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Despite the abundance of user research methods, card sorting remains one of the best ways to get into the minds of your users and discover how they understand and categorize information.

Given that one of our most popular tools is an online card sorting tool called OptimalSort (You may have heard of it), we thought that we’d answer some common questions about online card sorting – the research method that OptimalSort uses.

Let’s begin!

1. What’s the difference between online and offline card sorting?

Traditional card sorting can be done using paper cards and hosted in-person, hence “offline”. Online card sorting is pretty much what it sounds like: a card sort hosted over the internet. But there’s a little more to it.

Primarily, running a card sort online as opposed to hosting one in person means that the process becomes much easier to facilitate. Instead of needing to schedule a time for your participants to come into an office, you can simply send them a link to your card sort. Then, they can complete the test in their own time.

Note that the very benefits of online card sorting mean that you can lose certain insights gained from an in-person card sort, like understanding why your participants sort cards in a certain way. There are ways around this, however. For example, you could pair your card sorting tool with an online video recording solution.

2. When should you run an online card sort?

Card sorting is best suited to answering specific, information-related questions. For example, maybe you want to rearrange the layout of your magazine? Or perhaps you need to add several new shopping categories to your website.

In the latter example, card sorting is the perfect technique to find out where people would commonly expect to find those categories on your website. In the card sort, you present participants with a list of cards containing the names of items within certain categories and task them with sorting those items into groups that make sense to them. The end result? You have a clear picture of how your users or customers would arrange the content on your website.

Card sorting is useful when you’ve got the information you need to organize, but you’re just not sure how to organize it.

3. Do I need to compensate participants for taking part in my card sort?

Compensation is tricky when it comes to online testing methods like card sorting. While there are no hard and fast rules, you may find that it’s the best way to incentivize people to take part in your study. Now, taking part in an online card sort is much easier than trekking across town to sit down for a user interview, so you may want to offer participants the chance to win a prize for taking part instead of compensating them directly.

Note: Offering a discount for your product or service is a great way to compensate users and encourage the use of your product. 

4. How do I make sense of the data?

Most card sorting tools offer powerful analysis functionality built right into the tool itself, so all you have to worry about is actually putting the card sort together, sending out the links and promoting it.

Using OptimalSort as an example, let’s take a look at some of the analysis functionality and why it’s useful. Other card sorting tools will likely have different analysis options available.

• Participants Table: Review all of the people who took part in your card sort and segment or exclude them.
• Participant-Centric Analysis (PCA): See the most popular grouping strategies as well as the alternatives among those people who disagreed with the first strategy.
• Dendrograms: Quickly spot popular groups of cards and get a sense of how similar or different your participant’s card sorts were.

5. Is online card sorting expensive?

Online card sorting tools can be expensive, but it’s all relative. As just one example of this, online research platforms mean that you’ll likely be gaining access to a whole host of other tools by signing up for an online card sorting tool.

There’s also the fact that it’s a cheaper exercise overall than in-person card sorting as you won’t have to pay as much for compensation, or even use as much of your own time. Time is money!

6. Can I still get qualitative insights from an online card sort?

You can draw qualitative insights directly from the results of an online card sort, but you can also use online card sorting tools alongside participant recording software to build a more holistic understanding. By using recording software, you’ll be able to watch participants as they complete a card sort, and ask them to talk through what they’re doing to learn why they placed cards in a certain way. 

7. How many participants do I need?

In a nutshell, a larger number than you’d probably bring in for a user interview. Aim for between 20 and 30 participants.

Card sorting (whether it’s performed online or offline) is what’s known as a generative user testing method. This means that you’re typically starting without a design, and you’re using the method to get an idea of how people think with regards to the problem you’re trying to solve. A good example of this would be that you’re building a new website, and are using card sorting to learn how people think the content should be grouped and arranged.

Here’s a great quote from Nielsen Norman Group: “There is great variability in different people’s mental models and in the vocabulary they use to describe the same concepts. We must collect data from a fair number of users before we can achieve a stable picture of the users’ preferred structure and determine how to accommodate differences among users”.

