Optimal Blog

In September of 2020, Netflix released a new documentary called The Social Dilemma. For many viewers, much of the information likely came as a surprise. Could social media and technology really be behind some of the biggest societal changes and rifts in the past decade?

For UX designers and UXers working in technology, the documentary likely surfaced these feelings – and more. And, after viewing the Social Dilemma, many of these same people will be asking themselves 2 questions: “Am I part of the problem?” and “How do I fix this?”.

The social dilemma: Some not-so-light viewing material

If you haven’t already seen it, the documentary is worth watching. It posits that technology (but more specifically social media) is influencing the way people think, leading to real-world impacts. The growing political divides, fracturing of democracies and rise in mental illness all have a direct line to technology.

With that said, the documentary does dramatize the issue somewhat and doesn’t give much weight to the positive effects that technology and social media have had on our society. It can’t be discounted just how useful social media has been for organizing positive movements and bringing people together as a force for good.

Now that we’ve recapped the documentary (you should definitely still watch it if you haven’t already), it’s time we explore exactly what’s going on here – and what you can do about it.

Persuasive design and technology

The next time you open a messaging app to talk to a friend, notice everything that’s layered over the core function of the app (to facilitate a conversation between 2 people). In the case of Facebook Messenger, there’s the ‘Active Status’ function to show you which of your contacts are online and when they were last online, chat bubbles to indicate that someone is typing and ‘Read receipts’ to indicate whether or not someone has read a message that you’ve sent.

These elements of user interfaces fall under a broader category called persuasive technology or persuasive design.

So what is persuasive technology?

According to the Interaction Design Foundation, persuasive design is an area of design practice focused on influencing user behavior through the characteristics of a product or service.

“Based on psychological and social theories, persuasive design is often used in e-commerce, organizational management, and public health. However, designers also tend to use it in any field requiring a target group’s long-term engagement by encouraging continued custom,” the Foundation notes.

Media has always had a large part to play in influencing human behavior, but the rapid proliferation of interactive technology in the 21st century has meant that the potential for technology to influence how we think and act has increased immensely.

“The advancing sophistication of resources available to designers means tailoring the user experience by weaving persuasive elements into it is achievable in increasingly discreet ways than were available in earlier years.”

This area of design was first pioneered by the Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, B. J. Fogg. By understanding core factors such as motivation, triggers and ability, Fogg explains that designers can achieve their desired behaviors in users without needing to resort to tactics like deception and coercion.

The Social Dilemma reveals the dark side of persuasive design. So-called dark patterns run rife through social media apps; the previously-mentioned chat bubbles and the ‘pull to refresh feature’ (mirroring a slot machine) are just 2 examples.

The silver lining

By now it should be clear that persuasive design isn’t a force for evil – far from it, in fact. This subset of design can – and is – used for many positive purposes, like apps that encourage you to stand up, drink water and go for a walk. This makes persuasive design a useful area to understand – both for awareness of dark patterns and for the many ways in which these approaches can be used for good.

Guide: How to fix the problem

As much as many of us are drawn to the idea of the quick fix, fixing the problems we’ve outlined above will take time – and commitment. We’ve pulled together some thinking and resources for web designers, user researchers, usability testing experts and more.

Design ethics

When considering the implications of persuasive design, it’s a good idea to take one step back and think about design ethics. Trine Falbe, writing for Smashing Magazine, describes ethical design as “design made with the intent to do good”. 

Understandably, there’s a large number of areas that designers (and researchers) will want to consider when thinking about design ethics, including:

• Privacy
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Sustainability
• User involvement
• Focus

A List Apart has a great article which expands some of these areas and more. There’s also this article on Medium: ‘How to Design With Ethics’.

User research

Sitting beneath user involvement is UX research or user research. Primarily, UX research involves using various research methods to gather information about your end users. This is obviously useful from a design and product point of view, allowing us to test new functionality and draw out new insights.

Whether conducting usability tests or user interviews, user research is the best way to connect with the people you’re developing your product or service for.

