I have a UI option that I want to ask for feedback on or run a preference test with.

Userbrain.com for testing prototypes

The next set-up from Usabilityhub in my stack is the wonderful Userbrain.com

I say wonderful because it has a great UX, is backed by a fantastic and helpful team if ever needed and is pay-as-you-go, which is a welcome change compared to the costly enterprise subscription platforms.

UB respondents cost me on average $35 and deliver a 10–15 minute session recording from a script you configure in their platform. The qualification question ensures that only participants that meet your criteria enter your test.

I mainly use UB for testing prototypes or UAT where having the participant’s screen recording and reaction to a product is important, but I’ve also started using the platform for basic unmoderated user interviews. Here I simply link the user to Google documents asking them a series of questions to speak out loud or provide them with a video recording that similarly asks them the questions.

UXtweak.com for testing information architecture

Tree Testing and Card Sorting exercises are a fantastic way to research how users navigate and organise information and are a great way to test navigation structures and content labelling.

UXtweak.com has both research types built into its platform and you can use it both directly with your own users and their paid research panel. I find it easy to use and very cost-effective when compared to tools like Optimalworkshop which is still great, but expensive in comparison.

Worth also checking out Maze.co which is a similar US-based alternative.

Dovetailapp.com for analyzing data and sharing insights

The biggest change to my research stack is Dovetailapp.com Where were you when I needed you in 2018!

Dovetail is a super-smart research repository, that describes itself as a platform to “analyze, synthesize, store, and share your customer research in one collaborative and searchable platform.”.

Basically, you take your user interview footage (and other items) and Dovetail will auto-transcribe the discussions and give you tools to tag the data in a number of ways.

Once you have your data tagged you can use it to organise and visualise the text insights in a number of different views, build sharable insights reports and stitch together highlight reels.

For me, this not only saves time searching through user interviews manually to collect key insights, but it makes the data searchable and sharable in a number of ways that benefit us internally and when presenting research with clients.

I couldn't end without giving nngroup.com a mention as the go-to resource for third party UX research. It’s saved me loads of time in particular when I’ve needed to know best practices for UX and UI patterns.

Thanks for reading. Follow me for more articles like this throughout the year.