User Experience (UX) research has always been about people. How they think, how they behave, what they need, and—just as importantly—what they don’t yet realise they need. Traditional UX methodologies have long relied on direct human input: interviews, usability testing, surveys, and behavioral observation. The assumption was clear—if you want to understand people, you have to engage with real humans.
But in 2025, that assumption is being challenged.
The emergence of digital twins and synthetic users—AI-powered simulations of human behavior—is changing how researchers approach user insights. These technologies claim to solve persistent UX research problems: slow participant recruitment, small sample sizes, high costs, and research timelines that struggle to keep pace with product development. The promise is enticing: instantly accessible, infinitely scalable users who can test, interact, and generate feedback without the logistical headaches of working with real participants.
Yet, as with any new technology, there are trade-offs. While digital twins may unlock efficiencies, they also raise important questions: Can they truly replicate human complexity? Where do they fit within existing research practices? What risks do they introduce?
This article explores the evolving role of digital twins in UX research—where they excel, where they fall short, and what their rise means for the future of human-centered design.
The Traditional UX Research Model: Why Change?
For decades, UX research has been grounded in methodologies that involve direct human participation. The core methods—usability testing, user interviews, ethnographic research, and behavioral analytics—have been refined to account for the unpredictability of human nature.
This approach works well, but it has challenges:
Participant recruitment is time-consuming. Finding the right users—especially niche audiences—can be a logistical hurdle, often requiring specialised panels, incentives, and scheduling gymnastics.
Research is expensive. Incentives, moderation, analysis, and recruitment all add to the cost. A single usability study can run into tens of thousands of dollars.
Small sample sizes create risk. Budget and timeline constraints often mean testing with small groups, leaving room for blind spots and bias.
Long feedback loops slow decision-making. By the time research is completed, product teams may have already moved on, limiting its impact.
In short: traditional UX research provides depth and authenticity, but it’s not always fast or scalable.
Digital twins and synthetic users aim to change that.
What Are Digital Twins and Synthetic Users?
While the terms digital twins and synthetic users are sometimes used interchangeably, they are distinct concepts.
Digital Twins: Simulating Real-World Behavior
A digital twin is a data-driven virtual representation of a real-world entity. Originally developed for industrial applications, digital twins replicate machines, environments, and human behavior in a digital space. They can be updated in real time using live data, allowing organisations to analyse scenarios, predict outcomes, and optimise performance.
In UX research, human digital twins attempt to replicate real users' behavioral patterns, decision-making processes, and interactions. They draw on existing datasets to mirror real-world users dynamically, adapting based on real-time inputs.
Synthetic Users: AI-Generated Research Participants
While a digital twin is a mirror of a real entity, a synthetic user is a fabricated research participant—a simulation that mimics human decision-making, behaviors, and responses. These AI-generated personas can be used in research scenarios to interact with products, answer questions, and simulate user journeys.
Unlike traditional user personas (which are static profiles based on aggregated research), synthetic users are interactive and capable of generating dynamic feedback. They aren’t modeled after a specific real-world person, but rather a combination of user behaviors drawn from large datasets.
Think of it this way:
A digital twin is a highly detailed, data-driven clone of a specific person, customer segment, or process.
A synthetic user is a fictional but realistic simulation of a potential user, generated based on behavioral patterns and demographic characteristics.
Both approaches are still evolving, but their potential applications in UX research are already taking shape.
Where Digital Twins and Synthetic Users Fit into UX Research
The appeal of AI-generated users is undeniable. They can:
Scale instantly – Test designs with thousands of simulated users, rather than just a handful of real participants.
Eliminate recruitment bottlenecks – No need to chase down participants or schedule interviews.
Reduce costs – No incentives, no travel, no last-minute no-shows.
Enable rapid iteration – Get user insights in real time and adjust designs on the fly.
Generate insights on sensitive topics – Synthetic users can explore scenarios that real participants might find too personal or intrusive.
These capabilities make digital twins particularly useful for:
Early-stage concept validation – Rapidly test ideas before committing to development.
Edge case identification – Run simulations to explore rare but critical user scenarios.
Pre-testing before live usability sessions – Identify glaring issues before investing in human research.
