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Few UX research techniques can surpass the user interview for the simple fact that you can gain a number of in-depth insights by speaking to just a handful of people. Yes, the prospect of sitting down in front of your customers can be a daunting one, but you’ll gain a level of insight and detail that really is tough to beat.

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This research method is popular for a reason – it’s extremely flexible and can deliver deep, meaningful results in a relatively short amount of time.

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We’ve put together this article for both user interview newbies and old hands alike. Our intention is to give you a guide that you can refer back to so you can make sure you're getting the most out of this technique. Of course, feel free to leave a comment if you think there’s something else we should add.

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What is a user interview?

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User interviews are a technique you can use to capture qualitative information from your customers and other people you’re interested in learning from. For example, you may want to interview a group of retirees before developing a new product aimed at their market.

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User interviews usually follow the format of a guided conversation, diving deep into a particular topic. While sometimes you may have some predefined questions or topics to cover, the focus of your interviews can change depending on what you learn along the way.

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Given the format, user interviews can help you answer any number of questions, such as:

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• How do people currently shop online? Are there any products they would never consider purchasing this way?
• How do people feel about using meal delivery services? What stops them from trying them out?
• How do ride sharing drivers figure out which app to use when they’re about to start a shift?

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It’s important to remember that user interviews are all about people's perception of something, not usability. What this means in practical terms is that you shouldn’t go into a user interview expecting to find out how they navigate through a particular app, product or website. Those are answers you can gain through usability testing.

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When should you interview your users?

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Now that we have an understanding of what user interviews are and the types of questions this method can help you answer, when should you do them? As this method will give you insights into why people think the way they do, what they think is important and any suggestions they have, they’re mostly useful in the discovery stages of the design process when you're trying to understand the problem space.

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You may want to run a series of user interviews at the start of a project in order to inform the design process. Interviews with users can help you to create detailed personas, generate feature ideas based on real user needs and set priorities. Looked at another way, doesn’t it seem like an unnecessary risk not to talk to your users before building something for them?

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Plan your research

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Before sitting down and writing your user interview, you need to figure out your research question. This is the primary reason for running your user interviews – your ‘north star’. It’s also a good idea to engage with your stakeholders when trying to figure this question out as they’ll be able to give you useful insights and feedback.

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A strong research question will help you to create interview questions that are aligned and give you a clear goal. The key thing is to make sure that it’s a strong, concise goal that relates to specific user behaviors. You don’t want to start planning for your interview with a research question like “How do customers use our mobile app”. It’s far too broad to direct your interview planning.

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Write your questions

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Now it’s time to write your user interview questions. If you’ve taken the time to engage with stakeholders and you’ve created a solid research question, this step should be relatively straightforward.

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Here are a few things to focus on when writing your interview questions:

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• Encourage your interviewees to tell stories: There’s a direct correlation between the questions you write for a user interview and the answers you get back. Consider more open-ended questions, with the aim of getting your interviewees to tell you stories and share more detail. For example, “Tell me about the last car you owned” is much better than “What was the last car you owned”.
• Consider different types of questions: You don’t want to dive right into the complex, detailed questions when your interviewee has barely walked into the room. It’s much better to start an interview off with several ‘warm-up’ questions, that will get them in the right frame of mind. Think questions like: “What do you do for work?” and “How often do you use a computer at home?”. Answering these questions will put them in the right frame of mind for the rest of the interview.
• Start with as many questions as you can think of – then trim: This can be quite a helpful exercise. When you’re actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and writing your questions, go broad at first. Then, once you’ve got a large selection to choose from, trim them back.
• Have someone review your questions: Whether it’s another researcher on your team or perhaps someone who’s familiar with the audience you plan to interview, get another pair of eyes on your questions. Beyond just making sure they all make sense and are appropriate, they may be able to point out any questions you may have missed.

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Recruit participants

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Having a great set of questions is all well and good, but you need to interview the right kind of people. It’s not always easy. Finding representative or real users can quickly suck up a lot of time and bog down your other work. But this doesn’t have to be the case. With some strategy and planning you can make the process of participant recruitment quick and easy.