From an ethical design standpoint, we need to consider both how we communicate with our users and what we do with the research data that we collect by talking to them. The Little Book of Design Research Ethics covers some of the key principles to follow when carrying out design research.

Practice good user habits

Beyond the work you do as a designer of products and services, you can also practice better user habits to build up your understanding of just how persuasive some of these persuasive design techniques can be.

Here are some things to try:

• Cut back: Turn off notifications for pesky apps and uninstall social apps from your phone or tablet.
• Change how you get news: Instead of relying on news delivered through your social feeds, find a selection of news websites and visit them directly.
• Reach for a book instead of your phone: When there’s a lull in whatever it is you're doing, think before you reach for your phone.
• Share more with friends and family, not your feed: Self explanatory. Reach out to your friends and family when you have exciting news to share, not your social media accounts. 

Wrap up

The social dilemma has raised some interesting questions about the ethicacy of modern technology – particularly social media. Technology can be a powerful force for good, but as we’ve seen, there are downsides and dark patterns we cannot afford ignore.

As UX designers and researchers, you’ve got a lot of power to drive positive change within your community and organization. Change can start in your next user interface design meeting.

Information architecture (IA) is the backbone of the web – and essentially every other digital experience. It’s the system that’s used to organize and label content on websites in apps, and it ultimately determines the paths that people take to find what they’re looking for.

IA also underpins the design. Functioning as a kind-of skeleton beneath the polished veneer of what people see, it’s the foundation. Get it wrong, and the house falls down. A poorly thought-out IA and UX may not always cause your target audience to leave a website and look elsewhere, but the odds are certainly higher.

A good IA can make all the difference. After all, would you rather stumble through a website, dropping in and out of pages trying to find what you’re looking for, or use a website with a structure that’s intuitive and reflects the people using it?

We’re always focused on the importance of good information architecture here at Optimal Workshop – after all, we’ve developed a platform of tools to help people do just that – so we thought it was a good idea to compile some more useful IA resources.

5 resources from Optimal Workshop

The Optimal Workshop blog is a goldmine for resources on information architecture. For 10 years, we’ve been busy writing our own helpful guides and resources – and sourcing information from some of the brightest minds in the industry, covering everything from site maps to visual hierarchy.

1. Learn about information architecture – Our getting started guide is great for anyone wanting to learn the basics of IA or just as a refresher. It’s also a useful tool if you’d like to get someone onside for a project you’re about to begin. We’ve also got guides for tree testing, card sorting and more.
2. Anatomy of a website series - Architecture, labeling and footers. Our ‘Anatomy of’ series covers some of the basics of website structure. In our first 3 articles, we cover website architecture, website labelling and website footers. Stay tuned for more to come!
3. How to benchmark your information architecture - Before doing any work on your IA, you need to benchmark it. Here, a guest author explains how to benchmark a site navigation using tree testing.
4. The ultimate IA reading list - A list within a list! This compilation is a community favourite, and we’re constantly adding more detail to it. It’s a great place to get started if you’d like to expand your IA horizons.
5. How to develop a taxonomy for your information architecture – Taxonomy refers to how information is grouped, classified and labeled within a shared information environment. Learning how to create and test a taxonomy is essential.

4 resources from the community

1. Card sorting: Uncover users' mental models for better information architecture – As Nielsen Norman Group states, “Card sorting is a UX research technique in which users organize topics into groups. Use it to create an IA that suits your users' expectations”. It’s one of the best methods to create a better, more user-focused IA.
2. 5 information architecture warning signs in your analytics reports – Identifying IA problems is difficult – if you don’t know what to look for. While methods like tree testing are invaluable in diagnosing problems, you can also use your analytics reports! Pageviews, conversions, entrances and bounce rates are all great places to start.
3. The difference between information architecture (IA) and navigation – “IA is the information backbone of the site; navigation refers to those elements in the UI that allow users to reach specific information on the site.” Would you like to know more?
4. 5 examples of effective information architecture – This article covers off some examples of effective information architecture, taking a look at site mapping, content inventories and audits, tree structures and more. 

Alan & Co: Information architecture in the real world

Read about how a small retailer with an online store used Optimal Workshop to improve its website just in time for the busy Christmas shopping season.

