A beginner’s guide to qualitative and quantitative research

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of User Experience Research (UXR), one challenge stands out consistently: effectively communicating the value of UXR to stakeholders across the organization. As our recent whitepaper "The Value of UXR in 2024" reveals, the success of UXR initiatives often hinges not just on the quality of the research itself, but on how well its insights are integrated into decision-making processes. Let's explore how stakeholder integration can be the key to unlocking the full potential of UXR.

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Identifying key stakeholders and their needs 🕵️

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The first step in effective stakeholder integration is identifying who your key stakeholders are and understanding their specific needs and priorities. These stakeholders might include:

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1. Executive leadership: Interested in high-level insights that tie directly to business goals and ROI.
2. Product managers: Looking for actionable insights to inform product roadmaps and feature prioritization.
3. Designers: Seeking detailed user feedback to inform design decisions.
4. Developers: Needing clear, implementable recommendations.
5. Marketing teams: Interested in user perceptions and preferences to inform messaging and positioning.

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As one UX leader in our study noted,

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"Understanding the unique perspectives and priorities of each stakeholder group is crucial for effectively communicating the value of UXR."

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Techniques for effective stakeholder engagement 🦄

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Once you've identified your key stakeholders, the next step is to engage them effectively throughout the research process. Some proven techniques include:

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1. Early involvement: Include stakeholders in the research planning phase to ensure alignment with business objectives.
2. Observational opportunities: Invite stakeholders to observe user research sessions firsthand, fostering empathy and understanding.
3. Regular check-ins: Schedule frequent touchpoints to share interim findings and gather feedback.
4. Collaborative analysis: Involve stakeholders in data analysis sessions to leverage their expertise and build buy-in.

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Our survey revealed that organizations with high levels of stakeholder engagement throughout the research process reported significantly higher perceived value of UXR.

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Tailoring UXR communications for different audiences 📣

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One size does not fit all when it comes to communicating UXR insights. As one research manager in our study observed,

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"When we started tailoring our research reports to different stakeholder groups, we saw a dramatic increase in the adoption of our insights."

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To maximize impact, it's crucial to tailor your communications to different audiences:

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For executives 👩💼

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When communicating with executives, it's crucial to get straight to the point and demonstrate the business value of UXR:

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• Highlight key findings that directly impact business goals (e.g., user retention, conversion rates, market share)
• Use executive summaries that can be quickly scanned (no more than one page)
• Create clear, impactful data visualizations (e.g., dashboards, infographics) that show trends and comparisons
• Provide concrete examples of how UXR insights have led to measurable business improvements
• Include ROI calculations where possible, showing the financial impact of UXR-driven decisions
• Use benchmarks and industry comparisons to contextualize findings
• Anticipate and address potential business implications and strategic questions

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For example, instead of detailing usability issues, present a graph showing how addressing these issues could potentially increase customer satisfaction scores by X% and reduce churn by Y%.

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For product teams 📦

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Product teams need comprehensive insights that can directly inform their decision-making:

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• Present detailed user personas and scenarios to bring user needs to life
• Use user journey maps to illustrate pain points and opportunities across the entire user experience
• Provide specific, prioritized feature recommendations based on user needs and preferences
• Include case studies of similar products or features to provide context and inspiration
• Present quantitative data on feature usage and user preferences
• Offer clear next steps and actionable items for the product roadmap
• Use interactive prototypes or mockups to illustrate potential solutions

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For instance, create a user journey map that highlights key pain points in the current product, then overlay recommended features or improvements at each stage of the journey.

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For design teams 🎨🖌️

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Designers need rich, detailed feedback on the visual and interactive aspects of the product:

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• Provide specific user feedback on colors, layouts, interactions, and other design elements
• Use heat maps and click maps to show how users interact with designs
• Include video clips of usability testing sessions to show real user reactions and behaviors
• Highlight powerful user quotes that capture emotional responses to designs
• Present before-and-after comparisons to illustrate the impact of design changes
• Use annotation tools to pinpoint specific areas of designs that need attention
• Organize feedback by design principle (e.g., consistency, accessibility, simplicity) to align with design thinking

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For example, create a gallery of video clips showing users struggling with a particular interface element, paired with quotes expressing their frustration and suggestions for improvement.

