For many people, UX research is seen as a chore: they know that it’s useful and important, but are liable to just keep putting it off. Then, there are others who carry out discovery research at the start of a new project, but then quickly forget about it as they lose themselves in the design and development process. Lastly, we’ve got people who carry out research on a regular basis, both at the start of a project as discovery work and throughout to test assumptions and work through design or development problems.

Regardless of where you sit on the above scale, the insights that only user-focused research can deliver are key to building successful products, and if you don’t build products that address real user needs, then your competitors certainly will. 

Paula Makuck sums it quite well: “User research helps us to understand how people go about performing tasks and achieving goals that are important to them. It gives us context and perspective and puts us in a position to respond with useful, simplified, and productive design solutions.”

Of course, there’s a big jump from understanding the value of user research to actually successfully executing the entire research workflow. What’s more, the internet is filled with thousands of articles, guides and books that attempt to either explain the ‘how’ of the entire process or focus in on one small aspect. This article is designed to shine a high-level light on the key stages of the research workflow, and then point you off to more useful resources where appropriate. This article is for everyone who’s ever said: “Ok, I get the value of user research, but where do I actually start?”.

With that in mind, let’s dive into the first section of our guide, stakeholder interviews.

Run stakeholder interviews

A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your research, and more specifically the output. Working with stakeholders is especially important for anyone carrying out user research as you need to know both what they already know about a particular problem and what they need to find out. Understandably, strong communication throughout the research process is key.

While the way in which you communicate with stakeholders during a project may vary, interviews are the best way to identify what they know and need to know at the beginning. As with user interviews, it’s hard to beat sitting down face to face with someone to discuss their needs and problems. Digital.gov has an excellent article on the why of stakeholder interviews, as well as how to actually go about the process of setting them up. You can find that article here.

We’re not done with our stakeholders just yet, either. They’ll play an integral role in the entire user research workflow as we move through the various stages of our project.

Identify your known data

With our stakeholder interviews wrapped up, it’s time to turn our attention to another critical part of the early-stage user research process; identifying our known data. It’s certainly not always easy (and one of the reasons why a good research repository is so key), but the work is important. 

Why? Well, in addition to helping you avoid duplicate research work, taking the time to assess all of the existing data related to your research problem may help you to identify further avenues of research.

So what does this stage of the research workflow look like? It depends on your organization. For those with an established research function, it may be as easy as accessing the company Airtable or Google Drive and pulling up any existing findings. For those without such an operation, things may be a little trickier. Research will have almost certainly been carried out at some point or another, but your mileage may vary when it comes to actually locating it.

Here are just a few of the functions within an organization where you’re likely to find existing data:

• Product teams: Any product-focused organization is likely to have at least some insight into customer data. And while it may not be in the form of a tidy written report or a collated spreadsheet, product teams should be able to deliver data in the form of how users are actually using a product.
• Marketing teams: A potential treasure-trove of user data lies with marketing teams. These are the people within an organization that base much of their work on user behavior, and so are likely to have information like personas on hand.
• Sales team: In much the same way, sales teams will also likely have user data sitting around.

Wherever you end up locating existing research data, taking the time to collate it will certainly serve you well as you begin your own research project.

Develop an approach

Your approach is the mechanism by which you’ll gather more information about your research problem. In simple terms, the research questions and the methodologies you’ll use to answer them.

Research questions are essentially your research objectives. The ‘why’ of your research project. These should be informed by the existing data you’ve uncovered as well as discussions with your stakeholders. As for what research questions should look like, here are some examples: 

• “How do people currently use the cart feature on our mobile app?”
• “How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”
• “How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”

When formulating your research questions, keep in mind that these are not the same questions you should be asking your users. Basically, they should be broad enough that you can use them to then generate tasks or questions for your users, the outputs of which should hopefully shed a little more light on the problem you’re working on.

As for the methods you’ll use to actually attempt to answer these questions, we’ll get to those further down.

Put together a plan or brief

Putting together a detailed research plan is really a process that overlaps many of the steps we’ve outlined above. You’ll want to feed in things like who your stakeholders are, research methodologies, any budget estimates and the participants or participant groups you’re likely to bring on board.

For these reasons, a research plan is something that you should develop throughout the early stages of your research project and then refer back to throughout to ensure you’re still focusing on what you set out to answer. It’s fine to pivot a project if the problem leads you in a more useful direction, but always compare refer to your plan and stakeholders when doing so. Scope creep and rabbit holes are all too common in the field of user research.