However, digital twins and synthetic users are not a replacement for human research. Their effectiveness is limited in areas where emotional, cultural, and contextual factors play a major role.
The Risks and Limitations of AI-Driven UX Research
For all their promise, digital twins and synthetic users introduce new challenges.
They lack genuine emotional responses. AI can analyse sentiment, but it doesn’t feel frustration, delight, or confusion the way a human does. UX is often about unexpected moments—the frustrations, workarounds, and “aha” realisations that define real-world use.
Bias is a real problem. AI models are trained on existing datasets, meaning they inherit and amplify biases in those datasets. If synthetic users are based on an incomplete or non-diverse dataset, the research insights they generate will be skewed.
They struggle with novelty. Humans are unpredictable. They find unexpected uses for products, misunderstand instructions, and behave irrationally. AI models, no matter how advanced, can only predict behavior based on past patterns—not the unexpected ways real users might engage with a product.
They require careful validation. How do we know that insights from digital twins align with real-world user behavior? Without rigorous validation against human data, there’s a risk of over-reliance on synthetic feedback that doesn’t reflect reality.
A Hybrid Future: AI + Human UX Research
Rather than viewing digital twins as a replacement for human research, the best UX teams will integrate them as a complementary tool.
Where AI Can Lead:
Large-scale pattern identification
Early-stage usability evaluations
Speeding up research cycles
Automating repetitive testing
Where Humans Remain Essential:
Understanding emotion, frustration, and delight
Detecting unexpected behaviors
Validating insights with real-world context
Ethical considerations and cultural nuance
The future of UX research is not about choosing between AI and human research—it’s about blending the strengths of both.
Final Thoughts: Proceeding With Caution and Curiosity
Digital twins and synthetic users are exciting, but they are not a magic bullet. They cannot fully replace human users, and relying on them exclusively could lead to false confidence in flawed insights.
Instead, UX researchers should view these technologies as powerful, but imperfect tools—best used in combination with traditional research methods.
As with any new technology, thoughtful implementation is key. The real opportunity lies in designing research methodologies that harness the speed and scale of AI without losing the depth, nuance, and humanity that make UX research truly valuable.
The challenge ahead isn’t about choosing between human or synthetic research. It’s about finding the right balance—one that keeps user experience truly human-centered, even in an AI-driven world.
This article was researched with the help of Perplexity.ai.
What’s better than a UX team doing awesome research? A whole organization backing investment in UX research. What’s that look like in practice? Collaboration and support from stakeholders across the organization throughout the research process from set up, doing studies, sharing insights, and digesting, understanding, and actioning recommendations based on the amazing insights you generate.
UX research should be something that is known, understood, and expected across your organization. Rather than keeping all the insight goodies to yourselves, why not democratize user research by making it accessible and shareable to all stakeholders to drive understanding of its value wherever they sit in the organization?
We go into this in more detail in our ebook UX Research for Teams. By including the stakeholders throughout the process, the role of research becomes a lot more visible throughout the organization. Having the best online tools to make the whole process simple and straightforward is a great place to start.
1. Who owns the research?
Recognition that the user research undertaken in your organization benefits the whole organization is essential for setting up key resources. By ensuring that everyone is operating from the same set of tools, the insights and results are easier to manage, find and file. It also means if someone leaves, they don’t leave with all the insights and knowledge.
2. Everyone’s a researcher
Everyone within the organization should have the opportunity to be involved with UX research and should be encouraged to have a base understanding of the process (and even try out the tools) or, at the very least, have some understanding of the results and insights. If everyone has access to the tools, they can use these no matter where they sit in the organization.
3. Don’t get distracted by shiny things
Maintaining a single source of research, with a well-organized filing system means you can always look at what has gone before. It is a great place to start. The best UX researchers often revisit past studies to see where to go from here. Creating consistency through the process and output means comparing insights are simpler.
4. Research is better with friends
What’s better than one mind? It’s two or more. Working alongside a team opens new perspectives, thinking, problem-solving, and approaches. New ways to see a problem and how to interpret insights and results. By socializing your results with the key stakeholders, you bring them on the journey, explaining how and why UX research is important to the project and the wider team. Firming up the opportunity for future research.