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For development teams 👾 👾 👾

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Developers need concrete, implementable insights:

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• Provide a prioritized list of usability issues, bugs, or areas for improvement
• Use technical specifications and measurements where relevant (e.g., load times, error rates)
• Include device and browser information for reported issues
• Utilize developer-friendly formats like issue trackers or ticketing systems
• Provide clear acceptance criteria for recommended changes
• Include code snippets or pseudocode to illustrate potential solutions where appropriate
• Use flow diagrams to illustrate complex user interactions or system behaviors
• Highlight any technical constraints or considerations uncovered during research

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For instance, create a prioritized list of usability issues in a format that can be directly imported into the development team's project management tool, complete with severity ratings, reproduction steps, and suggested solutions.

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By tailoring your communication in these ways, you ensure that each stakeholder group receives the information they need in a format that resonates with their priorities and workflow. This targeted approach increases the likelihood that your UXR insights will be understood, valued, and acted upon across the organization.

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Building long-term stakeholder relationships 🏗️

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Building long-term stakeholder relationships is crucial for effective UXR integration, and it's an ongoing process rather than a one-time effort. Successful strategies include consistent follow-up to track the impact of research insights, celebrating wins and positive outcomes resulting from UXR, providing continuous education through workshops and training sessions, and maintaining open feedback channels for stakeholders to share their thoughts on the research process and outputs. 

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Our whitepaper findings highlight that organizations fostering strong, long-term relationships between UX researchers and other stakeholders typically demonstrate higher levels of research maturity and seamless integration of UXR into product development processes. This underscores the importance of nurturing these relationships to maximize the value and impact of UX research within the organization. 

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By investing in these long-term connections, UX researchers can ensure their insights continue to drive meaningful change and innovation across the company.

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Stakeholder integration: the cornerstone of impactful UXR

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Stakeholder integration is not just a nice-to-have in UXR—it's a critical factor in demonstrating and maximizing the value of user research. By identifying key stakeholders, engaging them effectively, tailoring communications, and building long-term relationships, UX researchers can ensure that their insights drive meaningful impact across the organization. As we look to the future of UXR, the ability to effectively integrate stakeholders will become even more crucial in our increasingly complex and fast-paced business environment.

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Ready to transform your UXR practice and unlock its full potential? 

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Optimal Workshop's comprehensive platform is designed to support effective stakeholder integration at every step of the research process. From collaborative planning tools to customizable reporting features, our suite of UXR solutions helps you engage stakeholders, tailor communications, and build lasting relationships that drive innovation. 

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Don't let valuable insights go unnoticed or unused—take the first step towards maximizing your UXR impact today. Start your free trial with Optimal Workshop and discover how easy it can be to bridge the gap between user insights and business decision-making, positioning your organization at the forefront of user-centered innovation.

Having a library of user research books is invaluable. Whether you’re an old hand in the field of UX research or just dipping your toes in the water, being able to reference detailed information on methods, techniques and tools will make your life much easier.

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There’s really no shortage of user research/UX reading lists online, so we wanted to do something a little different. We’ve broken our list up into sections to make finding the right book for a particular topic as easy as possible.

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General user research guides

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These books cover everything you need to know about a number of UX/user research topics. They’re great to have on your desk to refer back to – we certainly have them on the bookshelf here at Optimal Workshop.

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Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

Mike Kuniavsky

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This book covers 13 UX research techniques in a reference format. There’s a lot of detail, making it a useful resource for people new to the field and those who just need more clarification around a certain topic. There’s also a lot of practical information that you’ll find applicable in the real world. For example, information about how to work around research budgets and tight time constraints.

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• Goodreads link

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Just Enough Research

Erika Hall

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In Just Enough Research, author Erika Hall explains that user research is something everyone can and should do. She covers several research methods, as well as things like how to identify your biases and make use of your findings. Designers are also likely to find this one quite useful, as she clearly covers the relationship between research and design.

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• Goodreads link

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Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction

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Harry Hochheiser, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng

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Like Observing the User Experience, this is a dense guide – but it’s another essential one. Here, experts on human-computer interaction and usability explain different qualitative and quantitative research methods in an easily understandable format. There are also plenty of real examples to help frame your thinking around the usefulness of different research methods.

