Optimal Blog

The Age of the Customer is well and truly here. In every industry and vertical across the globe, UX professionals now dictate the terms, placing customers at the heart of every design decision. Or at least, this is the new reality that’s unfolding in the organizations and businesses that don’t want to be left behind.

Make no mistake; simply claiming to be the best is no longer enough. To survive and thrive, people need to be placed at the heart. The golden key that will allow organizations to pivot to this new reality lies with that of the user researcher.

But it’s not enough to simply “do user research”. Sure, some customer insight is obviously better than none at all, but to really be useful it needs to be effective research. That’s what this article is all about.

Get comfortable, because this is going to be a long one – for good reason.

Why (effective) user research is so important

You are not your user. As much as you may like to think that you are, you’re not. It can be a tricky proposition to get your head around, especially when we regularly assume that everyone thinks like us. There are 8 billion people out there who have a vastly different set of experiences and perspectives than you. With that in mind, when we start to generalize based on our own personal experiences, this is what’s known as availability bias.

Unfortunately, solving this is issue not as easy as getting into a room with customers and having a chat. People don’t always tell the truth! This isn’t to say that the participant in your last user interview was flat out lying to you, but the things that people say are different from the things that people do. It;’s your job (as a user researcher) to intuit the actual behaviors and actions, and identify their needs based on this data.

When you’re doing your job correctly, you’ve given your organization the best possible chance of success. Everything  – and I mean everything – starts with a solid understanding of your users. Doors will open, paths will reveal themselves – you get the idea.

The qualities of an effective user researcher

Let me preface this section by saying that you don’t have to have all of these qualities in spades, the list below is really just a way for you to better understand some of the traits of an effective user researcher, to get you thinking and on the right path.

• Curious: User research can be quite repetitive, especially when you get to the 6th user interview and need to ask the same questions. A genuine curiosity about people, the challenges they face and their behaviors will go a long way in helping you to push through.
• Pragmatic: Being an idealist has its uses, but it’s also important to be pragmatic. As a researcher, you need to operate on a fine line and balance your capacity to do research with business goals, finances and the desires of your stakeholders. Do the most with what you’ve got.
• Organized: It takes a lot to plan a research project, from scheduling testing sessions to assembling large slide decks for presentations. You’ve got to manage a large number of complex components, so it’s important that you can organize and prioritize.
• Collaborative: User research is most effective when it’s carried out collaboratively. This means working with your team, with the organization and with other disciplines. Think outside the box: Who stands to benefit from your research and how can you involve them?
• Empathetic: Real, natural empathy is a rare trait, but adopting an empathetic mindset is something everyone can (and should) learn. Beyond just uncovering insights from your participants, consider what these insights mean and how they all connect. This will truly enable you to understand your users.
• Sociable: You don’t have to suddenly adopt an extroverted persona, but being actively interested in other people will help you build relationships both inside your organization and with customers.
• Perceptive: User research means listening and observing. During a user interview or usability test, you need to be able to filter all of the data entering your mind and extract the most relevant insights.
• Analytical: In a similar vein to perceptiveness, being analytical is also key if you want to understand all of the data that your research will produce. Filter, examine, extract and move on.

How to run user research effectively (and at a low cost)

There are innumerable methods for user research, but many are resource- and time-intensive. What’s more, certain research methods come attached with significant costs.

But, research doesn’t have to be the time and money sink that it can often first appear to be. Certain actions before you ever step into the room with a participant can make a world of difference.

Conduct research at the start

User research is obviously valuable whenever you do it, but you’ll see the biggest impact when you carry it out right the start of a project. Conduct research to get the lay of the land; to learn how and why customers make certain decisions, and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Note: Don’t research in a silo, involve your team, stakeholders and other interested parties.

Have clear goals – and a plan

Every research project needs a clear objective, and that comes from a detailed UX research plan, which includes well-formulated research questions. Every project will have a different question, but they’re the best starting point to ensure research success.

Choose the right methods

There’s no shortage of research methods to choose from, but being an effective user researcher is all about being able to pick the right methods for each project, and use them correctly. Nearly every research project will benefit from using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to generate the most useful insights.

To understand which method to use, it’s a good idea to view them using the following framework:

Involve stakeholders

Bring stakeholders into your research project as early as possible. These are the people that will end up utilizing the results of your work, and chances are they’re the ones who’ll have the most questions at the end. Involve them through consultation, regular updates, the all-too-important presentation at the end of the project and by letting them take notes for you during research sessions.

Wrap up

It’s not enough to simply run a card sort now (although that’s still a very useful exercise). You need to think cohesively about the role of your research in your organization and make sure that you’re as aware of your bias as you are of the various methods and tools available to you. Happy researching!