Most of what we’ve talked about above will end up constituting your research plan, but a formal document is still an extremely useful tool to have. Don’t fall into the trap of simply dumping everything into a folder on your computer. Such an approach may be fine for you during the project (and possibly even when you need to come back in the future), but it’ll be a nightmare for anyone else needing to pick up where you left off.

Collect the data

Now we come to the data gathering stage of the research process, requiring the use of various research methods to answer our questions. As we covered in our Intro to UX research guide, there’s really no shortage of user research methods available. From card sorting to usability testing, each method – when used correctly – can be a powerful way to get the answers you need.

The methods you end up using should be informed by your research questions. While some questions are best answered using qualitative methods (like user interviews or usability tests), others are better suited to quantitative testing methods. Alternatively, you could even use a combination by mixing methods.

Determining which method to use requires careful consideration of your research question. If we take a look at the question: “How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”, we’d want to look at how they navigate through the website, meaning tree testing would be a suitable option. Alternatively, the question: “How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”, would be better suited to a qualitative research method like a user interview where we can sit down with a user and ask them questions directly.

Of course, to even execute any of these research methodologies, you’re going to need participants.

Source your participants

You’ve got a research plan, key stakeholders, the questions you need to answer and an understanding of the methods you’d like to use to answer those questions. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to participant recruitment.

There’s a common misconception that finding participants is one of the hardest parts of the user research process, being time consuming, costly and annoying – but this isn’t actually the case. With just a little digging, you’ll likely be able to uncover a pool of people without ever leaving your desk.

Here are just a few of the potential participant sources that researchers, designers and marketers use on a regular basis. This list is by no means exhaustive, but should serve as a good starting point. You’ll also want to consider payment. Your participants are giving up some of their time to help you, so think about a small monetary reward or even a discount for your products or services. The amount and how you broach this depends on the channel.

• Product teams: Even if your organization doesn’t employ any researchers, chances are your product teams will be a good link to your users. Reach out to product managers, designers and developers to see whether they have any regular contact with users. You may find they work with users directly on a regular basis.
• Sales, customer support and marketing teams: Similarly, sales and marketing teams also serve as a solid link to your users. Marketing and customer support teams will often manage lists of your existing users, whereas sales teams will have a good understanding of active or engaged users as well as prospective users.
• Social channels: This one is quite simple. Consider recruiting directly through your social channels.
• Recruitment services: There are a number of dedicated participant recruitment services available (you can check out our one here) that essentially handle the entire recruitment process for you. All you need to do is specify the type of people you need and they’ll handle the rest.
• Intercepts: Running a live pop-up message on your website is another great way to recruit participants. If you’re using a messaging app like Intercom, you can easily set up a participant recruitment message to pop up on the screens of people that match the criteria you set.
• Meetups: Heading to a local meetup group of the people you’re interested in testing can provide you with a good source of participants. This approach is quite useful if you’re looking for people outside of your organization’s users.

Understand the data

We’ve now recruited our participants, chosen our testing methods and run the tests. With the results starting to roll in, it’s time to analyze the data and make sense of it all. No small task. The insights you draw out of your data will obviously depend on the user research methods you’ve used, with methods like card sorting and tree testing giving you more quantitative data to analyze, and usability tests and user interviews providing you with qualitative insights. In any case, the key thing to focus on with this part of the UX research workflow is drawing out useful insights that help you to address your research questions and how you’re going to present this information back to your stakeholders. 

Connect to stakeholders

We’re now at the penultimate step in the research process; taking what we’ve learned and communicating it back to our stakeholders. Consider the following before you sit down in a room with them.

Aim to have detailed answers to your research questions as well as actionable next steps for your stakeholders. You’ve just put in significant time running the research process and as such are best suited to actually making suggestions based on the outputs of that research. It’s also important to understand not only your stakeholders, but the groups likely to be making use of the research further down the track. The easier you can make the process for them (of utilizing your research), the more value they’ll see in the process. Consider using tools that utilize visualizations as one way of making it easy for people to make sense of your research.

Lastly, it’s often a good idea to actually sit down with your stakeholders in a room again instead of simply sending your research results over in an email. Being able to sit down with your stakeholders one-on-one and explain your findings and recommendations will put you in good stead for future research projects.