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There are 2 main ways to go about recruitment. You can either handle the process yourself – we’ll share some tips for how to do this below – or use a recruitment service. Using a dedicated recruitment service will save you the hassle of actively searching for participants, which can often become a significant time-sink.

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If you’re planning to recruit people yourself, here are a few ways to go about the process. You may find that using multiple methods is the best way to net the pool of participants you need.

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• Reach out to your customer support team: There’s a ready source of real users available in every organization: the customer support team. These are the people that speak to your organization’s customers every day, and have a direct line to their problems and pain points. Working with this team is a great way to access suitable participants, plus customers will value the fact that you’re taking the time to speak to them.
• Recruit directly from your website: Support messaging apps like Intercom and intercept recruiting tools like Ethnio allow you to recruit participants directly from your website by serving up live intercepts. This is a fast, relatively hands-off way to recruit people quickly.
• Ask your social media followers: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be great sources of research participants. There’s also the bonus that you can broadcast the fact that your organization focuses on research – and that’s always good publicity! If you don’t have a large following, you can also run paid ads on different social platforms.

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Once a pool of participants start to flow in, consider setting up a dedicated research panel where you can log their details and willingness to take part in future research. It may take some admin at the start, but you’ll save time in the long run.

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Note: Figure out a plan for participant data protection before you start collecting and storing their information. As the researcher, it’s up to you to take proper measures for privacy and confidentiality, from the moment you collect an email address until you delete it. Only store information in secure locations, and make sure you get consent before you ever turn on a microphone recorder or video camera.

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Run your interviews

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Now for the fun part – running your user interviews. In most cases, user interviews follow a simple format. You sit down next to your participant and run through your list of questions, veering into new territory if you sense an interesting discussion. At the end, you thank them for their time and pass along a small gift (such as a voucher) as a thank-you.

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Of course, there are a few other things that you’ll want to keep in mind if you really want to conduct the best possible interviews.

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• Involve others: User interviews are a great way to show the value of research and give people within your organization a direct insight into how users think. There are no hard and fast rules around who you should bring to a user interview, just consider how useful the experience is likely to be for them. If you like, you can also assign them the role of notetaker.
• Record the interview: You’ll have to get consent from the interviewee, but having a recording of the interview will make the process of analysis that much easier. In addition to being able to listen to the recording again, you can convert the entire session into a searchable text file.
• Don’t be afraid to go off-script: Interviewing is a skill, meaning that the more interviews you conduct, the better you’re going to get. Over time, you’ll find that you’re able to naturally guide the conversation in different directions as you pick up on things the interviewee says. Don’t be discouraged if you find yourself sticking to your prepared questions during your first few interviews.
• Be attentive: You don’t want to come across as a brick wall when interviewing someone – you want to be seen as an attentive listener. This means confirming that you’re listening by nodding, making eye contact and asking follow-up questions naturally (this last one may take practice). If you really struggle to ask follow-up questions, try writing a few generic questions can you can use at different points throughout the interview, for example “Could you tell me more about that?”. There’s a great guide on UXmatters about the role empathy has to play in understanding users.
• Debrief afterwards: Whether it’s just you or you and a notetaker, take some time after the interview to go over how it went. This is a good opportunity to take down any details either you may have missed and to reflect and discuss some of the key takeaways.

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Analyze your interview findings

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At first glance, analyzing the qualitative data you’ve captured from a user interview can seem daunting. But, with the right approach (and some useful tools) you can extract each and every useful insight.

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If you’ve recorded your interview sessions, you’ll need to convert your audio recordings into text files. We recommend a tool like Descript. This software makes it easy to take an audio file of your recording and transform it into a document, which is much faster than doing it without dedicated software. If you like, there’s also the option of various ‘white glove’ services where someone will transcribe the interview for you.

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With your interview recordings transcribed and notes in-hand, you can start the process of thematic analysis. If you’re unfamiliar, thematic analysis is one of the most popular approaches for qualitative research as it helps you to find different patterns and themes in your data. There are 2 ways to approach this. The first is largely manual, where you set up a spreadsheet with different themes like ‘navigation issue’ and ‘design problem’, and group your findings into these areas. This can be done using sticky notes, which used to be a common ways to analyze findings.

