Our Favorite Tools for User Research
A growing list of awesome tools for user-centered design.
Before building anything, it’s critical to understand the the story behind the product: who you’re making it for, why they need it, how they’ll interact with it. User research is the gathering and synthesizing of data about user behaviors, needs, and motivations to create a better product with the end-user in mind. It’s how you avoid making assumptions and creating usability failures that don’t meet people’s needs and wants.
There are a staggering number of methodologies and tools for user research and testing, so we asked our product and UX friends to help us round up a more manageable list of tools to check out. The list will be kept updated, so comment or tweet @KnightLab if you have any more suggestions!
This post is excerpted from Issue #11 of The Shed, our newsletter about the tools we use to tell stories. Subscribe for weekly issues!
Tools for Prototyping
InVision
InVision is a popular prototyping and mockup tool built for designers by designers. You can quickly build a clickable prototype, have clients and team members comment directly on the designs, and — most impressively — user test from a nifty mobile app that lets you record screen interaction as well as voice and video of the user.
(h/t Katie Briggs, Dave Stanton, Richard Alvarez)
Flinto
Flinto is a prototyping tool that’s great for quickly and easily prototyping early ideas for mobile, desktop, and web apps to the point where you can start user testing.
(h/t katie zhu)
Pen and paper
It can be easy to get lost in all these cool tools that are now at our disposal, but never forget the beauty of the basics.
(h/t Richard Alvarez, Steve Portigal, common sense)
Tools for User Testing
Literature
There’s a ton written about usability and user research, so when in doubt, hit the books!
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is the classic holy grail of web/mobile usability “common sense” approaches (read an excerpted user test script here).
Medium is also a treasure trove of knowledge. This guide by Jason Hreha is a good starting point that’s chock-full of tips, templates, and scripts. We think his lede nails it: “User testing isn’t rocket science. In fact, it’s common sense wrapped in fancy language.”
Ethnio
Ethnio is a research recruiting tool that helps find the right participants for your user research by intercepting the people who use your website or app. You can create a screener to share manually or place directly on your site, automatically schedule interviews or sessions, and set up incentive payments.
UserTesting
UserTesting is a platform for getting rapid customer feedback on almost any customer experience, from apps to physical product unboxing. “You can set up your own tests [and] questions, and you get videos of the users, which is always a humbling experience,” says katie zhu, an engineer and product manager at Medium.
(Bonus: If you’re looking for a little extra cash, you can sign up to get paid to test.)
(h/t katie zhu)
Lookback
Lookback is a mobile UX user recording tool that lets you remotely record the on-screen activity, video, and audio of users as they use your mobile site or app.
(h/t Katie Briggs)
UserVoice
UserVoice (not to be confused with UserVoice Helpdesk, the company’s customer-service product) is a platform for collecting feedback from several sources. One of the most useful tools is a little widget you can place right in your app to ask users questions in a native experience.
(h/t Richard Alvarez)
TypeForm
Typeform is an elegant alternative to basic survey tools such as SurveyMonkey, Polldaddy, and Google Forms. You can create any kind of flexible, customized forms, including surveys, quizzes, contact forms, payment forms, and more.
(h/t katie zhu, Katie Briggs)
Google Apps
In a pinch, Google’s suite of products has got your back. You can use Docs to share low-fidelity wireframes with users and get feedback in real-time; Forms for qualitative surveys; Hangouts for live interviews and tests; and probably more we didn’t think of.
(h/t Richard Alvarez)
Live events
We’re taking a wider interpretation of “tool” here, but live events can work great for in-person user tests. Katie Briggs, a digital product designer at KPCC — Southern California Public Radio, tells The Shed: “Before/after the event, we’ll have a little product team booth where attendees can come try out our prototype. Ideally we can iterate during the event and then turn around for more testing once it’s over.”
(h/t Katie Briggs)
Tools for Thinking
Storytelling
At the end of the day, making great products comes back to the stories you uncover in your research, prototyping, and design process. Each user has a story that should inform how you iterate and shape your own story.
“My favorite tool is the act of telling stories itself,” says user research consultant Steve Portigal, author of upcoming book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. “Just talking about what happened forces you to synthesize, to find the essence. It doesn’t mean that in telling a story you are discarding the rest of the experience (the “data”); you are just choosing, in that moment, something to share, some way to extract from an overwhelming amount of information.”
This practice of breaking down, highlighting, and extracting stories can take many forms, according to Portigal — anything from an email or a post laying out “here’s what happened,” or even just recounting the experience to someone else.
Here’s Portigal’s advice for how to approach the tool of storytelling:
When you get back at the end of the day, write up a paragraph or two about what happened.
When you get into deep-dive analysis and synthesis, go through transcripts and make notes of what seems noteworthy and then meet with others and tell stories about what happened.
Relate each quote, observation, etc. as a story. Tell it to someone else, and in doing so, surface what you think collectively is important.
(h/t Steve Portigal)
What are your favorite user research tools? Let us know by commenting or tweeting @KnightLab and we’ll update our list! (In the meantime, subscribe to The Shed!)