5. Qualitative research insights that are simple to find
Qualitative research tools are designed to assist you with testing types, including user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability tests. Working as a team with tags, sorting, and recording can be made simple and streamlined.
One of the best decisions you can make as a researcher is to bring the organization along for the ride. Setting up consistent tools across the team (and beyond) will help streamline research, making it simpler for all to be involved at each step of the process. Embedding UX research into each part of the organization.
Every month we have informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your day. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry 🚀
Do you want to learn ways to uplift qualitative researchers and value their skill sets as business assets?
In an effort to make “data-driven” decisions, business leaders look to research for guidance. However, there is often an implicit priority for quantitative research over qualitative research. Often, even if qualitative research is funded and the findings are valued, the qualitative researcher and their skill sets can feel under-appreciated at an organizational or business unit level.
Let’s uplift the qualitative researcher and honor the craft of qualitative research as a transferable skill set. In this talk we will discuss:
Theories about why business leaders have a hard time thinking about qualitative research findings as “data”
Techniques for navigating the quant vs. qual conversation with non-research minded stakeholders — with an emphasis on not pitting research methods against each other.
The importance of modeling qualitative researcher behaviors in other business contexts.
How thinking like a qualitative researcher can close organizational gaps and aid in consensus building
Tips for demonstrating the value of thinking and acting like qualitative researchers
Jennifer Long
Speaker Bio 🎤
Jennifer is a business generalist with UX Research and Information Architecture chops. She spent six years at Factor, an Information Architecture Consulting Firm, where she most recently held the Chief of Staff role. Jennifer has an MBA, a certificate of UX design from School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, and Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. She strongly believes in building stakeholder consensus and adding depth to projects through careful exploration. She lives in Washington State near the U.S./Canadian border and loves hiking in the North Cascades with her family and their German Shepherd mutt.
Take a seat, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next UX Insider!
Summary: A detailed UX research plan helps you keep your overarching research goals in mind as you work through the logistics of a research project.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting down to interview one of your users, steering the conversation in interesting directions and taking note of valuable comments and insights. But, as every researcher knows, it’s also easy to get carried away. Sometimes, the very process of user research can be so engrossing that you forget the reason you’re there in the first place, or unexpected things that come up that can force you to change course or focus.
This is where a UX research plan comes into play. Taking the time to set up a detailed overview of your high-level research goals, team, budget and timeframe will give your research the best chance of succeeding. It's also a good tool for fostering alignment - it can make sure everyone working on the project is clear on the objectives and timeframes. Over the course of your project, you can refer back to your plan – a single source of truth. After all, as Benjamin Franklin famously said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the best way to put together a research plan.
Your research recipe for success
Any project needs a plan to be successful, and user research is no different. As we pointed out above, a solid plan will help to keep you focused and on track during your research – something that can understandably become quite tricky as you dive further down the research rabbit hole, pursuing interesting conversations during user interviews and running usability tests. Thought of another way, it’s really about accountability. Even if your initial goal is something quite broad like “find out what’s wrong with our website”, it’s important to have a plan that will help you to identify when you’ve actually discovered what’s wrong.
So what does a UX research plan look like? It’s basically a document that outlines the where, why, who, how and what of your research project.
It’s time to create your research plan! Here’s everything you need to consider when putting this plan together.
Make a list of your stakeholders
The first thing you need to do is work out who the stakeholders are on your project. These are the people who have a stake in your research and stand to benefit from the results. In those instances where you’ve been directed to carry out a piece of research you’ll likely know who these people are, but sometimes it can be a little tricky. Stakeholders could be C-level executives, your customer support team, sales people or product teams. If you’re working in an agency or you’re freelancing, these could be your clients.
Make a list of everyone you think needs to be consulted and then start setting up catch-up sessions to get their input. Having a list of stakeholders also makes it easy to deliver insights back to these people at the end of your research project, as well as identify any possible avenues for further research. This also helps you identify who to involve in your research (not just report findings back to).
Action: Make a list of all of your stakeholders.