Getting stakeholders aligned and engaged with your research is rarely easy. In fact, it’s typically one of the hardest parts of being a user researcher.

I’ve seen it time and again: researchers pouring their hearts and souls into discovery and analysis projects, only to have leadership teams and different subject matter experts pay little or no attention to the outputs. There is one useful tool for stakeholder alignment, however, and when used correctly it can change how those aforementioned leadership teams and subject matter experts see your research.

Note-taking: A brief recap

The process of note-taking isn’t rocket science – and it’s exactly what it sounds like: Writing observations down during a user interview or other user test in order to identify any useful insights.

In more qualitative forms of research, the note-taking process is essential. It’s how you capture qualitative data. In a card sort, it’s more of an auxiliary exercise that can add another layer of insight.

The core skill with note-taking isn’t necessarily typing, it’s about the note-takers ability to transform observations that they’re making into readable and digestible text. Being a fast typer doesn’t always make for a good note-taker!

This is what makes note-taking an ideal tool for stakeholder engagement. It’s low effort and is an easy way to bring other people into the research process. This is time well spent, as the people who consume the outputs of your research should have an interest in the problems that you’re researching.

3 ways note-taking drives stakeholder engagement

Beyond being a tool to improve stakeholder engagement with your research, the added bonus of getting these people in the room with you as note-takers is that you’re free from the responsibility.

Whether it’s a card sort, user interview or usability test, you can focus on guiding your participants through the various tasks while your stakeholder jots down observations.

Here are 3 ways note-taking can help to drive stakeholder engagement in your research.

1. They get the chance to contribute to your research

Picture this. You’re at the end of your next research project, and you’re standing up at the front of a meeting room alongside a slide deck. It’s time to present your findings back to the original stakeholders of the project. Now consider how much more engaged they’ll be if they also had the opportunity to take part in the note-taking process.

Instead of simply reading your figures and findings, they’ll know exactly where they’ve come from and have a real connection to the data.

2. They can listen to real customers

It’s not often that stakeholders – typically those in leadership positions – get the chance to interact with customers. Usually, they hear about customer experiences second-hand from sales, marketing and customer service teams.

When you bring a stakeholder in as a note-taker, they’re able to hear from customers directly. Being in the room with customers as they try out new features or products is always interesting for those in the higher rungs of an organization.

3. You can generate insights together

Bringing stakeholders into your research sessions as note-takers means you can then collaborate with them to generate findings, thus helping you to reach a consensus quicker. Why does this work? Instead of simply taking a finalized set of findings to your stakeholders, they are with you in the room taking the notes and identifying insights together in the debrief session afterward.

The best tools for note-taking

Forget typing up notes in a document on a laptop – there are a significant number of qualitative note-taking tools available that make the process of note-taking and analysis much easier.

At Optimal Workshop, our tool for this job is Reframer, and it’s a powerful way to improve the qualitative note-taking process. With Reframer, you can log all your notes and observations in one place. After the research session is over, you can make sense of your findings quickly with easy-to-use analysis tools.

Wrap up

You don’t need to bring stakeholders in solely as note-takers. If they’d rather act as passive observers, there’s still immense value in having them in the room with you. Remember: It’s all about getting these people in sync with your research so that they’re better able to see the value of what you do, day to day!

There comes a time in every research project when the actual ‘research’ comes to an end. At this stage, you’ve collated your data and extracted useful insights, and it’s time to take the critical next step: presenting your findings back to your stakeholders.

I remember the first time that I had to present data to stakeholders. My team and I had just run a series of user interviews to learn more about how user researchers seek out and use new learning resources. We’d identified the high-level takeaways and pulled them into a slide deck to take to the leadership team.

Now came the scary part. With the lead researcher on my team, I stood up in front of the group of stakeholders and bumbled my way through the findings. Thankfully, I was with a very capable researcher and we managed to get across all of the important points – but the experience taught me a lot about how to present to stakeholders effectively.

Use stories

One of the most effective techniques that you can use as a presenter is that of the storyteller. Start off by reminding your audience of the status quo, and then reveal the path to a better way of doing things. This sets up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

By establishing this tension, you’re in a better position to persuade your audience to adopt a new viewpoint. Harvard Business Review has a great article from Nancy Duarte that makes for an excellent starting point.

Make it visual

Your findings need to be understandable, not pretty. It’s your job to take everything that you’ve learned, distill it down into the most relevant points for your stakeholders, and then present it in such a way that they’ll be able to take the information on board. A key aspect of success here depends on the visuals.

