Qualitative
Quantitative
Attitudinal
Generative
Evaluative
Qualitative
Generative
Attitudinal
Quantitative
Behavioral
Evaluative
Qualitative Behavioral
Evaluative
Quantitative
Evaluative
Qualitative
Generative
Tl;dr: user interviews.
Directly ask users about their experiences with a product to understand their thoughts, feelings, and problems
✅ Provides detailed insights that survey may miss ❌ May not represent the wider user base; depends on user’s memory and honesty
User interviews are a qualitative research method that involves having open-ended and guided discussions with users to gather in-depth insights about their experiences, needs, motivations, and behaviors.
Typically, you would ask a few questions on a specific topic during a user interview and analyze participants' answers. The results you get will depend on how well you form and ask questions, as well as follow up on participants’ answers.
“As a researcher, it's our responsibility to drive the user to their actual problems,” says Yuliya Martinavichene , User Experience Researcher at Zinio. She adds, “The narration of incidents can help you analyze a lot of hidden details with regard to user behavior.”
That’s why you should:
Tanya Nativ , Design Researcher at Sketch recommends defining the goals and assumptions internally. “Our beliefs about our users’ behavior really help to structure good questions and get to the root of the problem and its solution,” she explains.
It's easy to be misunderstood if you don't have experience writing interview questions. You can get someone to review them for you or use our Question Bank of 350+ research questions .
This method is typically used at the start and end of your project. At the start of a project, you can establish a strong understanding of your target users, their perspectives, and the context in which they’ll interact with your product. By the end of your project, new user interviews—often with a different set of individuals—offer a litmus test for your product's usability and appeal, providing firsthand accounts of experiences, perceived strengths, and potential areas for refinement.
Tl;dr: field studies.
Observe users in their natural environment to inform design decisions with real-world context
✅ Provides contextual insights into user behavior in real-world situations ✅ Helps identify external factors and conditions that influence user experience ❌ Can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to conduct ❌ Participants may behave differently when they know they are being observed (Hawthorne effect)
Field studies—also known as ethnographic research—are research activities that take place in the user’s environment rather than in your lab or office. They’re a great method for uncovering context, unknown motivations, or constraints that affect the user experience.
An advantage of field studies is observing people in their natural environment, giving you a glimpse at the context in which your product is used. It’s useful to understand the context in which users complete tasks, learn about their needs, and collect in-depth user stories.
This method can be used at all stages of your project—two key times you may want to conduct field studies are:
Tl;dr: focus groups.
Gather qualitative data from a group of users discussing their experiences and opinions about a product
✅ Allows for diverse perspectives to be shared and discussed ❌ Group dynamics may influence individual opinions
A focus group is a qualitative research method that includes the study of a group of people, their beliefs, and opinions. It’s typically used for market research or gathering feedback on products and messaging.
Focus groups can help you better grasp:
As with any qualitative research method, the quality of the data collected through focus groups is only as robust as the preparation. So, it’s important to prepare a UX research plan you can refer to during the discussion.
Here’s some things to consider:
It’s easier to use this research technique when you're still formulating your concept, product, or service—to explore user preferences, gather initial reactions, and generate ideas. This is because, in the early stages, you have flexibility and can make significant changes without incurring high costs.
Another way some researchers employ focus groups is post-launch to gather feedback and identify potential improvements. However, you can also use other methods here which may be more effective for identifying usability issues. For example, a platform like Maze can provide detailed, actionable data about how users interact with your product. These quantitative results are a great accompaniment to the qualitative data gathered from your focus group.
Tl;dr: diary studies.
Get deep insights into user thoughts and feelings by having them keep a product-related diary over a set period of time, typically a couple of weeks
✅ Gives you a peak into how users interact with your product in their day-to-day ❌ Depends on how motivated and dedicated the users are
Diary studies involve asking users to track their usage and thoughts on your product by keeping logs or diaries, taking photos, explaining their activities, and highlighting things that stood out to them.
“Diary studies are one of the few ways you can get a peek into how users interact with our product in a real-world scenario,” says Tanya.
A diary study helps you tell the story of how products and services fit into people’s daily lives, and the touch-points and channels they choose to complete their tasks.
There’s several key questions to consider before conducting diary research, from what kind of diary you want—freeform or structured, and digital or paper—to how often you want participants to log their thoughts.