Write your research questions
Before we get into timeframes and budgets you first need to determine your research questions, also known as your research objectives. These are the ‘why’ of your research. Why are you carrying out this research? What do you hope to achieve by doing all of this work? Your objectives should be informed by discussions with your stakeholders, as well as any other previous learnings you can uncover. Think of past customer support discussions and sales conversations with potential customers.
Here are a few examples of basic research questions to get you thinking. These questions should be actionable and specific, like the examples we’ve listed here:
“How do people currently use the wishlist feature on our website?”
“How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”
“How do people make a decision on which power company to use?”
“What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”
A good research question should be actionable in the sense that you can identify a clear way to attempt to answer it, and specific in that you’ll know when you’ve found the answer you’re looking for. It's also important to keep in mind that your research questions are not the questions you ask during your research sessions - they should be broad enough that they allow you to formulate a list of tasks or questions to help understand the problem space.
Action: Create a list of possible research questions, then prioritize them after speaking with stakeholders.
What is your budget?
Your budget will play a role in how you conduct your research, and possibly the amount of data you're able to gather.
Having a large budget will give you flexibility. You’ll be able to attract large numbers of participants, either by running paid recruitment campaigns on social media or using a dedicated participant recruitment service. A larger budget helps you target more people, but also target more specific people through dedicated participant services as well as recruitment agencies.
Note that more money doesn't always equal better access to tools - e.g. if I work for a company that is super strict on security, I might not be able to use any tools at all. But it does make it easier to choose appropriate methods and that allow you to deliver quality insights. E.g. a big budget might allow you to travel, or do more in-person research which is otherwise quite expensive.
With a small budget, you’ll have to think carefully about how you’ll reward participants, as well as the number of participants you can test. You may also find that your budget limits the tools you can use for your testing. That said, you shouldn’t let your budget dictate your research. You just have to get creative!
How long do you think your user research project will take? This is a necessary consideration, especially if you’ve got people who are expecting to see the results of your research. For example, your organization’s marketing team may be waiting for some of your exploratory research in order to build customer personas. Or, a product team may be waiting to see the results of your first-click test before developing a new signup page on your website.
It’s true that qualitative research often doesn’t have a clear end in the way that quantitative research does, for example as you identify new things to test and research. In this case, you may want to break up your research into different sub-projects and attach deadlines to each of them.
Action: Figure out how long your research project is likely to take. If you’re mixing qualitative and quantitative research, split your project timeframe into sub-projects to make assigning deadlines easier.
Understanding participant recruitment
Who you recruit for your research comes from your research questions. Who can best give you the answers you need? While you can often find participants by working with your customer support, sales and marketing teams, certain research questions may require you to look further afield.
The methods you use to carry out your research will also have a part to play in your participants, specifically in terms of the numbers required. For qualitative research methods like interviews and usability tests, you may find you’re able to gather enough useful data after speaking with 5 people. For quantitative methods like card sorts and tree tests, it’s best to have at least 30 participants. You can read more about participant numbers in this Nielsen Norman article.
At this stage of the research plan process, you’ll also want to write some screening questions. These are what you’ll use to identify potential participants by asking about their characteristics and experience.
Action: Define the participants you’ll need to include in your research project, and where you plan to source them. This may require going outside of your existing user base.
Which research methods will you use?
The research methods you use should be informed by your research questions. Some questions are best answered by quantitative research methods like surveys or A/B tests, with others by qualitative methods like contextual inquiries, user interviews and usability tests. You’ll also find that some questions are best answered by multiple methods, in what’s known as mixed methods research.
If you’re not sure which method to use, carefully consider your question. If we go back to one of our earlier research question examples: “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”, we’d want to test the navigation pathways.
If you’re not sure which method to use, it helps to carefully consider your research question. Let’s use one of our earlier examples: “Is it easy for users to check their order history in our iPhone app?” as en example. In this case, because we want to see how users move through our app, we need a method that’s suited to testing navigation pathways – like tree testing.
For the question: “What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”, we’d want to take a different approach. Because this is more of an exploratory question, we’re probably best to carry out a round of user interviews and ask questions about their process for buying a TV.