Alan & Co is a retailer with several stores and a popular online storefront. Though it still services a lot of customers through its physical stores, the online arm of Alan & Co is growing rapidly. People from all over the world purchase goods through Alan & Co’s online store.

But, despite sales going up and up, staff at Alan & Co have been hearing from customers that the online store can be difficult to use. Finding certain items is confusing and time-consuming, and many are starting to get frustrated and look elsewhere instead.

Seeing an advertisement for Optimal Workshop, the head of online sales at Alan & Co decides to give them a go and see if she can get to the bottom of the problem.

We’ve said it once and we’ll certainly say it again: user research is a critical part of the design process. By applying the right research methods to the problems you’re trying to solve, you can pull out fantastic insights which you can use to build products and services that meet the needs of your users.

This won’t be news to any user researchers or designers reading this article – but for those on the marketing side of the organizational fence, it’s time to sit up, take notice, and learn just how valuable user research is. Hint: It’s quite valuable!

Now, thanks to the wealth of information about UX research that’s available online, not to mention the array of tools available, marketers can easily take advantage of powerful research methods to supercharge their marketing campaigns and their user insights.

But, I hear you ask, isn’t ‘user research’ just another term for ‘market research’? Well, not exactly. That’s why we’ll start this article off by exploring the difference between the two.

What’s the difference between market research and user research?

Regardless of organization, profession or field, market research and user research are terms often mixed up or used interchangeably. This comes down mostly to the fact that both terms contain the word ‘research’, but there’s a little more to it.Both market research and user research overlap (check out the diagram below), with a shared focus on things like personas, analytics and competitor analysis. More broadly, user research is seen as a more qualitative approach, whereas market research is typically seen as quantitative. In practice, however, both user researchers and market researchers – at least those doing their jobs correctly – will use a combination of both research approaches.

Looked at another way, market research is typically used to inform sales and marketing (Who will buy what), whereas user research is used to drive product decisions by understanding user needs (What do our users want).

What does this mean for marketers (and researchers?)

Market research, broadly speaking, has always been tied to the bottom line of an organization, and using research as a way to improve revenue lines through an understanding of an organization’s users. Market research seeks the answers to questions such as:

• Who will buy what
• When will they buy it
• What do they look for when buying X product
• Why do they buy X product and not Y product

But this is starting to change. As we’ve seen in the world of design, market research has also undertaken a user-centered shift to try and actually understand the user as opposed to just their intent. There is still a way to go, however. The ESOMAR Global Report from 2017 found that just 15 percent of worldwide spend on market research was qualitative.

As SimpleUsability explains: “The two disciplines co-exist on a moving scale, often overlapping, rather than existing as two polarising variables”.

For marketers (and user researchers to an extent), this really means one thing: focus on the method, not the overarching label. Marketers should take a deep dive into the world of user research and explore all of the methods that researchers utilize on a daily basis:

• Card sorting can show you how your users sort and categorize information, which makes the process of building effective website structures quite simple.
• Diary studies help you to understand long-term user behaviour. Users self-report over a long period of time, keeping a diary about the activity you’re studying.  
• Contextual inquiries let you observe your users in their natural environment, and allow you to ask questions while they go about their business.
• Tree testing lets you test the bare bones structure of your website or mobile app, iterate on the structure, and then test it again.

These are just a few of the methods popular among user researchers – but there are many, many more. Check out the chart below from Christian Rohrer (via Nielsen Norman Group).

How can marketers get started with user research?

Any journey into the world of UX research really needs to start with a holistic understanding of the different methods available and an understanding of what each method can tell you. If you haven’t read it before, we highly recommend the Intro to UX guide on our blog. Then, you can dive into detail by reading about different types of testing and research.

What comes next? The world of user research is a very different place now than what it was even 10 years ago. In the past few years, there’s been a surge in the number of powerful remote UX research tools available, with options available for every method and approach. There are card sorting and tree testing tools, tools for contextual inquiries and even tools for running remote user interviews over the internet. Exploring the different options available to you and playing around with different combinations of tools will put you in the best position to run your own research projects – which brings us to our final recommendation.