Remember to determine the trigger: a signal that lets the participants know when they should log their feedback. Tanya breaks these triggers down into the following:
Diary studies are often valuable when you need to deeply understand users' behaviors, routines, and pain points in real-life contexts. This could be when you're:
Collect quantitative data from a large sample of users about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction with a product
✅ Provides a broad overview of user opinions and trends ❌ May lack in-depth insights and context behind user responses
Although surveys are primarily used for quantitative research, they can also provided qualitative data, depending on whether you use closed or open-ended questions:
Matthieu Dixte , Product Researcher at Maze, explains the benefit of surveys: “With open-ended questions, researchers get insight into respondents' opinions, experiences, and explanations in their own words. This helps explore nuances that quantitative data alone may not capture.”
So, how do you make sure you’re asking the right survey questions? Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal, says that when planning online surveys, it’s best to avoid questions that begin with “How likely are you to…?” Instead, Gregg says asking questions that start with “Have you ever… ?” will prompt users to give more specific and measurable answers.
Make sure your questions:
To learn more about survey design, check out this guide .
While surveys can be used at all stages of project development, and are ideal for continuous product discovery , the specific timing and purpose may vary depending on the research goals. For example, you can run surveys at:
Tl;dr: card sorting.
Understand how users categorize and prioritize information within a product or service to structure your information in line with user expectations
✅ Helps create intuitive information architecture and navigation ❌ May not accurately reflect real-world user behavior and decision-making
Card sorting is an important step in creating an intuitive information architecture (IA) and user experience. It’s also a great technique to generate ideas, naming conventions, or simply see how users understand topics.
In this UX research method, participants are presented with cards featuring different topics or information, and tasked with grouping the cards into categories that make sense to them.
There are three types of card sorting:
Card sorting type comparison table
You can run a card sorting session using physical index cards or digitally with a UX research tool like Maze to simulate the drag-and-drop activity of dividing cards into groups. Running digital card sorting is ideal for any type of card sort, and moderated or unmoderated sessions .
Read more about card sorting and learn how to run a card sorting session here .
Card sorting isn’t limited to a single stage of design or development—it can be employed anytime you need to explore how users categorize or perceive information. For example, you may want to use card sorting if you need to:
Tl;dr: tree testing.
Evaluate the findability of existing information within a product's hierarchical structure or navigation
✅ Identifies potential issues in the information architecture ❌ Focuses on navigation structure, not visual design or content
During tree testing a text-only version of the site is given to your participants, who are asked to complete a series of tasks requiring them to locate items on the app or website.
The data collected from a tree test helps you understand where users intuitively navigate first, and is an effective way to assess the findability, labeling, and information architecture of a product.
We recommend keeping these sessions short, ranging from 15 to 20 minutes, and asking participants to complete no more than ten tasks. This helps ensure participants remain focused and engaged, leading to more reliable and accurate data, and avoiding fatigue.
If you’re using a platform like Maze to run remote testing, you can easily recruit participants based on various demographic filters, including industry and country. This way, you can uncover a broader range of user preferences, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of your target audience.
To learn more about tree testing, check out this chapter .
Tree testing is often done at an early stage in the design or redesign process. That’s because it’s more cost-effective to address errors at the start of a project—rather than making changes later in the development process or after launch.
However, it can be helpful to employ tree testing as a method when adding new features, particularly alongside card sorting.
While tree testing and card sorting can both help you with categorizing the content on a website, it’s important to note that they each approach this from a different angle and are used at different stages during the research process. Ideally, you should use the two in tandem: card sorting is recommended when defining and testing a new website architecture, while tree testing is meant to help you test how the navigation performs with users.
Tl;dr: usability testing.
Observe users completing specific tasks with a product to identify usability issues and potential improvements
✅ Provides direct insights into user behavior and reveals pain points ❌ Conducted in a controlled environment, may not fully represent real-world usage
Usability testing evaluates your product with people by getting them to complete tasks while you observe and note their interactions (either during or after the test). The goal of conducting usability testing is to understand if your design is intuitive and easy to use. A sign of success is if users can easily accomplish their goals and complete tasks with your product.
There are various usability testing methods that you can use, such as moderated vs. unmoderated or qualitative vs. quantitative —and selecting the right one depends on your research goals, resources, and timeline.