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The second involves dedicated qualitative research tool like Reframer. You log your notes over the course of several interview sessions and then use Reframer’s tagging functionality to assign tags to different insights. By applying tags to your observations, you can then use its analysis features to create wider themes. The real benefit here is that there’s no chance of losing your past interviews and analysis as everything is stored in one place. You can also easily download your findings into a spreadsheet to share them with your team.

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What’s next?

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With your interviews all wrapped up and your analysis underway, you’re likely wondering what’s next. There’s a good chance your interviews will have opened up new areas you’d like to test, so now could be the perfect time to assess other qualitative research methods and add more human data to your research project. On the other hand, you may want to move onto quantitative research and put some numbers behind your research.

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Whether you choose to proceed down a qualitative or quantitative path, we’re pulled together some more useful articles and things for you to read:

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• Qualitative research methods – A breakdown of various qualitative research methods and why you’d want to use this research approach in the first place.
• Taking better notes for better sensemaking – Learn how you can improve your notetaking abilities before your next user interview or usability test.
• 13 time-saving tips and tools for conducting great user interviews – User interviews can be time-sinks, so take a look at these tips to make the process as smooth as possible.
• Pros and cons of conducting user interviews (Interaction Design Foundation) – A really useful resource that breaks down the pros and cons of user interviews.
• Tool: Reframer – You can use Reframer (our qualitative note taking tool) to capture detailed notes during your interviews. Then, you can apply tags and use Reframer’s analysis features to make the most of your interview data.
• Tool: Descript – Transcribing interviews is arduous, and can often take more time than the interview itself. Use a transcription tool like Descript to speed the process up.
• 16 tips for better user interviews – If you’d like another checklist to run through before you start your user interviews, this one is worth checking out.

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

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Qualitative research

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

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When to use qualitative research

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

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

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How to gather qualitative data

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

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

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How many participants will you need?

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

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Quantitative research

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

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When to use quantitative research

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

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

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How to gather quantitative data

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

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Here are some of the most popular quantitative research methods:

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

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How many participants will you need?

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

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Mixed methods research

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

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

• What is mixed methods research?

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Where to from here?

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

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Here are some of the best articles to read next:

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

With UX research so closely tied to product success, setting up a dedicated research practice is fast becoming important for many organizations. It’s not an easy process, especially for organizations that have had little to do with research, but the end goal is worth the effort.

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But where exactly are you supposed to start? This article provides 6 key things to keep in mind when setting up a research practice, and should hopefully ensure you’ve considered all of the relevant factors.

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1) Work out what your organization needs

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The first and most simple step is to take stock of the current user research situation within the organization. How much research is currently being done? Which teams or individuals are talking to customers on an ongoing basis? Consider if there are any major pain points with the current way research is being carried out or bottlenecks in getting research insights to the people that need them. If research isn't being practiced, identify teams or individuals that don't currently have access to the resources they need, and consider ways to make insights available to the people that need them.

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2) Consolidate your insights

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UX research should be communicating with nearly every part of an organization, from design teams to customer support, engineering departments and C-level management. The insights that stem from user research are valuable everywhere. Of course, the opposite is also true: insights from support and sales are useful for understanding customers and how the current product is meeting people's needs.

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When setting up a research practice, identify which teams you should align with, and then reach out. Sit down with these teams and explore how you can help each other. For your part, you’ll probably need to explain the what and why of user research within the context of your organization, and possibly even explain at a basic level some of the techniques you use and the data you can obtain.

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Then, get in touch with other teams with the goal of learning from them. A good research practice needs a strong connection to other parts of the business with the express purpose of learning. For example, by working with your organization’s customer support team, you’ll have a direct line to some of the issues that customers deal with on a regular basis. A good working relationship here means they’ll likely feed these insights back to you, in order to help you frame your research projects.

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By working with your sales team, they’ll be able to share issues prospective customers are dealing with. You can follow up on this information with research, the results of which can be fed into the development of your organization’s products.