With an idea of the methods you can use and the tools available online, you’ll want to put together a UX research plan to build up all of the information you currently have as well as the questions you need to answer.

So here we are. The line between user research and market research continues to blur with every passing day as both sides of the organizational fence rally around a common point: Figuring out their users.

User researchers understand the value of leveraging the various methods available to them. The only question is, will you?

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.

Store learnings

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.

Design has a problem — historical and still pressing — of only designing for users that are easily accessible, are able to participate, or who meet some pre-determined idea of a ‘target’ or an ‘average’ user.

This is bad for organisations, who are missing out on a huge segment of the people they’d like to reach, and it’s bad for users, who can feel shut out of the services they’d like to access.

Remote research allows you to address common diversity and inclusion challenges of in-person research, and create a better product or service as a result.

Occupational diversity

While you’re probably already making considered attempts to include a diverse range of participants, the reality is that many people are simply not able to participate in research.

Some people cannot make it in to your research facilities for an hour on a weekday for an in-person interview — not now and not pre-pandemic either. That list includes single parents and other full-time carers, who are overwhelmingly women. (It’s also likely to exclude people with mobility challenges and certain chronic illnesses.)

One of the greatest strengths of remote research is that it enables asynchronous responses, which means people can fit it in whenever it makes the most sense for them. This makes it easier to research with shift workers, night owls, and people in precarious contract work, who may not be able request time off.

Geographic and cultural diversity

Research is mostly good at including people that are nearby, with spare time, and with the means to come and go as you require them to; they’ve got to fit with your schedule and your project plan. 

Planning your research to be remote by default allows you to work with and around these constraints in ways that will improve the validity and richness of your data and insights.

As an example, Paper Giant recently worked with Atlassian to conduct research with knowledge workers. Using remote research methods, we were able to speak to people in workplaces from multiple countries in North America, Europe and Australasia. This is far more representative of Atlassian’s user base than if we had only interviewed participants local to us, and helped us avoid treating Australia’s workplace culture as universal.

Neurodiversity 

Remote research also allows you to speak to people who might be uncomfortable with the intensity of a one-on-one interview in unfamiliar surroundings.

For example, autistic people commonly report finding eye contact overwhelming, but no one quite makes direct eye contact on video calls anyway, so this is one less thing they have to manage.

Body language is harder to interpret over a video call, which means remote research works best when it doesn’t rely on non-verbal cues. This equalises the process for everyone.

Research shows that non-native speakers, people with auditory processing disorders and people with high anxiety “often prefer text channels so they can have more time to process messages and craft responses.”

Inclusion challenges

Inclusion is a challenge as well as an opportunity when you’re using digital tools for research — such tools rely on digital literacy and digital infrastructure that people might not have. It’s worth remembering here that remote research doesn’t have to be digital. It can mean a phone call; it can mean sending something through the post.

This means you need to know who your users are and take into account any kind of access or inclusion issues they may have. For example, when Paper Giant has worked with participants with low literacy, we’ve designed comics as a way of getting people’s feedback on stuff rather than relying on words — those can be sent through the post. We’ve also used Easy English principles in documents for people with acquired brain injury.

Many people are only turning to remote research now, as a response to COVID-19. But it would be a mistake to view it as the fallback option. Remote research allows you to engage a much broader diversity of participants, leading to richer and better validated insights.

Paper Giant writes about research, design, innovation and ethics in our fortnightly newsletter – subscribe here.

You’re ready to run your next research project. You’ve collaborated with the product team on the problem space, there’s buy-in and budget – now what?

Well, it’s time to look at an essential part of the research workflow: the research tool stack. I know, I can already hear the grumblings. “Why do we even need a tool stack?” and “Why do I even have to think about this? Why can’t I just keep using [insert popular user research tool here]?”. Well, here's why.

We’ve done a LOT of research in our time here. That’s only natural, we build user research tools for people like you. And, in that time, we’ve learned a lot about matching the right tools to the right methods, and what you need to consider when integrating all of these tools together. What’s more, we’ve got a fairly good idea of some of the other tools you should consider which can make your life as a researcher much, much easier.