Action: Before diving in and setting up a card sort, consider which method is best suited to answer your research question.
Develop your research protocol
A protocol is essentially a script for your user research. For the most part, it’s a list of the tasks and questions you want to cover in your in-person sessions. But, it doesn’t apply to all research types. For example, for a tree test, you might write your tasks, but this isn't really a script or protocol.
Writing your protocol should start with actually thinking about what these questions will be and getting feedback on them, as well as:
The tasks you want your participants to do (usability testing)
How much time you’ve set aside for the session
A script or description that you can use for every session
Your process for recording the interviews, including how you’ll look after participant data.
Action: This is essentially a research plan within a research plan – it’s what you’d take to every session.
5 ways to increase user research in your organization – One of the best ways to get other teams and stakeholders on board with your own research projects is by helping to spread awareness of the benefits of user research.
How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design continuing to grow in organizations across the globe, we’re going to need skilled UX leaders.
For many people, UX research is seen as a chore: they know that it’s useful and important, but are liable to just keep putting it off. Then, there are others who carry out discovery research at the start of a new project, but then quickly forget about it as they lose themselves in the design and development process. Lastly, we’ve got people who carry out research on a regular basis, both at the start of a project as discovery work and throughout to test assumptions and work through design or development problems.
Regardless of where you sit on the above scale, the insights that only user-focused research can deliver are key to building successful products, and if you don’t build products that address real user needs, then your competitors certainly will.
Paula Makuck sums it quite well: “User research helps us to understand how people go about performing tasks and achieving goals that are important to them. It gives us context and perspective and puts us in a position to respond with useful, simplified, and productive design solutions.”
Of course, there’s a big jump from understanding the value of user research to actually successfully executing the entire research workflow. What’s more, the internet is filled with thousands of articles, guides and books that attempt to either explain the ‘how’ of the entire process or focus in on one small aspect. This article is designed to shine a high-level light on the key stages of the research workflow, and then point you off to more useful resources where appropriate. This article is for everyone who’s ever said: “Ok, I get the value of user research, but where do I actually start?”.
With that in mind, let’s dive into the first section of our guide, stakeholder interviews.
Run stakeholder interviews
A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your research, and more specifically the output. Working with stakeholders is especially important for anyone carrying out user research as you need to know both what they already know about a particular problem and what they need to find out. Understandably, strong communication throughout the research process is key.
While the way in which you communicate with stakeholders during a project may vary, interviews are the best way to identify what they know and need to know at the beginning. As with user interviews, it’s hard to beat sitting down face to face with someone to discuss their needs and problems. Digital.gov has an excellent article on the why of stakeholder interviews, as well as how to actually go about the process of setting them up. You can find that article here.
We’re not done with our stakeholders just yet, either. They’ll play an integral role in the entire user research workflow as we move through the various stages of our project.
Identify your known data
With our stakeholder interviews wrapped up, it’s time to turn our attention to another critical part of the early-stage user research process; identifying our known data. It’s certainly not always easy (and one of the reasons why a good research repository is so key), but the work is important.
Why? Well, in addition to helping you avoid duplicate research work, taking the time to assess all of the existing data related to your research problem may help you to identify further avenues of research.
So what does this stage of the research workflow look like? It depends on your organization. For those with an established research function, it may be as easy as accessing the company Airtable or Google Drive and pulling up any existing findings. For those without such an operation, things may be a little trickier. Research will have almost certainly been carried out at some point or another, but your mileage may vary when it comes to actually locating it.
Here are just a few of the functions within an organization where you’re likely to find existing data:
Product teams: Any product-focused organization is likely to have at least some insight into customer data. And while it may not be in the form of a tidy written report or a collated spreadsheet, product teams should be able to deliver data in the form of how users are actually using a product.
Marketing teams: A potential treasure-trove of user data lies with marketing teams. These are the people within an organization that base much of their work on user behavior, and so are likely to have information like personas on hand.
Sales team: In much the same way, sales teams will also likely have user data sitting around.
Wherever you end up locating existing research data, taking the time to collate it will certainly serve you well as you begin your own research project.
Develop an approach
Your approach is the mechanism by which you’ll gather more information about your research problem. In simple terms, the research questions and the methodologies you’ll use to answer them.