Usability testing is usually performed with functional mid or hi-fi prototypes . If you have a Figma, InVision, Sketch, or prototype ready, you can import it into a platform like Maze and start testing your design with users immediately.
The tasks you create for usability tests should be:
Be mindful of using leading words such as ‘click here’ or ‘go to that page’ in your tasks. These instructions bias the results by helping users complete their tasks—something that doesn’t happen in real life.
With Maze, you can test your prototype and live website with real users to filter out cognitive biases, and gather actionable insights that fuel product decisions.
To inform your design decisions, you should do usability testing early and often in the process . Here are some guidelines to help you decide when to do usability testing:
To learn more about usability testing, check out our complete guide to usability testing .
Tl;dr: five-second testing.
Gauge users' first impressions and understanding of a design or layout
✅ Provides insights into the instant clarity and effectiveness of visual communication ❌ Limited to first impressions, does not assess full user experience or interaction
In five-second testing , participants are (unsurprisingly) given five seconds to view an image like a design or web page, and then they’re asked questions about the design to gauge their first impressions.
Why five seconds? According to data , 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website, so it;s essential to grab someone’s attention in the first few seconds of their visit. With a five-second test, you can quickly determine what information users perceive and their impressions during the first five seconds of viewing a design.
And if you’re using Maze, you can simply upload an image of the screen you want to test, or browse your prototype and select a screen. Plus, you can star individual comments and automatically add them to your report to share with stakeholders.
Five-second testing is typically conducted in the early stages of the design process, specifically during initial concept testing or prototype development. This way, you can evaluate your design's initial impact and make early refinements or adjustments to ensure its effectiveness, before putting design to development.
To learn more, check out our chapter on five-second testing .
Tl;dr: a/b testing.
Compare two versions of a design or feature to determine which performs better based on user engagement
✅ Provides data-driven insights to guide design decisions and optimize user experience ❌ Requires a large sample size and may not account for long-term effects or complex interactions
A/B testing , also known as split testing, compares two or more versions of a webpage, interface, or feature to determine which performs better regarding engagement, conversions, or other predefined metrics.
It involves randomly dividing users into different groups and giving each group a different version of the design element being tested. For example, let's say the primary call-to-action on the page is a button that says ‘buy now’.
You're considering making changes to its design to see if it can lead to higher conversions, so you create two versions:
Over a planned period, you measure metrics like click-through rates, add-to-cart rates, and actual purchases to assess the performance of each variation. You find that Group B had significantly higher click-through and conversion rates than Group A. This indicates that showing the button above the product description drove higher user engagement and conversions.
Check out our A/B testing guide for more in-depth examples and guidance on how to run these tests.
A/B testing can be used at all stages of the design and development process—whenever you want to collect direct, quantitative data and confirm a suspicion, or settle a design debate. This iterative testing approach allows you to continually improve your website's performance and user experience based on data-driven insights.
Tl;dr: concept testing.
Evaluate users' reception and understanding of a new product, feature, or design idea before moving on to development
✅ Helps validate and refine concepts based on user feedback ❌ Relies on users' perception and imagination, may not reflect actual use
Concept testing is a type of research that evaluates the feasibility, appeal, and potential success of a new product before you build it. It centers the user in the ideation process, using UX research methods like A/B testing, surveys, and customer interviews.
There’s no one way to run a concept test—you can opt for concept testing surveys, interviews, focus groups, or any other method that gets qualitative data on your concept.
*Dive into our complete guide to concept testing for more tips and tricks on getting started. *
Concept testing helps gauge your audience’s interest, understanding, and likelihood-to-purchase, before committing time and resources to a concept. However, it can also be useful further down the product development line—such as when defining marketing messaging or just before launching.
The best research type varies depending on your project; what your objectives are, and what stage you’re in. Ultimately, the ideal type of research is one which provides the insights required, using the available resources.
For example, if you're at the early ideation or product discovery stage, generative research methods can help you generate new ideas, understand user needs, and explore possibilities. As you move to the design and development phase, evaluative research methods and quantitative data become crucial.
Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods.
In an ideal world, a combination of all the insights you gain from multiple types of user research methods would guide every design decision. In practice, this can be hard to execute due to resources.
Sometimes the right methodology is the one you can get buy-in, budget, and time for.
Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal
UX research tools can help streamline the research process, making regular testing and application of diverse methods more accessible—so you always keep the user at the center of your design process. Some other key tips to remember when choosing your method are:
A good way to inform your choice of user experience research method is to start by considering your goals. You might want to browse UX research templates or read about examples of research.
Michael Margolis , UX Research Partner at Google Ventures, recommends answering questions like:
If your team is very early in product development, generative research —like field studies—make sense. If you need to test design mockups or a prototype, evaluative research methods—such as usability testing—will work best.
This is something they’re big on at Sketch, as we heard from Design Researcher, Tanya Nativ. She says, “In the discovery phase, we focus on user interviews and contextual inquiries. The testing phase is more about dogfooding, concept testing, and usability testing. Once a feature has been launched, it’s about ongoing listening.”
If you're looking for rich, qualitative data that delves into user behaviors, motivations, and emotions, then methods like user interviews or field studies are ideal. They’ll help you uncover the ‘why’ behind user actions.
On the other hand, if you need to gather quantitative data to measure user satisfaction or compare different design variations, methods like surveys or A/B testing are more suitable. These methods will help you get hard numbers and concrete data on preferences and behavior.
*Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods. *
Think of UX research methods as building blocks that work together to create a well-rounded understanding of your users. Each method brings its own unique strengths, whether it's human empathy from user interviews or the vast data from surveys.
But it's not just about choosing the right UX research methods; the research platform you use is equally important. You need a platform that empowers your team to collect data, analyze, and collaborate seamlessly.
Simplifying product research is simple with Maze. From tree testing to card sorting, prototype testing to user interview analysis—Maze makes getting actionable insights easy, whatever method you opt for.
Meanwhile, if you want to know more about testing methods, head on to the next chapter all about tree testing .
Conduct impactful UX research with Maze and improve your product experience and customer satisfaction.
How do you choose the right UX research method?
Choosing the right research method depends on your goals. Some key things to consider are:
What is the best UX research method?
The best research method is the one you have the time, resources, and budget for that meets your specific needs and goals. Most research tools, like Maze, will accommodate a variety of UX research and testing techniques.
When to use which user experience research method?
Selecting which user research method to use—if budget and resources aren’t a factor—depends on your goals. UX research methods provide different types of data:
Identify your goals, then choose a research method that gathers the user data you need.
What results can I expect from UX research?
Here are some of the key results you can expect from actioning the insights uncovered during UX research:
Tree Testing: Your Guide to Improve Navigation and UX
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Effective user experience design is intuitive, accessible, and engaging. But how do you design a delightful experience that meets your target audience’s needs? Conducting user experience research gives you a glimpse inside your users’ heads, so you can understand what they care about and the challenges they face.
In this article, Figma Designer Advocate Ana Boyer weighs in on:
User experience research helps design teams identify areas of opportunity to improve user interfaces and enhance the overall user experience. According to Ana, UX research can reveal insights about target users across all phases of product development—from strategy and planning to product launch and post-launch improvements. A robust UX research framework includes both quantitative and qualitative research.
Using information gathered from larger sample sizes, quantitative research yields concrete numerical data that reveals what users are doing. Researchers run statistical analyses and review analytics to gain insights into user behavior. For example, Ana says, “you might try tracking the number of times users clicked a CTA button on a newly designed web page, compared to an old version."
For qualitative research, researchers collect subjective and descriptive feedback directly from users, tapping into users’ personal feelings and experiences with a product or design. "Qualitative research gives you a more thorough explanation of why someone is doing something in the context of a flow,” Ana says.
User-centered design research often covers two types of qualitative research: attitudinal and behavioral. Attitudinal research examines users’ self-reported beliefs and perceptions related to a user experience, while behavioral research focuses on observing first-hand what users do with a product.
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According to Ana, with UX research you can:
Most common UX research methodologies break down into these essential activities:
Given all the UX research methods you can use for product development, when is each most useful? Ana offers these pro tips.
Launch & post-launch
No matter where you are in the product development process, FigJam’s research plan template can help you define your research goals. Figma’s research and design templates help you conduct research with user interviews , user personas , card sorting , and Sprig study integration .
With the insights gained from your research, you're ready to design, develop, and prototype engaging user experiences. Use Figma’s UX design tool to:
To jumpstart your UX research, browse inspiring UX research resources shared by the Figma community .
Now you're ready to roll with UX research!