Here are some key things to keep in mind when it comes to the visual aspects of your presentation:

• Don’t overwhelm your audience with numbers: Use simple formatting, commas and skip unnecessary decimals. Also, right-align columns of numbers so that they form a kind-of bar chart automatically, and your stakeholders can quickly locate the largest numbers.
• Avoid 3D charts (unless they’re the best option): 3D presentation charts are tempting, but they introduce more cognitive load by making people process another element. Of course, there are exceptions.
• Consider something other than the pie chart: Sure, it’s rare that you’ll see a presentation without a pie chart, but they are far from the best option. Why? Because humans aren’t as good at judging the relative differences in circles as opposed to lines. We can much more easily process a bar graph than a pie chart. 

Encourage feedback and questions

You’re not just presenting the findings of your research to inform your stakeholders, you also want agreement. Add to that, this is also a great opportunity to gather more information as well as any feedback.

Don’t be afraid of the Q&A. Ask your stakeholders if they have any questions or feedback on what you’ve just shown them. There are a few ways to do this. You can ask for questions throughout the presentation, at the end, or even send a recap email after the fact to gather written responses. 

Know who you’re talking to

You need to know exactly who you’re presenting to as well as what their priorities and interests are. For example, if you’re speaking to a marketing manager or the leadership team, drill into how your research could impact areas like your free to paid conversion rate, revenue in general or customer churn.

Keep it short, but have more detail available

No one really wants to be sitting in a room listening to a presentation for 2 hours. Try and get all of your key points across within 30 minutes and allot extra time at the end for questions and discussion.

In short, focus on the high-level findings of your research, but have more data available and ready to send out.

Have a TL;DR

It’s a well-known fact that people in upper management positions are often time-poor. That’s why it’s not uncommon to see smartphones and laptops come out in particularly long meetings. If you’re presenting to a group of these people, one of the best ways to give your findings the highest chance of sinking in is through a high-level overview slide, also known as a too long, didn’t read (TL;DR) slide.

The objective of this slide is to give your audience the key takeaways and most important findings. You may also want to insert links to more detailed explanations as well as your suggested next steps.

This is also a great tool for anyone who’s unable to attend your presentation – they’ll know exactly what they’re looking at without having to come to their own conclusions.

Give concrete recommendations

Last, but certainly not least, make sure that no matter what you’re presenting, you have concrete next steps outlined clearly for your audience. For every issue or challenge that you identify, ensure that you have a clear recommendation for how to address that problem. Yes, even if it seems trivial, it’s your job to outline the recommended next steps.

Your stakeholders obviously don’t have to take any of the actions that you propose, but you’re already deep in the problem space and so in the best position to propose further actions. 

Wrap up

Presenting the findings of a research project is an understandably scary undertaking for many researchers – but it shouldn’t be. Remember that you’re there to surface insights to the people that need to hear them, and that this is the best possible way to do so. The last thing you want is for your findings to never see the light of day outside of a shared drive folder.

So remember, focus on creating a useful, interesting presentation that speaks to the people in the room – and don’t be afraid to take questions! Good luck!

Discovery research prior to the design and development of products, services and features nearly always leads to better results, whether that means a better reception from your target audience or product/market fit.

But you already knew that.

You’re likely well aware that this all-too-important research phase helps you to gather a broad range of insights about the opportunities in front of you, better define exactly what problems you need to solve and get stakeholders and other parties involved early on.

With this in mind, which methods should you use to generate the best discovery outcomes? Let’s find out.

Interview your stakeholders

You’ll no doubt be familiar with the process of interviewing your users, but it’s now time to apply that same skillset to the stakeholders of your project. This is a fairly common user research practice, and can give you a good idea of the following:

• Organization goals: What problems is the business trying to solve?
• Constraints: What factors could stand in the way (whether technical or otherwise)?
• Current insights: What do your subject matter experts already know about the problem you’re trying to solve, and what do they know about your users?

Stakeholder interviews are an excellent place to start if you’re planning to build an entirely new product or build a substantial new feature for a product that’s already being used.

Analyze business data

You don’t always need to go outside of your organization to gather information about the problem space. Chances are (especially if you’re in an established company) that there are already reams of useful data just waiting for the right analytical eye.

When we talk about business data, we basically mean any data that the organization already has about the product or feature that you’re working on. This could come in many forms, for example, qualitative anecdotes from customer service teams, or quantitative data about usage from development teams. Analyzing this sort of quantitative and qualitative data will give you useful context about key stakeholders, user pain points, opportunities and even broader issues such as alignment.

Depending on when you start this process, you may find that digging into business data is also a good opportunity to introduce yourself to the stakeholders most closely aligned with the data.

Carry out competitor analysis

Competitive analysis is the process of comparing the products and services of one company (typically yours) with those of another company. You carry out competitive analysis by comparing different types of data. For example, when we here at Optimal Workshop redesigned our blog, we carried out a significant amount of discovery research, which included a large amount of competitive analysis of other blogs. We focused on things like functionality, types of content, target audience and design.