Research questions are essentially your research objectives. The ‘why’ of your research project. These should be informed by the existing data you’ve uncovered as well as discussions with your stakeholders. As for what research questions should look like, here are some examples:
“How do people currently use the cart feature on our mobile app?”
“How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”
“How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”
When formulating your research questions, keep in mind that these are not the same questions you should be asking your users. Basically, they should be broad enough that you can use them to then generate tasks or questions for your users, the outputs of which should hopefully shed a little more light on the problem you’re working on.
As for the methods you’ll use to actually attempt to answer these questions, we’ll get to those further down.
Put together a plan or brief
Putting together a detailed research plan is really a process that overlaps many of the steps we’ve outlined above. You’ll want to feed in things like who your stakeholders are, research methodologies, any budget estimates and the participants or participant groups you’re likely to bring on board.
For these reasons, a research plan is something that you should develop throughout the early stages of your research project and then refer back to throughout to ensure you’re still focusing on what you set out to answer. It’s fine to pivot a project if the problem leads you in a more useful direction, but always compare refer to your plan and stakeholders when doing so. Scope creep and rabbit holes are all too common in the field of user research.
Most of what we’ve talked about above will end up constituting your research plan, but a formal document is still an extremely useful tool to have. Don’t fall into the trap of simply dumping everything into a folder on your computer. Such an approach may be fine for you during the project (and possibly even when you need to come back in the future), but it’ll be a nightmare for anyone else needing to pick up where you left off.
Collect the data
Now we come to the data gathering stage of the research process, requiring the use of various research methods to answer our questions. As we covered in our Intro to UX research guide, there’s really no shortage of user research methods available. From card sorting to usability testing, each method – when used correctly – can be a powerful way to get the answers you need.
The methods you end up using should be informed by your research questions. While some questions are best answered using qualitative methods (like user interviews or usability tests), others are better suited to quantitative testing methods. Alternatively, you could even use a combination by mixing methods.
Determining which method to use requires careful consideration of your research question. If we take a look at the question: “How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”, we’d want to look at how they navigate through the website, meaning tree testing would be a suitable option. Alternatively, the question: “How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”, would be better suited to a qualitative research method like a user interview where we can sit down with a user and ask them questions directly.
Of course, to even execute any of these research methodologies, you’re going to need participants.
Source your participants
You’ve got a research plan, key stakeholders, the questions you need to answer and an understanding of the methods you’d like to use to answer those questions. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to participant recruitment.
There’s a common misconception that finding participants is one of the hardest parts of the user research process, being time consuming, costly and annoying – but this isn’t actually the case. With just a little digging, you’ll likely be able to uncover a pool of people without ever leaving your desk.
Here are just a few of the potential participant sources that researchers, designers and marketers use on a regular basis. This list is by no means exhaustive, but should serve as a good starting point. You’ll also want to consider payment. Your participants are giving up some of their time to help you, so think about a small monetary reward or even a discount for your products or services. The amount and how you broach this depends on the channel.
Product teams: Even if your organization doesn’t employ any researchers, chances are your product teams will be a good link to your users. Reach out to product managers, designers and developers to see whether they have any regular contact with users. You may find they work with users directly on a regular basis.
Sales, customer support and marketing teams: Similarly, sales and marketing teams also serve as a solid link to your users. Marketing and customer support teams will often manage lists of your existing users, whereas sales teams will have a good understanding of active or engaged users as well as prospective users.
Social channels: This one is quite simple. Consider recruiting directly through your social channels.
Recruitment services: There are a number of dedicated participant recruitment services available (you can check out our one here) that essentially handle the entire recruitment process for you. All you need to do is specify the type of people you need and they’ll handle the rest.
Intercepts: Running a live pop-up message on your website is another great way to recruit participants. If you’re using a messaging app like Intercom, you can easily set up a participant recruitment message to pop up on the screens of people that match the criteria you set.
Meetups: Heading to a local meetup group of the people you’re interested in testing can provide you with a good source of participants. This approach is quite useful if you’re looking for people outside of your organization’s users.