Store learnings

Let’s recap on what we’ve covered. We’ve gone through:

• The stakeholder interview process
• How to uncover any data that already exists within the organization
• Putting together an approach, as well as a plan or brief
• The data collection phase
• Participant recruitment
• Data analysis
• Connecting your results back to your stakeholders.

There’s a final step that can be easy to overlook, but it’s a critical one in order to ensure that your research (and the insights you’ve managed to uncover) remain accessible. One of the most common failings of the user research process is storing the data in a sustainable way. All too often, the people conducting the studies run their tests, pull out the information they need, and then simply leave the data in the tool they used to run the research or in nested folders on the organization’s server. 

The solution is quite simple in theory, although a little harder in practice – especially when you’re working within a larger team. We’ve talked about building research repositories in this article (point 4), but the key takeaway is that while you should certainly use the right tool to store your findings, you also need to ensure you create a sustainable process. There’s no sense going to the trouble of setting up a new tool if you don’t have a system in place for others to feed in their own research or access historical research in the future.

You don’t need much to create a research repository – you’ll often find many researchers are able to put together one using a tool like Airtable or Excel. Whatever you end up using, just make sure it’s easy to update and access.

Wrap up + summary

Hopefully, by breaking down each stage of the research workflow into actionable steps, we’ve shown that it’s actually quite a simple undertaking – albeit one with quite a few steps. Let us know if you’ve got any questions or thoughts of your own.

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

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

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

Occupational diversity

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

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

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

Geographic and cultural diversity

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

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

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

Neurodiversity 

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

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

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

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

Inclusion challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why you need a UX research tool stack

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

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

By that we mean:

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

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

Know your research question, then identify your methods

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

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

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

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

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

Tools to support the research workflow

**Warning: Promotion of Optimal Workshop tools**

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget the participants

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

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

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

In a nutshell, you need to:

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

Tools to make your life easier

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

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

Document, document, document

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

One of the most common topics of conversation that I come across in research circles is how to deal with the administrative burden of user research. I see it time and again – both junior and experienced researchers alike struggling to balance delivering outputs for their stakeholders as well as actually managing the day-to-day of their jobs.

It’s not easy! Research is an admin-heavy field. All forms of user testing require a significant time investment for participant recruitment, user interviews mean sorting through notes in order to identify themes and different qualitative methods can leave you with pages of spreadsheet data. Staring down this potential mountain of administrative work is enough to make even the most seasoned researchers run for the hills.

Enter ResearchOps. Sprouting up in 2018, various researchers came together to try and standardize different research practices and processes in order to support researchers and streamline operations. It may seem like a silver bullet, but the fundamental questions still remain. How can you, as a researcher, manage the administrative side of your job? And where does your responsibility end and your colleagues’ begin? Well, it’s time to find out.

Putting ResearchOps into perspective

As we touched on in the introduction, ResearchOps is here and it’s here to stay. Like its cousin DesignOps, ResearchOps represents an earnest and combined effort on the part of the research community to really establish research practices and give researchers a kind-of backbone to support them. Carrying out effective user research is more important now than ever before, so it’s key that vetted practices and processes are in place to guide the growing community of researchers. ResearchOps can also be instrumental in helping us establish boundaries and lines of communication.

But, it’s important to frame ResearchOps. This new ‘practice’ won’t magically solve the administrative burden that comes along with doing research. In fact, it’s likely that simply by having access to clear processes and practices, many researchers will identify more opportunities to run their research practices more effectively, which in many cases will mean, yep, you guessed it, more administrative work. Interestingly, Kate Towsey (one of the ‘founders’ of ResearchOps), best summed this situation up by describing ResearchOps as an API – elements you can ‘plug’ into your own research practice.

In dealing with these issues, there are some key questions you need to ask yourself.

Who owns research in your organization?

If you speak to researchers from different organizations, you’ll quickly realize that no two research practices are run the same way. In some cases, research teams are very well established operations, with hundreds of researchers following clearly set out processes and procedures in a very structured way. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got the more haphazard research operations, where people (perhaps not even ‘researchers’ in the traditional sense) are using research methods. The varied way in which research practices operate means the question of ownership is often a difficult one to answer – but it’s important.

Before we get into some of the strategies you can use to reduce and manage the administrative side of user research, you need to get a clear picture of who owns research in your organization. A fuzzy understanding of ownership makes the task of establishing boundaries near-impossible.