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It can also be fruitful to develop an insights repository, where researchers can store any useful insights and log research activities. This means that sales, customer support and other interested parties can access the results of your research whenever they need to.

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When your research practice is tightly integrated other key areas of the business, the organization is likely to see innumerable benefits from the insights>product loop.

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3) Figure out which tools you will use

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By now you’ve hopefully got an idea of how your research practice will fit into the wider organization – now it’s time to look at the ways in which you’ll do your research. We’re talking, of course, about research methods and testing tools.

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We won’t get into every different type of method here (there are plenty of other articles and guides for that), but we will touch on the importance of qualitative and quantitative methods. If you haven’t come across these terms before, here’s a quick breakdown:

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• Qualitative research – Focused on exploration. It’s about discovering things we cannot measure with numbers, and often involves speaking with users through observation or user interviews.
• Quantitative research – Focused on measurement. It’s all about gathering data and then turning this data into usable statistics.

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All user research methods are designed to deliver either qualitative or quantitative data, and as part of your research practice, you should ensure that you always try to gather both types. By using this approach, you’re able to generate a clearer overall picture of whatever it is you’re researching.

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Next comes the software. A solid stack of user research testing tools will help you to put research methods into practice, whether for the purposes of card sorting, carrying out more effective user interviews or running a tree test.

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There are myriad tools available now, and it can be difficult to separate the useful software from the chaff. Here’s a list of research and productivity tools that we recommend.

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Tools for research

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Here’s a collection of research tools that can help you gather qualitative and quantitative data, using a number of methods.

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• Treejack – Tree testing can show you where people get lost on your website, and help you take the guesswork out of information architecture decisions. Like OptimalSort, Treejack makes it easy to sort through information and pairs this with in-depth analysis features.
• dScout – Imagine being able to get video snippets of your users as they answer questions about your product. That’s dScout. It’s a video research platform that collects in-context “moments” from a network of global participants, who answer your questions either by video or through photos.
• Ethnio – Like dScout, this is another tool designed to capture information directly from your users. It works by showing an intercept pop-up to people who land on your website. Then, once they agree, it runs through some form of research.
• OptimalSort – Card sorting allows you to get perspective on whatever it is you’re sorting and understand how people organize information. OptimalSort makes it easier and faster to sort through information, and you can access powerful analysis features.
• Reframer – Taking notes during user interviews and usability tests can be quite time-consuming, especially when it comes to analyze the data. Reframer gives individuals and teams a single tool to store all of their notes, along with a set of powerful analysis features to make sense of their data.
• Chalkmark – First-click testing can show you what people click on first in a user interface when they’re asked to complete a task. This is useful, as when people get their first click correct, they’re much more likely to complete their task. Chalkmark makes the process of setting up and running a first-click test easy. What’s more, you’re given comprehensive analysis tools, including a click heatmap.

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Tools for productivity

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These tools aren’t necessarily designed for user research, but can provide vital links in the process.

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• Whimsical – A fantastic tool for user journeys, flow charts and any other sort of diagram. It also solves one of the biggest problems with online whiteboards – finicky object placement.
• Descript – Easily transcribe your interview and usability test audio recordings into text.
• Google Slides – When it inevitably comes time to present your research findings to stakeholders, use Google Slides to create readable, clear presentations.

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4) Figure out how you’ll track findings over time

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With some idea of the research methods and testing tools you’ll be using to collect data, now it’s time to think about how you’ll manage all of this information. A carefully ordered spreadsheet and folder system can work – but only to an extent. Dedicated software is a much better choice, especially given that you can scale these systems much more easily.

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A dedicated home for your research data serves a few distinct purposes. There’s the obvious benefit of being able to access all of your findings whenever you need them, which means it’s much easier to create personas if the need arises. A dedicated home also means your findings will remain accessible and useful well into the future.

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When it comes to software, Reframer stands as one of the better options for creating a detailed customer insights repository as you’re able to capture your sessions directly in the tool and then apply tags afterwards. You can then easily review all of your observations and findings using the filtering options. Oh, and there’s obviously the analysis side of the tool as well.