Understand the data
We’ve now recruited our participants, chosen our testing methods and run the tests. With the results starting to roll in, it’s time to analyze the data and make sense of it all. No small task. The insights you draw out of your data will obviously depend on the user research methods you’ve used, with methods like card sorting and tree testing giving you more quantitative data to analyze, and usability tests and user interviews providing you with qualitative insights. In any case, the key thing to focus on with this part of the UX research workflow is drawing out useful insights that help you to address your research questions and how you’re going to present this information back to your stakeholders.
Connect to stakeholders
We’re now at the penultimate step in the research process; taking what we’ve learned and communicating it back to our stakeholders. Consider the following before you sit down in a room with them.
Aim to have detailed answers to your research questions as well as actionable next steps for your stakeholders. You’ve just put in significant time running the research process and as such are best suited to actually making suggestions based on the outputs of that research. It’s also important to understand not only your stakeholders, but the groups likely to be making use of the research further down the track. The easier you can make the process for them (of utilizing your research), the more value they’ll see in the process. Consider using tools that utilize visualizations as one way of making it easy for people to make sense of your research.
Lastly, it’s often a good idea to actually sit down with your stakeholders in a room again instead of simply sending your research results over in an email. Being able to sit down with your stakeholders one-on-one and explain your findings and recommendations will put you in good stead for future research projects.
Let’s recap on what we’ve covered. We’ve gone through:
The stakeholder interview process
How to uncover any data that already exists within the organization
Putting together an approach, as well as a plan or brief
The data collection phase
Participant recruitment
Data analysis
Connecting your results back to your stakeholders.
There’s a final step that can be easy to overlook, but it’s a critical one in order to ensure that your research (and the insights you’ve managed to uncover) remain accessible. One of the most common failings of the user research process is storing the data in a sustainable way. All too often, the people conducting the studies run their tests, pull out the information they need, and then simply leave the data in the tool they used to run the research or in nested folders on the organization’s server.
The solution is quite simple in theory, although a little harder in practice – especially when you’re working within a larger team. We’ve talked about building research repositories in this article (point 4), but the key takeaway is that while you should certainly use the right tool to store your findings, you also need to ensure you create a sustainable process. There’s no sense going to the trouble of setting up a new tool if you don’t have a system in place for others to feed in their own research or access historical research in the future.
You don’t need much to create a research repository – you’ll often find many researchers are able to put together one using a tool like Airtable or Excel. Whatever you end up using, just make sure it’s easy to update and access.
Wrap up + summary
Hopefully, by breaking down each stage of the research workflow into actionable steps, we’ve shown that it’s actually quite a simple undertaking – albeit one with quite a few steps. Let us know if you’ve got any questions or thoughts of your own.
User experience (UX) research, or user research as it’s commonly referred to, is an important part of the product design process. Primarily, UX research involves using different research methods to gather information about how your users interact with your product. It is an essential part of developing, building and launching a product that truly meets the requirements of your users.
UX research is essential at all stages of a products' life cycle:
Planning
Building
Introduction
Growth & Maturity
While there is no one single time to conduct UX research it is best-practice to continuously gather information throughout the lifetime of your product. The good news is many of the UX research methods do not fit just one phase either, and can (and should) be used repeatedly. After all, there are always new pieces of functionality to test and new insights to discover. We introduce you to best-practice UX research methods for each lifecycle phase of your product.
1. Product planning phase 🗓️
While the planning phase it is about creating a product that fits your organization, your organization’s needs and meeting a gap in the market it’s also about meeting the needs, desires and requirements of your users. Through UX research you’ll learn which features are necessary to be aligned with your users. And of course, user research lets you test your UX design before you build, saving you time and money.
One of the best ways to learn about your users and how they interact with your product is to observe them in their own environment. Watch how they accomplish tasks, the order they do things, what frustrates them, and what makes the task easier and/or more enjoyable for your subject. The data can be collated to inform the usability of your product, improving intuitive design, and what resonates with users.
Competitive Analysis
Reviewing products already in the market can be a great start to the planning process. Why are your competitors’ products successful and how well do they behave for users. Learn from their successes, and even better build on where they may not be performing the best and find your niche in the market.