Why you need a UX research tool stack

The right tools will help you succeed. It’s really as simple as that. When you’ve got a capable tool stack that you can use when you’re in the midst of a research project, you’ll be able to gather better data, faster, and ensure you’re not wasting time. This is true in any business area. Whether that’s marketing, technology or customer support, well thought-out and vetted tool stacks and change the way you work.

There’s also the ResearchOps consideration. If you’re not too familiar with this term, ResearchOps is basically a movement to operationalize and socialize user research in organizations around the world.

By that we mean:

• Socialize research: Make it easier for people to access the insights generated by user research, and allow them to actively take part in research activities.
• Operationalize research: Standardize templates, processes and plans to reduce research costs and the time required to get research projects off the ground.

Key to ResearchOps success is the UX tool stack. It falls into the standardization point mentioned above. A curated list of tools will make it easier to launch new research projects and onboard new people – whether they’ve got “research” as a part of their job title isn’t relevant. Which tools are used where will obviously differ from company to company, but as a researcher, you should ensure that you have a set list of the tools that you use on a regular basis and a good understanding of why you use them.

Know your research question, then identify your methods

Before you start looking at software reviews to find UX tools, you need a solid understanding of your research question and the methods that you’ll use to answer it.

Let’s recap on research questions. As we’ve discussed in articles-past, research questions are basically your research objectives – the ‘why’ of your research. These need to come from discussions with your stakeholders (product teams, for example) and take into account any previous research or learnings. 

A popular example research question that I like to use is “How do our users currently use the ‘Order history’ feature on our website?”.  It’s hits all of those good research question points. It’s actionable (in the sense that you can identify a clear way to answer it) and specific (you’ll know when you’ve found the answers to it). A final note on research questions: They’re not the questions that you’ll ask your participants during your research sessions. Instead, they should inform the questions you’ll ask.

So, now that we’ve got a clearer picture of what research questions are, we can turn to the research methods. The methods you select will depend on your research questions. For example, some questions are best answered using qualitative methods, whereas others will benefit from quantitative methods. Some questions may even be answered through a combination of the 2 approaches.

Let’s use our earlier research question as an example of how to identify the right research method. As it’s focused on how people use a specific part of our website, we’d probably want to conduct some usability testing to watch them as they use the feature. Then, we might ask them questions or conduct dedicated user interviews to ask more in-depth questions. We could also run a tree test to see how people move through our website (with a focus on how they interact with the order history feature).

Tools to support the research workflow

**Warning: Promotion of Optimal Workshop tools**

The user research/UX space is an interesting one when it comes to the tools that are available to the people needing to do research. As a growing field, the number of options continues to grow alongside it. If you want a list of every tool that’s out there, Nikki Anderson published a great article on UX Collective, which you can read here. In this article, however, we’re going to talk about the tools that we provide. Yes, we’re doing a little bit of self-promotion, but our user research tools are used by some of the biggest companies in the world – and for good reason. Allow me to explain.

Our platform contains 5 distinct tools, each of which is designed to execute a specific research method. This means that the platform as a whole can be useful across a large part of a research project. Let’s take a look at each of the different tools and the methods they’re designed around.

• OptimalSort (Card sorting): This is an easy way to design an information architecture (IA), workflow, menu structure or website navigation paths. Mainly, it helps you understand how people organise information (basically what makes sense to them). OptimalSort is our card sorting tool, and is lighting fast, powerful and packed with a range of analysis features.
• Treejack (Tree testing): This method helps you test your IA without visual distractions. You can use the method to prove your site structure will work before you get into actual work of interface design. What’s more, it helps you find out where users get lost on your website quickly. Like OptimalSort, Treejack is fast, powerful and includes several options for analyzing your data.
• Chalkmark (Design validation/First-click testing): Got a wireframe or even a finalized design and not sure whether it’s converting customers or doing its job? You may want to try first-click testing. After all, when people get their first click right on a website, they are two to three times as likely to find what they're looking for than if they went in the wrong direction with that first click. Chalkmark helps you discover design issues quickly and easily, and it’s also easy to use.
• Reframer (Usability testing/User interviews): Qualitative research methods – such as user interviews and usability testing – have always been messy. After each session you’re often left with reams of notes in no particular order and with no way of making sense of the data. Reframer is our qualitative note taking tool, and it makes it easy to both take notes during sessions, tag observations and then use those tags to draw out useful themes and analysis.
• Questions (Surveys): This method is fairly self-explanatory. Surveys basically allow you to gather insights and feedback from your users. Questions (our survey tool) lets you create surveys quickly in over 70 languages and collect data using a variety of question types.