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If you’re looking for a way to store high-level findings – perhaps if you’re intending to share this data with other parts of your organization – then a tool like Confluence or Notion is a good option. These tools are basically wikis, and include capable search and navigation options too.

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5) Where will you get participants from?

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A pool of participants you can draw from for your user research is another important part of setting up a research practice. Whenever you need to run a study, you’ll have real people you can call on to test, ask questions and get feedback from.

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This is where you’ll need to partner other teams, likely sales and customer support. They’ll have direct access to your customers, so make sure to build a strong relationship with these teams. If you haven’t made introductions, it can helpful to put together a one-page sheet of information explaining what UX research is and the benefits of working with your team.

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You may also want to consider getting in some external help. Participant recruitment services are a great way to offload the heavy lifting of sourcing quality participants – often one of the hardest parts of the research process.

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6) Work out how you'll communicate your research

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Perhaps one of the most important parts of being a user researcher is taking the findings you uncover and communicating them back to the wider organization. By feeding insights back to product, sales and customer support teams, you’ll form an effective link between your organization’s customers and your organization. The benefits here are obvious. Product teams can build products that actually address customer pain points, and sales and support teams will better understand the needs and expectations of customers.

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Of course, it isn’t easy to communicate findings. Here are a few tips:

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• Document your research activities: With a clear record of your research, you’ll find it easier to pull out relevant findings and communicate these to the right teams.
• Decide who needs what: You’ll probably find that certain roles (like managers) will be best served by a high-level overview of your research activities (think a one-page summary), while engineers, developers and designers will want more detailed research findings.

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Continue reading

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

Did you know that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text? That’s according to some interesting research from the company behind the Post-it Note. Humans are visual creatures, and there’s a reason video is hard to beat when it comes to taking on new information – especially interesting video.

With that in mind, we’ve asked our user researchers for their favorite TED talks for people getting started in the UX space. We’ve also included 2 extra videos we think are definitely worth watching.

The beauty of data visualization

What it’s about: David McCandless explains how complex datasets (whether on military spending or even something like Facebook status updates) can be transformed into beautiful visualizations to unearth previously-unseen patterns and connections. The point of this talk is essentially that good design through visualizations is the key to making sense of the huge quantities of data available today.

About the speaker: David McCandless is a data journalist and information designer, founder of the Information is Beautiful blog.

The complex relationship between data and design in UX

What it’s about: Designer Rochelle King explains her journey overhauling the Spotify interface, in which she was challenged to combine the various interfaces of the product into a single layout. She covers the process of redesigning the website as well as how to best manage the relationships between designers, users and data.

About the speaker: Rochelle King was the global vice president of user experience and design at Spotify and is now vice president of product creative at Netflix.

How giant websites design for you

What it’s about: Margaret Gould Stewart (whose designs have undoubtedly touched hundreds of millions of people) speaks about the 3 rules for design at scale, and points out that even tiny tweaks can cause either global outrage or have sweeping positive impacts.

About the speaker: Facebook's Director of Product Design, Margaret Gould Stewart also worked at YouTube. She certainly has the right experience for this topic.

The first secret of design is… noticing

What it’s about: The man (no, not that man) behind the original Apple iPod shares some of his tips for noticing and driving change – specifically the importance of noticing the little things. It’s a light, funny talk that’s as useful for UX researchers as it is for designers.

About the speaker: Tony Fadell is an Apple veteran and creator of the original iPod. After that, he moved onto Nest, the home automation company that was eventually acquired by Google.

Simplicity sells

What it’s about: David Pogue presents one of the more lighthearted TED talks, running through some of the worst user interface designs and some of the underlying principles that went into their design. As just one example, he talks about the different approaches to logging off that Microsoft and Apple use, and at one point he breaks out into song.

About the speaker: David Pogue is a bestselling author, columnist for the New York Times covering personal technology and technology correspondent for CBS News.

The power of vulnerability

What it’s about: Vulnerability researcher Brené Brown delves into one particularly deep human insight she came across during her research. She explains that this insight sent her on a journey to understand both herself and humanity. It’s not strictly UX research, but this talk has valuable learnings for every UX professional.