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• Goodreads link

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Information architecture

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If you’re new to information architecture (IA), understanding why it’s such an important concept is a great place to start. There’s plenty of information online, but there are also several well-regarded books that make great starting points.

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Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

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You’ll probably hear this book referred to as “the polar bear book”, just because the cover features a polar bear. But beyond featuring a nice illustration of a bear, this book clearly covers the process of creating large websites that are both easy to navigate and appealing to use. It’s a useful book for designers, information architects and user researchers.

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• Goodreads link

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How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Abby Covert

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This is a great introduction to information architecture and serves as a nice counter to the polar bear book, being much shorter and more easily digestible. Author Abby Covert explains complex concepts in a way anyone can understand and also includes a set of lessons and exercises with each chapter.

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• Goodreads link

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User interviews

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For those new to the task, the prospect of interviewing users is always daunting. That makes having a useful guide that much more of a necessity!

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Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal

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While interviewing users may seem like something that doesn’t require a guide, an understanding of different interview techniques can go a long way. This book is essentially a practical guide to the art of interviewing users. Author Steve Portigal covers how to build rapport with your participants and the art of immersing yourself in how other people see the world – both key skills for interviewers!

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• Goodreads link

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Usability testing

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Web usability is basically the ease of use of a website. It’s a broad topic, but there are a number of useful books that explain why it’s important and outline some of the key principles.

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Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Steve Krug

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Don’t Make Me Think is the first introduction to the world of UX and usability for many people, and for good reason – it’s a concise introduction to the topics and is easy to digest. Steve Krug explains some of the key principles of intuitive navigation and information architecture clearly and without overly technical language. In the latest edition, he’s updated the book to include mobile usability considerations.

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As a testament to just how popular this book is, it was released in 2000 and has since had 2 editions and sold 400,000 copies.

• Goodreads link

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Design

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The design–research relationship is an important one, even if it’s often misunderstood. Thankfully, authors like Don Norman and Vijay Kumar are here to explain everything.

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The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

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This book, by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Don Norman, explains how design is the communication between an object and its user, and how to improve this communication as a way of improving the user experience. If nothing else, this book will force you to take another look at the design of everyday objects and assess whether or not they’re truly user-friendly.

• Goodreads link

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101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization

Vijay Kumar

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A guidebook for innovation in the context of product development, this book approaches the subject in a slightly different way to many other books on the same subject. The focus here is that the practice of creating new products is actually a science – not an art. Vijay Kumar outlines practical methods and useful tools that researchers and designers can use to drive innovation, making this book useful for anyone involved in product development.

• Goodreads link

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See our list on Goodreads

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We've put together a list of all of the above books on Goodreads, which you can access here.

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Further reading

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For experienced practitioners and newcomers alike, user research can often seem like a minefield to navigate. It can be tricky to figure out which method to use when, whether you bring a stakeholder into your usability test (you should) and how much you should pay participants. Take a look at some of the other articles on our blog if you’d like to learn more.

In the field of user research, every method is either qualitative, quantitative – or both. Understandably, there’s some confusion around these 2 approaches and where the different methods are applicable.This article provides a handy breakdown of the different terms and where and why you’d want to use qualitative or quantitative research methods.

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Qualitative research

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Let’s start with qualitative research, an approach that’s all about the ‘why’. It’s exploratory and not about numbers, instead focusing on reasons, motivations, behaviors and opinions – it’s best at helping you gain insight and delve deep into a particular problem. This type of data typically comes from conversations, interviews and responses to open questions.The real value of qualitative research is in its ability to give you a human perspective on a research question. Unlike quantitative research, this approach will help you understand some of the more intangible factors – things like behaviors, habits and past experiences – whose effects may not always be readily apparent when you’re conducting quantitative research.A qualitative research question could be investigating why people switch between different banks, for example.