Go to next section
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/
[2] https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/
A/B tests incrementally improve the user experience of a product while effectively reaching business goals.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to run successful discovery efforts in your UX-design process.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to develop processes, standards, and strategies for effective content.
When the key differences between choices are implied or buried, users often select the wrong option or misunderstand the features.
Individuals at different career stages have different challenges, opportunities, and ways to level up.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
In user research, between-groups designs reduce learning effects; repeated-measures designs require fewer participants and minimize the random noise.
User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.
What is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview answers basic questions + how to run fast user tests.
UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover problems and opportunities in designs.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.
Application usability is enhanced when the UI guides and supports users through the workflow.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.
Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles published last year.
It’s easy to place too much trust in genAI tools. Use only information you can verify or recognize to be true.
Researchers often want to ask about sensitive topics in surveys and screeners. Handle them appropriately and delicately to avoid dropoffs and inaccurate data.
Use this glossary to quickly clarify key terms and concepts related to UX deliverables.
When following good practices, prompt controls can increase the discoverability of genAI chatbots’ features, offer inspiration, and minimize manual user input.
Tabs are everywhere, but do you use them properly? Distinguish between types of tabs, design them for visual clarity, and structure their content for usability.
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In this complete guide to presenting UX research findings, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.
What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.
User experience research sets out to identify the problem that a product or service needs to solve and finds a way to do just that. Research is the first and most important step to optimising user experience.
UX researchers do this through interviews, surveys, focus groups, data analysis and reports. Reports are how UX researchers present their work to other stakeholders in a company, such as designers, developers and executives.
In this guide, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.
How to write a ux research report, 5 tips on presenting ux research findings.
Ready to present your research findings? Let’s dive in.
[GET CERTIFIED IN USER RESEARCH]
There are six key components to a UX research report.
The introduction should give an overview of your UX research . Then, relate any company goals or pain points to your research. Lastly, your introduction should briefly touch on how your research could affect the business.
Simply put, your next slide or paragraph should outline the top decisions you need to make, the search questions you used, as well as your hypothesis and expectations.
In this section, you can tell your stakeholders why your research matters. If you base this research on team-level or product development goals, briefly touch on those.
Share the research methods you used and why you chose those methods. Keep it concise and tailored to your audience. Your stakeholders probably don’t need to hear everything that went into your process.
This section will be the most substantial part of your report or presentation. Present your findings clearly and concisely. Share as much context as possible while keeping your target audience – your stakeholders – in mind.
In the last section of your report, make actionable recommendations for your stakeholders. Share possible solutions or answers to your research questions. Make your suggestions clear and consider any future research studies that you think would be helpful.
Most likely, you’ll already have conducted stakeholder interviews when you were planning your research. Taking those interviews into account, you should be able to glean what they’re expecting from your presentation.
Tailor your presentation to the types of findings that are most relevant, how those findings might affect their work and how they prefer to receive information. Only include information they will care about the most in a medium that’s easy for them to understand.
Do they have a technical understanding of what you’re doing or should you keep it a non-technical presentation? Make sure you keep the terminology and data on a level they can understand.
What part of the business do they work in? Executives will want to know about how it affects their business, while developers will want to know what technological changes they need to make.
As briefly as possible, summarise your research goals, business value and methodology. You don’t need to go into too much detail for any of these items. Simply share the what, why and how of your research.
Answer these questions:
You can briefly explain your methods to recruit participants, conduct interviews and analyse results. If you’d like more depth, link to interview plans, surveys, prototypes, etc.
Your stakeholders will probably be pressed for time. They won’t be able to process raw data and they usually don’t want to see all of the work you’ve done. What they’re looking for are key insights that matter the most to them specifically. This is why it’s important to know your audience.
Summarise a few key points at the beginning of your report. The first thing they want to see are atomic research nuggets. Create condensed, high-priority bullet points that get immediate attention. This allows people to reference it quickly. Then, share relevant data or artefacts to illustrate your key learnings further.
Relevant data:
Relevant aspects of artefacts:
For most people you’ll present to, a summary of key insights will be enough. But, you can link to a searchable repository where they can dig deeper. You can include artefacts and tagged data for them to reference.
[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]
Offer actionable recommendations, not opinions. Share clear next steps that solve pain points or answer pending decisions. If you have any in mind, suggest future research options too. If users made specific recommendations, share direct quotes.
There are two ways you could share your findings in a presentation or a report. Let’s look at these two categories and see which might be the best fit for you.