About the speaker: Brené Brown is a researcher who focuses on vulnerability, courage, shame and authenticity. She wrote the bestselling book Daring Greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and lead.

Also watch: How to speak so that people want to listen

What it’s about: One of the most important skills for any UX professional is communicating with others, and this talk by Julian Treasure holds some valuable advice. He explains the “how-to’s of speaking”, including how to speak with empathy and exercises for warming up your vocal chords.

About the speaker: Julian Treasure is a sound and communication expert, traveling the world and teaching people and businesses to use sound more effectively.

Also watch: The puzzle of motivation

What it’s about: Figuring out motivation is a constant puzzle for user researchers. Career analyst Dan Pink explores motivation in this talk, examining the fact that traditional rewards aren’t actually as effective as most think.

About the speaker: Dan Pink was Al Gore’s speech writer before heading into the world of career analysis. He’s also written 6 books, including the bestseller When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.

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Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.

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While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.

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Define user research

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If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.

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In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:

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• More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
• Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
• Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.

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Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.

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The early stages

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When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:

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• Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
• Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
• Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
• Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.

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Involve others in your research

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When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.

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We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.

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Educate others on what research is

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Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.

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Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.

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Collect user insights across the organization

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Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.

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Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.

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Bring stakeholders along to research sessions

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Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.

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To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.

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You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.

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Share your findings – consistently

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Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.

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By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.

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Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.

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Read more

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design growing in organizations around the world, we’ll need capable leaders to run UX teams.
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

Summary: In this post, David goes through the process of running an audit of Optimal Workshop’s content – and why you should probably think about doing your own.

When was the last time you ran a website content audit? If the answer’s either ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Never’, then it’s probably high time you did one. There are few activities that can give you the same level of insight into how your content is performing as a deep dive into every blog post, case study and video on your website.

What is a content audit?

At a very high level, a website content audit is a qualitative analysis of all blogs, landing pages, support articles and guides on your website. It’s like taking inventory or stock-taking. In real terms, a content audit will often be a spreadsheet with fields for things like content type, URL, title, view count and category – the fields differ depending on your own needs and the types of content you’re auditing.

Why conduct a content audit?

There’s really no better way to understand how all of your content is performing than a comprehensive audit. You’re able to see which articles and pages are driving the most traffic and which ones aren’t really contributing anything.

You can also see if there are any major gaps in your content strategy to date. For example, is there a particular area of your business that you’re not supporting with guides or blog articles?

A holistic understanding of your website’s content allows you to create more effective content strategies and better serve your audience.

Auditing Optimal Workshop

Content had grown organically at Optimal Workshop. In the 10 years since we started countless people had a hand in creating blog articles, landing pages, videos and other types of content – much of it often created without following a clear content strategy. That’s often fine for a small startup, but not the right direction to stay on for a rapidly growing business.

When I started to scope the task of auditing everything content-related, I first took note of where all of our content currently sat. The ‘learn hub’ section of our website was just a fairly convoluted landing page pointing off to different sub-landing pages, while the blog was a simply a reverse-chronological order display of every blog post and far too many categories. There was clearly room for significant improvement, but taking stock of everything was a critical first step.

With a rough idea of where all of our content was located – including the many live pages that weren’t accessible through the sitemap – I could begin the process of collating everything. I’d decided on a spreadsheet as it allowed me to achieve quite a high information density and arrange the data in a few different ways.

I came up with several fields based on the type of content I was auditing. For the blog, I wanted:

• Article title
• Categories/tags
• Author
• View count
• Average time on page
• Average bounce rate

At an individual level, these categories gave me a good idea as to whether or not a piece of content was performing well. When looking at all of the blog posts in my finished audit, I could also quickly identify any factors that the best-performing pieces of content had in common.

One of the most interesting, although not entirely surprising, learnings from this audit was that our more practical and pragmatic content (regardless of channel) always performed better than the lighter or fluffier content we occasionally produced. The headline was almost certainly the deciding factor here. For example, articles like ‘A guide to conducting a heuristic evaluation’ and ‘How to create use cases’ attracted view counts and read times well above articles like ‘From A to UX’ and ‘Researching the researchers and designing for designers’. Interestingly, content written to support the use of our tools also often attracted high view counts and read times.