Strategies to manage the administrative burden of Research

Research is an admin-intensive practice. There’s no getting around it. And, while it’s true that some tools can help you to reduce the day-to-day admin of your job (typically by making certain methods easier to execute), there’s still a fair amount of strategic thinking that you’ll need to do. In other words, it’s time to look at some strategies you can use to ensure you’re doing the job in the most efficient way.

1. Know where your job stops

Understand what your colleagues expect from you, and what your organization expects from you. Knowing where your job stops (and where the jobs of the other members of your team begin) is key to the smooth running of a research practice. We’re talking about you – we’ll get to how research as a practice interacts with other parts of the organization in the next section. If you’re one of 5 researchers in your organization, a lack of alignment will lead to duplication of work, missed opportunities, and, in many cases, more admin. This is a constant issue, and it’s not one that researchers alone deal with. Needing to scramble to set up a meeting because 2 teams realize they’re both working on the same project happens all too often, in every type of organization.

2. Establish clear boundaries

Research, as a practice, can touch nearly every area of an organization. This is both by design and necessity. Research is consultative, and requires input from a number of parts of an organization. If not managed carefully, operating your research without clear boundaries can mean you’re stuck with significant amounts of administrative work.

Think about a typical research project:

1. You might start by meeting with stakeholders to discuss what questions they want answered, or problems they want solved.
2. Then, you may engage other researchers on your team to solicit their opinions as to how to proceed.
3. You might test your studies with staff before taking them “live” and testing them with your target users.
4. Depending on the research, you may need to engage with your legal department to work through risk assessments, consent forms, risk and ethical issues.
5. At the end of your project, you’ll probably need to take your research and store it somewhere, a task that will involve more data governance conversations.

The ResearchOps community put together this fantastic framework (below) which maps out the majority of research processes.

“You can’t possibly handle any one bubble without touching many of the others, so it’s important to establish clear boundaries for what you, as research ops and as a person, cover,” Kate Towsey explains.

As for how to actually establish these boundaries – and in turn reduce the chance of an administrative overload – turn to conversations. One of the best ways to clear up any fogginess around remit is to simply pull the different parties into the same room and talk through your perspectives.

3. Outsource (if you need to)

In certain situations, it may make sense to outsource. Of course, we’re not talking about simply taking your research practice and outsourcing it wholesale, but instead taking select components that are well suited to being managed by third parties.

The obvious candidate here is participant recruitment. It’s typically one of the most time-consuming and admin-heavy parts of the research process, and coincidentally one that’s also easy to outsource. Participant recruitment services have access to tens of thousands of participants, and can pull together groups of participants for your research project, meaning you can eliminate the task of going out and searching for people manually. You simply specify the type of participant you require, and the service handles the rest.

Of course, there will always be times where manual participant recruitment is preferable, for example when you’re trying to recruit for user interviews for an extremely niche subject area, or you’re dealing with participants directly from your customer base.

4. Prioritize your research repository

Taking the time to establish a useful, usable repository of all of your research will be one of the best investments you can make as a researcher. There is a time commitment involved in setting up a research repository, but upsides are significant. For example, you’ll reduce admin as you’ll have a clear process for storing the insights from studies that you conduct. You’ll also find that when embarking on a new research project, you’ll have a good place to start. Instead of just blinding going out and starting from scratch, you can search through past studies in the repository to see if any similar research has been run in the past. That way, you can maximise the use of past research and focus on new research to get new insights.

What a good research repository looks like will depend on your organization’s needs to some extent, but there are some things to keep in mind:

• Your research should be easy to retrieve – There should be no barriers for researchers needing to access the research data.
• You should be able to trace insights back to the raw research data – If required, researchers should be able to trace the outputs of a research project back to the initial findings/raw data.
• It should be easy for others to access the findings from your research – Thinking beyond your cadre of user researchers, your repository should be fairly accessible to others in the organization. Marketers, designers and developers alike should be able to retrieve research when required.
• Sensitive data should be secure, or deleted if it’s not necessary – Your entire research repository should only be accessible to those within your organization, but you may need even tighter restrictions within that bubble. For example, you don’t want even the slightest chance of sensitive data leaking. By that same token, delete sensitive information when it’s not absolutely essential that you keep it.

Wrap-up

User research is always going to require a fair amount of administrative work, but there are actions you can take to minimize some of these more arduous and repetitive tasks – you just need to know where to start.