Competitor analysis is a great way to work out where you stand alongside your competitors. You can get an idea of opportunities that they’ve missed, things they do well and potential areas of innovation for your own organization.

Run user interviews

User interviews are a research method designed to get qualitative information directly from your users. Typically, user interviews involve asking people questions related to how they use a particular system, their behaviors and their usage habits.

This research method is useful across the lifecycle of a product, but it’s particularly relevant in the discovery phase. At this point in time, you can use the results of user interviews to build your customer journey maps and personas and segments.

Host a diary study

In a diary study, users log activities of daily activities as and when they occur to generate contextual information about their behaviors, wants and needs. You can then use this data to better understand feature and product requirements.

This method has obvious advantages when used in the discovery phase of a research project. By casting a wide net and having at least 10 participants involved, you can get a broad range of insights over a long period of time. Once you’re finished, you’ll have access to useful self-reported information about usage behavior, usage scenarios, habits and more.

Wrap up

Hopefully, this guide has given you a good introduction to some of the methods that you’ll want to use during your next discovery project. Once you’ve wrapped up your discovery work, you (and your team) should have a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve as well as the opportunities and potential areas of innovation. Oh, and stakeholder alignment of course!

Keep in mind that it’s OK if the outcome of a discovery project is a dead-end – or a completely new direction. Discovery now helps you to avoid running into those issues after you’ve built a new product or feature. 

Happy discovery!

Anyone who’s ever been involved in user research knows that the process takes many different forms. Organization size, research maturity, stakeholder buy-in, budget and many other factors all play a part in how various teams and individuals approach the process of learning how users think and, consequently, how to build products and services for them.

One of the most important steps you can take is to move from tactical (evaluative) research to discovery (generative) research.

Tactical versus discovery research

If you need a brief refresher on what these two terms mean, here’s a handy breakdown:

• Tactical or evaluative research: Assessing an existing solution to work out whether it meets people’s needs. This could be running a tree test on a website that’s already widely used.
• Discovery or generative research: Developing a deeper understanding of a problem or a group of users to identify opportunities and areas of innovation. This could be running a series of user interviews to speak to users directly.

I want to be clear here: We’re not saying that you should never carry out tactical, evaluative research, just that it’s vital to carve out time for discovery.

An issue of time

Time waits for no one. When speaking to user researchers, a common theme is that they’re underresourced and time-poor. Typically, the smaller numbers of researchers in comparison to other roles means that their skills are in high demand, all the time.

What does this mean for the types of work that researchers are often tasked with? In many organizations, researchers are constantly in lock-step with design and development teams, carrying out necessary tactical research alongside prototype development, or testing finalized versions of products and services.

This doesn’t leave much time (if any) for generative research.

Discovery research: A deep dive

Making time for discovery in the UX design process is not about testing hypotheses, prototypes or solutions. This type of research is firmly focused on framing the problem, developing an understanding of the problem space and gathering data.

Discovery, by its very nature, should be broad and have no particular leanings with regards to solutions or technology. The focus here is about learning how people live and act, what their environments are like, and getting a detailed understanding of their behaviors, thoughts and opinions.

If you’re running a discovery project on a product that’s already been developed, then it’s not discovery. It’s essentially validation that what’s already been built is the right solution.

Discovery research should help you build up a solid understanding of your users, the problems to be solved, opportunities available and success metrics that the team and stakeholders can rally behind.

How to get started with discovery research

You can use a number of different methods to carry out discovery research. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common ones.

• User interviews: Ideal for learning about people’s behaviors, problems, habits and perspectives, this method is a great way to collect qualitative data as part of the discovery process. 
• Diary studies: In a similar vein to user interviews, diary studies allow you to collect qualitative data from a group of people. Diary studies differ in that the insights are self-reported, thus giving you a different perspective.
• Field studies: Instead of bringing users into your organization for an interview or usability study, head out into the field to observe how they work and behave in their environment. 
• Stakeholder interviews: Looking internally, stakeholder interviews are a great way to get a unique perspective on the problem you’re investigating. Stakeholders typically know a lot about internal processes, user behaviors and what solutions have already been tried.
• Assumption-mapping workshops: This type of workshop is all about prioritizing your assumptions based on certainty – and risk. The idea is that by identifying the riskiest assumptions you’ll have a better idea of where to devote your energy.

Nielsen Norman Group has an in-depth article on discovery that covers some of the other common activities. 

The outputs of a discovery project

After you’ve run a discovery project, you and your team will have a much more comprehensive understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve – and where you should start to focus your efforts.

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!