Usually, a presentation is best for sharing data with a large group and when presenting to non-technical stakeholders. Presentations should be used for visual communication and when you only need to include relevant information in a brief summary.
A presentation is usually formatted in a:
If you’re presenting to a smaller group, technical stakeholder or other researchers, you might want to use a report. This gives you the capacity to create a comprehensive record. Further, reports could be categorised based on their purpose as usability, analytics or market research reports.
A report is typically formatted in a:
You might choose to write a report first, then create a presentation. After the presentation, you can share a more in-depth report. The report could also be used for records later.
When you’re presenting your findings, find ways to engage those you’re presenting to. You can ask them questions about their assumptions or what you’re presenting to get them more involved.
For example, “What do you predict were our findings when we asked users to test the usability of the menu?” or “What suggestions do you think users had for [a design problem]?”
If you don’t want to engage them with questions, try including alternative formats like videos, audio clips, visualisations or high-fidelity prototypes. Anything that’s interactive or different will help keep their engagement. They might engage with these items during or after your presentation.
Another way to keep it engaging is to tell a story throughout your presentation. Some UX researchers structure their presentations in the form of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey . Start in the middle with your research findings and then zoom out to your summary, insights and recommendations.
When possible, use qualitative data to back up quantitative data. For example, include a visualisation of poll results with a direct quote about that pain point.
Use this opportunity to show the value of the work you do and build empathy for your users. Translate your findings into a format that your stakeholders – designers, developers or executives – will be able to understand and act upon.
Actionable presentations are engaging and they should have some business value . That means they need to solve a problem or at least move toward a solution to a problem. They might intend to optimise usability, find out more about the market or analyse user data.
Here are a few ways to make it actionable:
Make it easy for stakeholders to dive deeper if they want to but make it optional. Yes, this means including links to an easily searchable repository and keeping your report brief.
Humans tend to focus best on just 3-4 things at a time. So, limit your report to three or four major insights. Additionally, try to keep your presentation down to 20-30 minutes.
Remember, you don’t need to share everything you learned. In your presentation, you just need to show your stakeholders what they are looking for. Anything else can be sent later in your repository or a more detailed PDF report.
If you get pushback from stakeholders during your presentation, it’s okay to share your constraints.
Your stakeholders might not understand that your sample size is big enough or how you chose the users in your study or why you did something the way you did. While qualitative research might not be statistically significant, it’s usually representative of your larger audience and it’s okay to point that out.
Because they aren’t researchers, it’s your job to explain your methodology to them but also be upfront about the limitations UX research can pose. When all of your cards are on the table, stakeholders are more likely to trust you.
When it comes to presenting your UX research findings, keep it brief and engaging. Provide depth with external resources after your presentation. This is how you get stakeholders to find empathy for your users. This is how you master the art of UX.
Need to go back to the basics and learn more about UX research? Dive into these articles:
What is UX research? The 9 best UX research tools to use in 2022
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Do you want to apply the design thinking framework to your next design challenge? Here are 9 tools to help you at every stage.
When it comes to solving tricky problems and coming up with robust, user-friendly solutions, design thinking is one of the most effective approaches you can take. This helps you get a rich and nuanced understanding of your users, consider complex challenges from multiple angles, and generate fresh and creative ideas.
If you want to get maximum value from the design thinking process, you need the right tools on hand. We’ve rounded up 9 of the best design thinking tools to help you every step of the way—check them out.
Design thinking is a problem-solving framework that encourages you to prioritise the end user, think outside the box, and come up with novel solutions.
It’s firmly rooted in empathy , collaboration, and experimentation, allowing you to explore and test a variety of ideas before you settle on one. This has many advantages within the UX design process , helping to:
That’s design thinking in a nutshell. Next, let’s outline the key stages in the design thinking process.
The design thinking process comprises five key phases:
This loop continues, encouraging you to refine and iterate on your ideas until you arrive at an effective, user-friendly, rigorously tested solution that’s ready to be developed and launched.
When it comes to applying the design thinking framework, the right tools will help you to optimise the process and get the best possible results from each stage.
Design thinking tools are essential for:
Throughout the design thinking process, it’s important to facilitate smooth collaboration amongst team members and stakeholders. With specialist tools built for teamwork and communication, it’s much easier to get everybody aligned on who you’re problem-solving for and what problem you’re trying to solve.