For more research strategy content, stay tuned to the Optimal Workshop Blog.

Happy testing!

In-person user testing is an important part of any research project, helping you to see first-hand how your users interact with your prototypes and products – but what are you supposed to do when it’s not a viable option?

The recent outbreak of coronavirus is forcing user researchers and designers to rethink traditional testing approaches, especially in-person testing. So what’s the solution? Enter unmoderated user testing. This approach circumvents the need to meet your participants face-to-face as it’s done entirely over the internet. As you can probably guess, this also means there are a few considerable benefits.

Here, we'll take a look at 5 reasons to consider this testing approach. But first, let's explore what unmoderated user testing is.

What is unmoderated user testing?

In the most basic sense, unmoderated user testing removes the ‘moderated’ part of the equation. Instead of having a facilitator guide participants through the test, participants complete the testing activity by themselves and in their own time. For the most part, everything else stays the same.

The key differences are that:

• You’re unable to ask follow-up questions
• You can’t use low-fidelity prototypes
• You can’t support participants (beyond the initial instructions you send them).

However, there are a number of upsides to unmoderated user testing, which we’ll cover below.

1. You can access participants from all over the globe

There’s a good chance that your organization’s customers don’t exist solely in your city, or even just in your country, so why limit yourself to testing local individuals? Moderated user testing requires you to either bring in people who can visit your office or for you to actually travel to another physical location and host testing sessions there.

With unmoderated user testing, you can use a variety of participant recruitment services to access large groups of participants from all over the globe. Making these services even more useful is the fact many allow you to recruit the exact participants you need. For example, drivers of Toyota hybrid vehicles who live in Calgary.

2. Unmoderated user testing is cheaper

Have a think for a moment about all of the typical costs that go along with a hosted user testing session. There’s the cost of a location if you’re traveling to another city, the remuneration for the people you’re testing and the cost of equipment (that you may not typically have access to). Sure, moderated testing can be made much more affordable if you’re hosting a session in your own office and you have all of the required gear, but that’s not the case for everyone doing research.

Unmoderated user testing really only requires you to choose the tool with which you want to run your user test (variable cost), set up your study and then send out the link to your participants.

3. It’s easier to manage

Unmoderated user testing means you can set aside the difficult task of managing participants in person, from scheduling through to finding notetakers and people to help you with the recording equipment. As we noted in the above section about cost, all you have to do is select the tool and then set up and run your study.

4. Automatic analysis

Running in-person, qualitative usability testing sessions can deliver some truly useful insights. There’s really nothing like sitting down in front of a participant and seeing how they interact with the product you’re working on, hearing their frustrations and learning about how they work. But any insights you gain from these sessions you’ll have to derive yourself. There’s no magic button that can generate useful qualitative analysis for you.

With unmoderated user testing, and especially with the right set of tools, you can run your tests and then have analysis generated automatically from your data. Take our IA tool Treejack as just one example. The functionality built into the tool means you can send out text-based versions of your website structure and then see how people make their way through the website to find what they’re looking for. At the end of your test, Treejack will present you with an array of useful, detailed visualizations like this one:

5. There’s less chance of bias

Ever heard of the observer effect? It’s a theory that basically states that the observation of a phenomenon will inevitably change that phenomenon, commonly due to the instruments used in the measurement. The observer effect and other biases often come into play during moderated research sessions specifically as a result of having a moderator in the room – typically with their own biases. Removing the moderator from the equation means you’ll get more reliable data from your study.

And the best place to get started?

Unmoderated user research requires unmoderated testing tools. With health concerns like coronavirus and influenza leading to reduced travel and in turn making in-person testing more difficult, there’s never been a better time to start using unmoderated testing tools. If you haven’t already, take our full set of 5 tools for a spin for free (no credit card required).

At Optimal Workshop, we're always looking to further the practice of user research. That's why we developed a powerful set of user research tools focused on quantitative and qualitative user testing.

This past year was a big one for us. We attended UX conferences all over the globe and met with researchers and designers in all sorts of organizations. We also continued to build up a solid list of best-practice tips from our community.

That’s what this article is all about – sharing our top user research tips. Some of these are as time-tested and true as the practice of user research itself, and others are starting to take off. Let’s dive right in, but if you’ve got any of your own, feel free to let us know!