Intuitively, this makes sense. We’re a software company writing for a community of researchers, designers and professionals, many of whom will have come to our blog as a result of some interaction with our tools. It makes sense they’d see more value in content that can help them accomplish a specific task – even better if it supports their use of the tools.

Auditing the learn hub

Following my audit of the blog, I moved onto the other areas of the learn hub. I created an entirely new spreadsheet that contained everything that wasn’t a blog post, with a set of different fields:

• Page name
• Content type (landing page, case study, video or guide)
• Description
• Owner (which product/marketing team)
• Page views
• Average time on page
• Bounce rate

I knew before even starting the audit that our series of 101 guides received a significant share of our learn hub page traffic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just much they attracted. Each guide received far and away more traffic than the other learning resources. It’s results like these that serve to really highlight the value of frequent content audits. Few other exercises can provide such informative insights into content strategy.

At some point in the past, we’d also run a short video series called ‘UX Picnic’, where we’d asked different guest user researchers to share interesting stories. Similarly, we had two case studies live on the website, with a third one delisted but still available (as long as you knew the URL!). We hadn’t seen spectacular traffic with any of these pieces of content and all were good candidates for further investigation. Seeing as we had big plans for future case studies, analyzing what worked and what didn’t with these earlier versions would prove a useful exercise.

A product demo page, information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page made up the final pieces of our audit puzzle, and I popped these last 2 on a third ‘other pages’ spreadsheet. Interestingly, both the information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page had received decent traffic.

Identifying gaps in our content ‘tree’

An important function of a content audit is to identify ways to improve the content strategy moving forward. As I made my way through the blog articles, guides and case studies, I was finding that while we’d seen great results with a number of different topics, we’d often move onto another topic instead of producing follow-up content.

Keyword research revealed other content gaps – basically areas where there was an opportunity for us to produce more relevant content for our audience.

Categorizing our content audit

Once I’d finished the initial content pull from the website, we (the Community Education team) realized that we wanted to add another layer of categorization.

With a focus specifically on the blog (due to the sheer quantity of content), we came up with another tagging system that could help us when it came time to move to a new blogging platform. I went back through the spreadsheet containing every blog post, and tagged posts with the following system:

• Green: Valuable - The post could be moved across with no changes.
• Red: Delete - The post contains information that’s wildly out of date or doesn’t fit in with our current tone and style.
• Yellow: Outdated - The post is outdated, but worth updating and moving across. It needs significant work.
• Purple: Unfinished series - The post is part of an unfinished series of blog posts.
• Orange: Minor change - The post is worth moving across and only needs a minor change.
• Blue: Feature article - The article is about a feature or product release.

This system meant we had a much better idea of how we’d approach moving our blog content to a new platform. Specifically, what we could bring across and the content we’d need to improve.

The document that keeps on giving

Auditing everything ‘content’ at Optimal Workshop proved to be a pretty useful exercise, allowing me to see what content was performing well (and why) and the major gaps in our content strategy. It also set us up for the next stage of our blog project (more coming soon), which was to look at how we’d recategorize and re-tag content to make it easier to find.

How to do a content audit

If you’ve just jumped down straight down here without reading the introduction at the top of the page, this section outlines how to run your own content audit. To recap, a content audit is a qualitative assessment of your website’s content. Running one will enable you to better understand the pros and cons of your current content strategy and help you to better map out your future content strategy.

To do a content audit, it’s best to start with a clear list of categories or metrics. Commonly, these are things like:

• Page visits
• Average time on page
• Social shares
• Publication date
• Word count

The sky’s the limit here. Just note that the more categories you add, the more time you’ll have to spend gathering data for each piece of content. With your categories defined, open a new spreadsheet and begin the process of auditing each and every piece of content. Once you’ve finished your audit, socialize your insights with your team and any other relevant individuals.

Then, you can move onto actually putting your content audit into practice. Look for gaps in your content strategy – are there any clear areas that you haven’t written about yet? Are there any topics that could be revisited. Ideally, a content audit should be kept updated and used whenever the topic of “content strategy” comes up.