Naturally, it’s easier to understand what we’re talking about by seeing these tools in action for yourself. If you haven’t already, join the likes of Uber, IBM and NASA and try all 5 out for yourself.

Don’t forget the participants

Now that we’ve got an understanding of some of the research methods (and the tools that we’ll use to execute them), we can turn our attention to another critical area – participant recruitment.

You don’t necessarily need a panel of participants ready to go at all times, but it’s a good idea to at least have an idea of where you can source people quickly. After all, as most researchers will tell you, research projects can often spring up out of the blue and you may need to hurriedly pull together a few participants to take part in a study.

If you’re interested in learning about the best way to go about sourcing quality participants for your next research project, we’ve got you covered with this article here.

In a nutshell, you need to:

• Define your user group (The people who are representative of either your users or potential users).
• Work out how many participants you need (This number will depend on the method or methods you’re using.
• Identify where you’re going to find participants (You can ask within your organization, over social media, use a recruitment service or even place a live intercept on your website).

Tools to make your life easier

Aside from the research-focused tools, there’s an entirely different category of tools that you can use to help you with your research. I like to categorize these as the tools that make your life easier. They’re not essential, but they will help you to reduce some of the admin load and headaches that can come with managing these processes manually.

• Screen recorders: These tools are very useful during usability tests (whether remote or in-person), as they allow you to record exactly what your participant is doing as part of your test. By pairing this with a camera recording of your participant, you can go back after the test is over and watch the footage to learn where they get stuck and where their pain points are. TechRadar has a good breakdown of the different screen recording options.
• Sound recorders: On the flipside, sound recorders reduce the note taking burden by giving you an audio recording of your testing session. As with a screen recording, this is a useful item to have if you need to go back to clarify something from your test. Rev put together 2 lists of the best sound recording apps for Android and iOS (iPhone).
• Transcription: Once you’ve captured your audio recording, you can use a transcription service to take the audio and transcribe it into a document. Rev is one such service and a good option. If your material is sensitive and you’d rather do the transcription yourself, transcribe.wreally helps you easily turn your audio into a text document.
• Calendar scheduling tools: Calendly and other similar tools make the process of scheduling user interviews and usability tests a breeze. You can set up spaces where you’re free to host the sessions, and then your participants can select times within those spaces that suit them. This cuts back on the often finicky email chains to set up testing sessions.

Document, document, document

As we touched on at the beginning of this article, the UX tool stack is an important aspect of ResearchOps. Documentation is equally key – but specifically documentation surrounding how the research tools are used within the organization, and for what purpose.

Good documentation for your UX tools should really just follow the same guidelines for other types of documentation. O’Reilly Media has a good article on best practices for good documentation. We’ve edited the list to make it clearer:

• Inviting and clear
• Comprehensive, yet skimmable
• Examples of how to use the software
• Repetition, when useful
• Up-to-date
• Easy to contribute to
• Easy to find

Conclusion

As in any profession, the tools that you have in your toolkit are (more often than not) essential in enabling you to do your job effectively. This is certainly true in user research, where having a set of easy to use, powerful tools can help you answer your research questions and extract useful insights.Your toolkit will certainly and adapt and change over time, especially as you discover new tools to add to your arsenal, but we find (unsurprisingly) that we still depend on our capable set to execute some of the core research methods. Sign up for free today and take them for a spin. We don’t think you’ll regret it.