1. Extend an olive branch to those unfamiliar with user research

In an ideal world, user research would sit at the heart of every organization. It’s a practice that benefits other teams and specializations and improves itself thanks to outside input. But, building those bridges isn’t always easy – especially if the practice of user research is still quite new within a company.

So what’s the best approach? It’s as simple as extending an olive branch to relevant areas of the organization. Typically, this means product, marketing, sales and data science teams. At Optimal Workshop, we’ve found that a great way to break these inter-team barriers down is simply by going out for a coffee and talking about the ways in which your two disciplines can collaborate.

If you’re interested in learning how to explain the value of user research, check out this article we wrote here.

2. Understand the value of a combined research and data science team

Research and data science are often siloed within organizations, but this is a missed opportunity. Data allows you to identify problems and dismiss assumptions, helping you to figure out what to do next. Sound familiar? User research and data science use different methodologies to answer the same questions, and when combined together the outputs can be much more fruitful. As speaker Mila Dymnikova said at UX New Zealand this year: “Data science can add a competitive edge to your UX team”.

We don’t have an actionable point for this research tip, other than to head over to your colleagues in data science and start up a conversation. If you don’t have any data scientists, think about the areas of your organization where people are utilizing data on a regular basis and start there.

3. Always establish clear research questions

Before you even think about running a usability test, it’s important to establish your research questions. Creating these at the beginning of your project will help you identify which methods to use, what you’ll discuss with stakeholders and where you’ll be able to uncover existing data.

As for example research questions, here are 2 to get you thinking. Remember: research questions should be both actionable and specific.

• “How do people currently use the wishlist feature on our website?”
• “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”

4. Focus on facts, not opinions

Whether you’re having a discussion with a stakeholder, a designer or a user, it’s all too easy to interpret opinion as fact. Steve Krug, in a 2005 interview with BoxesAndArrows, explained this quite well: “One of the problems web teams face is that we all have a lot of personal experience as web users, so we all think we know what makes a site good”.

“As a result, most design discussions are full of strong personal opinions, usually disguised as facts… it’s very appealing to have someone you can turn to for definitive answers”.

Being able to discern between a fact and an opinion isn’t always easy, and it's something that takes time to master. Before you head into your next stakeholder consultation, try to recognize when someone may be voicing a personal opinion instead of an impartial statement.

5. Reassure your interviewees

Before you start an in-person user test, one of the best things you can do for your participants is to make sure they’re comfortable. You can do this by explaining what’s expected of them, that you’re not testing them (you’re testing the design/product) and to ask questions if they need to. After all, the user testing process is a two-way street.

This is partly why we recommend all user researchers take a turn in the
participant seat and go along to a user testing session.

This is a great video from Google Ventures on the user interview process.

6. Figure out the correct location

Before you book a meeting room for your next usability test, consider the importance of location. You may not want to book a quiet meeting room if the thing you’re testing is often used in a loud or otherwise distracting environment. Take an app for construction workers as an example. You may find that you get much more useful data by carrying out your usability test on a loud construction site, so you can see what your users will typically have to deal with when using your app.

7. Combine OptimalSort and Chalkmark

There’s no overstating the importance of card sorting when building an IA or testing first impressions when reviewing designs. That's why OptimalSort and Chalkmark are so useful. But, did you know you can use these tools together too?

Here are 3 of the ways you can combine OptimalSort and Chalkmark:

1. Test the viability of your concepts and find out which one your users prefer most
2. Test your IA through two different lenses: non-visual and visual
3. Find out if your labels and their matching icons make sense to users.

Check out the expanded article here where we explain each of the above approaches.

8. Use Reframer to make sense of your qualitative user research

Most qualitative research is, by its very nature, messy. Unlike the relatively clean, number-focused world of quantitative research, the world of qualitative research is all about the ‘why’. It’s exploratory, focused on reasons, opinions, behaviors and motivations. So how do you make sense of all this ‘messy’ data? Our qualitative research tool Reframer is one of the easiest ways.

Here’s how it works: When running a user test, store your observations in Reframer. Then, add tags to classify each observation. Tags might be things like sentiment (happy, sad, frustrated, etc) or based on actions or progress (succeeded or failed).

9. Understand the value of observers

Forget about lengthy presentations to your organization. Bringing people into your user testing sessions as observers (or notetakers) is one of the best ways to show the value of user research to others. Think about it. You’re able to:

• Put other people within your organization in front of your users
• Demonstrate the value of talking to users about how they use your products and services
• Build up a common understanding of what research is and why it’s useful.