Quantitative Research Methods
Surveys and Questionnaires
Surveys are useful for collecting feedback or understanding attitudes. You can use the learnings from your survey of a subset of users to draw conclusions about a larger population of users.
There are two types of survey questions:
Closed questions are designed to capture quantitative information. Instead of asking users to write out answers, these questions often use multi-choice answers.
Open questions are designed to capture qualitative information such as motivations and context. Typically, these questions require users to write out an answer in a text field.
2. Product building phase 🧱
Once you've completed your product planning research, you’re ready to begin the build phase for your product. User research studies undertaken during the build phase enable you to validate the UX team’s deliverables before investing in the technical development.
Qualitative Research Methods
Focus groups
Generally involve 5-10 participants and include demographically similar individuals. The study is set up so that members of the group can interact with one another and can be carried out in person or remotely.
Besides learning about the participants’ impressions and perceptions of your product, focus group findings also include what users believe to be a product’s most important features, problems they might encounter while using the product, as well as their experiences with other products, both good and bad.
Quantitative Research Methods
Card sorting gives insight into how users think. Tools like card sorting reveal where your users expect to find certain information or complete specific tasks. This is especially useful for products with complex or multiple navigations and contributes to the creation of an intuitive information architecture and user experience.
Tree testing gives insight into where users expect to find things and where they’re getting lost within your product. Tools like tree testing help you test your information architecture. Card sorting and tree testing are often used together. Depending on the purpose of your research and where you are at with your product, they can provide a fully rounded view of your information architecture.
3. Product introduction phase 📦
You’ve launched your product, wahoo! And you’re ready for your first real life, real time users. Now it’s time to optimize your product experience. To do this, you’ll need to understand how your new users actually use your product.
Qualitative Research Methods
Usability testing involves testing a product with users. Typically it involves observing users as they try to follow and complete a series of tasks. As a result you can evaluate if the design is intuitive and if there are any usability problems.
User Interviews - A user interview is designed to get a deeper understanding of a particular topic. Unlike a usability test, where you’re more likely to be focused on how people use your product, a user interview is a guided conversation aimed at better understanding your users. This means you’ll be capturing details like their background, pain points, goals and motivations.
Quantitative Research Methods
A/BTesting is a way to compare two versions of a design in order to work out which is more effective. It’s typically used to test two versions of the same webpage, for example, using a different headline, image or call to action to see which one converts more effectively. This method offers a way to validate smaller design choices where you might not have the data to make an informed decision, like the color of a button or the layout of a particular image.
Flick-click testing shows you where people click first when trying to complete a task on a website. In most cases, first-click testing is performed on a very simple wireframe of a website, but it can also be carried out on a live website using a tool like first-time clicking.
4. Growth and maturity phase 🪴
If you’ve reached the growth stage, fantastic news! You’ve built a great product that’s been embraced by your users. Next on your to-do list is growing your product by increasing your user base and then eventually reaching maturity and making a profit on your hard work.
Growing your product involves building new or advanced features to satisfy specific customer segments. As you plan and build these enhancements, go through the same research and testing process you used to create the first release. The same holds true for enhancements as well as a new product build — user research ensures you’re building the right thing in the best way for your customers.
Qualitative research methods
User interviews will focus on how your product is working or if it’s missing any features, enriching your knowledge about your product and users.
It allows you to test your current features, discover new possibilities for additional features and think about discarding existing ones. If your customers aren’t using certain features, it might be time to stop supporting them to reduce costs and help you grow your profits during the maturity stage.
Quantitative research methods
Surveys and questionnaires can help gather information around which features will work best for your product, enhancing and improving the user experience.
A/B testing during growth and maturity occurs within your sales and onboarding processes. Making sure you have a smooth onboarding process increases your conversion rate and reduces wasted spend — improving your bottom line.
Wrap up 🌮
UX research testing throughout the lifecycle of your product helps you continuously evolve and develop a product that responds to what really matters - your users.
Talking to, testing, and knowing your users will allow you to push your product in ways that make sense with the data to back up decisions. Go forth and create the product that meets your organizations needs by delivering the very best user experience for your users.