8. How many cards should I use?

We recommend aiming for between 30 and 60 cards, as per our comprehensive 101 guide. Why? Because:

• People will be more likely to complete your card sort.
• You’ll only be able to include the most relevant cards, and be forced to discard the rest.
• You’ll get enough useful data and insights to make informed decisions about your website, app or project.

9. What online card sorting tools are available?

There are a number of online card sorting tools available, including our very own OptimalSort, which is one of the tools included in our platform. OptimalSort has a number of useful features to make it easy to set up and run a card sort with participants based all over the world. Once you’ve gathered all of your responses, built-in analysis features can then help you make sense of the data.

Of course, there are other options available. Take a look at this tools map from User Interviews for a comprehensive overview of the major research tools.

10. What do I do after a card sort?

With your card sort done and dusted, it’s time to take that data and build a draft structure of your website or mobile app. Once you’ve put this rough structure together, you can use tree testing to to see how people navigate through it. We’ve got a guide for that too, which you can read here.

Wrap-up

So that’s 10 questions about online card sorting – answered! If you’re interested in diving straight into a card sort of your own, we obviously recommend giving OptimalSort a try (which you can do for free).

Happy testing!

Few methods surpass card sorting when you need to figure out how your users understand and categorize information.

Whether you’re working on a new website, mobile app, intranet or even a physical store, this user research method is a powerful way of getting into the minds of the people you’re trying to serve.

For those of you unfamiliar with this method or just needing a recap, a card sort involves participants sorting cards containing different items into groups. It’s as simple as that. You can use the results to then determine how to group and label the information on your app or website in a way that makes sense to the people using it.

When to use card sorting

Imagine for a moment that you’re the owner of a small fitness apparel store called FitSmart, and you’ve just ordered in a shipment of new fitness trackers. You need to add these new products to your website, but you’re not exactly sure how they fit in alongside the shoes, clothing, equipment and supplements that you also offer.

This is where card sorting comes into play.

With this user research method, you can quickly determine where people might expect to find a fitness tracker category on your website. The card sort will present the test participants with a list of cards containing the names of items found on your website, and ask users to sort the cards into groups that make sense to them.

Remember: You are not your user, and while it is possible to take an educated guess as to where to position these products, using a card sort will take out the guesswork.

One of the other benefits of card sorting is that you can routinely come back to the method whenever you need to update your website.

How to run your first card sort

Running a card sort is quite straightforward – and much simpler when using an online, unmoderated tool. Yes, you can run a card sort in person using paper cards, but you’ll then also have to coordinate with participants to have them meet you in a physical location, actually host each card sort and carry out all of the analysis manually.

Using an online tool like OptimalSort eliminates all of the admin and instead allows you to get on with the task of actually analyzing your results and making effective decisions. If you’d like to try card sorting, you can give OptimalSort a go for free and then follow this guide to set up your first test. We’d love to hear how you get on!

Pair card sorting with tree testing

When you’re working in the realm of information architecture – whether that’s reorganizing the way your website is laid out or trying to arrange categories in a mobile shopping app – card sorting isn’t the be-all and end-all.

Card sorting can show you which things should go together, but you also need to be able to work out how people make their way through a website structure. This is where a method called tree testing comes into play.

Also known as reverse card sorting, you can use a tree test to evaluate the findability of different items. In a tree test, you task participants with completing a certain action (like finding fitness trackers) and observe them as they navigate through a text-only version of your website structure. By recording every step that they take, including any wrong turns and how long it takes them to complete the task, you can make more informed changes to the specific placement of different pages and elements.

It’s best to use card sorting and tree testing together.

• If you’re building a new website, start with a card sort to group items together, and then use a tree test to put your structure through its paces.
• If you’re trying to fix or update an existing website, start with a tree test to assess the current structure, then move to a card sort to make changes based on the results of the tree test.

Wrap up

Card sorting is one of the most effective ways of building products and services that are intuitive for the people using them. If you’re interested in learning more about this research method, check out the hub page for card sorting on the Optimal Workshop 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.