Getting these people into your research sessions is as easy as asking. The next time you come across someone from sales, marketing or your product teams, ask if they’d like to come along to your next user test.

10. Share your findings within your organization

Research for research’s sake is only viable in certain organizations – typically institutions like universities and colleges. In most other instances, research should be socialized with the wider organization.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that research should be carried out with the support of other teams from the outset. That is to say, you don’t want to turn up to a meeting and drop 3 months’ worth of research on your marketing team. Ideally, you’d work with those other teams to figure out their needs, carry out the research, then communicate it back to them.

11. In a user interview, just listen

A user interview is an opportunity to hear real peoples' thoughts on your product or service or a particular problem you’re studying. To that end, listen! Of course you’ll need to ask your questions, but remember to sit back and let them speak as much as they need to. Jumping in whenever there’s a lull in the conversation will only mean you’re potentially cutting them off when they may have more to say.

12. Recruit diverse participants

It’s always a good idea to recruit a diverse range of participants when you’re running your user tests. Try and get a good spread of jobs or roles, experience with what you’re testing, ethnicity and gender. You may also want to consider recruiting people whose native language is not what you’re using in your product or service. Using recruitment services is a good way to capture a spread of people if you’re struggling within your traditional circles.

13. Take time to unpack testing sessions with your team

Once you’ve wrapped up a testing session, take the data back to your team and unpack it as a group. Analyzing the results of your test in a roundtable format will mean you’re more likely to pick up on more themes and patterns than you would alone. Of course, this can be a hard thing to do, especially if you’re used to working through your results alone.

We find it’s helpful to ask a range of different people within your organization, such as data scientists, sales staff and designers, in addition to user researchers.

14. Run a survey within your organization

User research is often about turning outwards to gather opinions from the people using your product – but it’s also a useful internal tool. Use the same methods and processes you practice on your users to gather internal data. For example, run a survey about the way research functions within your organization, with a focus on how other people think research should operate.

15. Don’t rely on your memory

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the moment during a research session and forget to take notes. But don’t rely on your memory for anything! Whenever you hear an interesting point or think of a good next step, note it down. This is partly why we recommend bringing along a guest notetaker to take over this job for you.

16. Get your users to tell you a story

Instead of asking your users direct questions, get them to tell you a story. This is a great way to learn about how they think about something from start to finish. It’s quite a simple concept. For example, imagine you want to better understand how your users buy projects from your online store. Instead of asking them a direct question about the checkout process, ask to explain how they go about purchasing a product online. Besides learning more about the area you’re interested in, you’ll find that they give you useful background information on the process that you can use as part of your research.

17. Get a mentor

This isn’t a user research-specific tip, but it’s one that’s worth mentioning all the same. Getting a mentor is one of the best ways to progress your career, as they’ll be able to help you figure out where you want to go and how to get there. A good mentor will also be able to point out development opportunities and even keep an ear to the ground for potential new jobs that might suit you. In a nutshell, a mentor will help you to improve.

18. Get a mentee

On the flip side, it’s also a good idea to consider taking a mentee under your wing. This type of relationship can be fruitful for both parties, with mentees able to gain much of what we discussed above, and mentors able to reinforce their own learnings by teaching them to someone else.

19. Remember: You are not your user

Back in 2010, in the early growth days of social media, Google launched a new product called Google Buzz. Everything seemed set for a great launch. The product had gone through internal testing 20,000 Google employees and it had significant buy-in. Unfortunately, Google Buzz launched with a feature that generated a number of complaints and had to be quickly taken out. Shortly after that, Google Buzz was shut down entirely.

There’s a key lesson here for anyone involved in product development: You are not your user! Also known as the false-consensus effect, Raluca Budiu explained it best writing for Nielsen Norman Group: “Designers, developers, and even UX researchers fall prey to the false-consensus effect, projecting their behaviors and reactions onto users.”

Avoiding this bias isn’t too difficult. Always keep your users front of mind, involve them in the design process and make a point to interact with them regularly.

Try our powerful UX research platform

Understanding the importance of user research is just the first step. To get usable insights that you can use to make decisions you need the right set of tools – and that’s why we’ve developed a suite of 5. OptimalSort can show you how people think the pages on your website should be grouped, and Treejack can show you where people are getting lost. Try them all for free here.