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When to use qualitative research

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Qualitative research is best suited to identifying how people think about problems, how they interact with products and services, and what encourages them to behave a certain way. For example, you could run a study to better understand how people feel about a product they use, or why people have trouble filling out your sign up form. Qualitative research can be very exploratory (e.g., user interviews) as well as more closely tied to evaluating designs (e.g., usability testing).Good qualitative research questions to ask include:

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• Why do customers never add items to their wishlist on our website?
• How do new customers find out about our services?
• What are the main reasons people don’t sign up for our newsletter?

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How to gather qualitative data

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There’s no shortage of methods to gather qualitative data, which commonly takes the form of interview transcripts, notes and audio and video recordings.Here are some of the most widely-used qualitative research methods:

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• Usability test – Test a product with people by observing them as they attempt to complete various tasks.
• User interview – Sit down with a user to learn more about their background, motivations and pain points.
• Contextual inquiry – Learn more about your users in their own environment by asking them questions before moving onto an observation activity.
• Focus group – Gather 6 to 10 people for a forum-like session to get feedback on a product.

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How many participants will you need?

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You don’t often need large numbers of participants for qualitative research, with the average range usually somewhere between 5 to 10 people. You’ll likely require more if you're focusing your work on specific personas, for example, in which case you may need to study 5-10 people for each persona.While this may seem quite low, consider the research methods you’ll be using. Carrying out large numbers of in-person research sessions requires a significant time investment in terms of planning, actually hosting the sessions and analyzing your findings.

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Quantitative research

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On the other side of the coin you’ve got quantitative research. This type of research is focused on numbers and measurement, gathering data and being able to transform this information into statistics.Given that quantitative research is all about generating data that can be expressed in numbers, there multiple ways you make use of it. Statistical analysis means you can pull useful facts from your quantitative data, for example trends, demographic information and differences between groups. It’s an excellent way to understand a snapshot of your users.A quantitative research question could involve investigating the number of people that upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan.

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When to use quantitative research

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Quantitative research is ideal for understanding behaviors and usage. In many cases it's a lot less resource-heavy than qualitative research because you don't need to pay incentives or spend time scheduling sessions etc). With that in mind, you might do some quantitative research early on to better understand the problem space, for example by running a survey on your users.Here are some examples of good quantitative research questions to ask:

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• How many customers view our pricing page before making a purchase decision?
• How many customers search versus navigate to find products on our website?
• How often do visitors on our website change their password?

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How to gather quantitative data

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Commonly, quantitative data takes the form of numbers and statistics.

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Here are some of the most popular quantitative research methods:

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• Card sorts – Find out how people categorize and sort information on your website.
• First-click tests – See where people click first when tasked with completing an action.
• A/B tests – Compare 2 versions of a design in order to work out which is more effective.
• Clickstream analysis – Analyze aggregate data about website visits.

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How many participants will you need?

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While you only need a small number of participants for qualitative research, you need significantly more for quantitative research. Quantitative research is all about quantity. With more participants, you can generate more useful and reliable data you can analyze. In turn, you’ll have a clearer understanding of your research problem.This means that quantitative research can often involve gathering data from thousands of participants through an A/B test, or with 30 through a card sort. Read more about the right number of participants to gather for your research.

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Mixed methods research

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While there are certainly times when you’d only want to focus on qualitative or quantitative data to get answers, there’s significant value in utilizing both methods on the same research projects.Interestingly, there are a number of research methods that will generate both quantitative and qualitative data. Take surveys as an example. A survey could include questions that require written answers from participants as well as questions that require participants to select from multiple choices.

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Looking back at the earlier example of how people move from a free plan to a paid plan, applying both research approaches to the question will yield a more robust or holistic answer. You’ll know why people upgrade to the paid plan in addition to how many. You can read more about mixed methods research in this article:

• What is mixed methods research?

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Where to from here?

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With an understanding of qualitative and quantitative user research, the next best step would be to start learning more about the various methods that fall under each of these research approaches and how to actually conduct research effectively.

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Here are some of the best articles to read next:

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• How to write great questions for your research – Great research starts with the right questions. Learn how to write effective questions before you start your next project.
• Which comes first: card sorting or tree testing? – Card sorting and tree testing are complementary methods, but which one should you use first?
• How to encourage people to participate in your study – Seemingly one of the hardest parts of conducting research is finding willing participants. It’s actually not that difficult.