As you move through the various phases of the design thinking framework, your ideas will evolve from half-formed concepts to fully-fledged solutions, gradually increasing in detail and complexity.
Design thinking tools enable you to document the evolution of your ideas and to keep track of all the insights and feedback you gather along the way. This is useful for logging the history of your product and informing future design decisions.
Design thinking is all about being creative and experimenting with different ideas and solutions—and the right tools will help you to spark inspiration and think outside the box.
Whether it’s facilitating collaborative ideation sessions or providing templates for creative exercises, there are many design thinking tools out there that are invaluable when it comes to brainstorming and exploring novel solutions.
At almost every stage in the design thinking process, you’ll be creating something—be it empathy maps , user personas , low-fidelity wireframes , or fully interactive digital prototypes. For many design thinking artefacts, you’ll need specialist tools and software to speed up the process and make sure your work can be easily shared and viewed.
To get real value from the design thinking process, you must test your prototypes on real people. Feedback and testing tools enable you to connect with a broad and diverse pool of users and test participants—and make it much easier to collect, organise, and analyse the data you gather.
Ultimately, you can’t successfully follow the design thinking process without the right tools in place. So what are the best design thinking tools to add to your stack? Let’s find out.
For a deeper understanding of how design thinking tools are applied, check out the UX Design for Task-Based Application project by AND learner, Shrikant Subramaniam.
Hotjar is a web analytics and feedback tool that enables you to understand how people navigate and interact with your website.
Learn more about Hotjar here.
Lookback is a user research platform designed for qualitative research, including usability testing and user interviews. You can use it to observe and analyse how people interact with your products and prototypes, to organise and document your research insights, and to speak with your users one-on-one.
Learn more about Lookback here.
Miro is a virtual whiteboard tool built for collaboration and creativity. This versatile tool is useful throughout the design thinking process—from synthesising research insights as part of the ‘Empathise’ stage, to holding creative ideation sessions and building prototypes.
Learn more about Miro here.
Stormboard is a virtual collaboration and brainstorming tool ideal for the ideation stage of the design thinking process. Use templates, sticky notes, and images to bring your ideas to life and explore different concepts with your teammates.
Learn more about Stormboard here.
Similar to Miro, FigJam is another collaborative whiteboard tool. It’s part of Figma (which features at number 6 on our list of design thinking tools). FigJam is ideal for brainstorming, digitally sketching and visualising your ideas, as well as collaborating in real-time through virtual workshops.
Learn more about FigJam here.
Figma is one of the most popular tools in the industry, and it’s a staple for anyone following the design thinking process. Figma is primarily used for creating wireframes and prototypes—allowing you to visualise your ideas and share them for feedback.
You can learn more about Figma in this guide: What is Figma? Uses, Benefits, and Key Features .
Justinmind is among the most popular wireframing tools , used for creating both low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes. This design thinking tool comes in especially useful during the prototype and test phases, allowing you to visualise your ideas and dial up the detail and complexity as they evolve.
Learn more about Justinmind here.
If you’re looking for an advanced, all-powerful prototyping tool to bring your ideas to life, look no further than Framer . With Framer, you can create fully interactive, high-fidelity prototypes in next to no time—no coding skills required.
Not all of the best design thinking tools are digital. Oftentimes, your most creative ideas will come to you when you’re working with good old-fashioned pen and paper. And, if you want to run hands-on, screen-free workshops where everybody is entirely focused, these will be the only tools you need.
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about design thinking tools. Next time you’re tackling a tricky design challenge, refer back to our list and select two or three tools to try out as you apply the design thinking process.
Keen to learn more about design thinking? We think you’ll like these guides:
We hope this comprehensive guide to design thinking has given you a better understanding of this exciting discipline with myriad applications.
If you are interested in learning more about the field of user experience design, where design thinking is applied very heavily, here are some of the resources you might find useful:
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
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UI (user interface) / UX (user experience) describes a set. of concepts, guidelines, and workflows for critically thinking about the design and use of an interactive. product, map-based or ...
These papers are also among the most widely downloaded and cited formal research on UI / UX design. We have referenced many of these studies in our work at MauroNewMedia. Pay walls: As you will note in reviewing the following links and abstracts, most of the serious research on UI / UX design and optimization is located behind pay walls ...
Abstract. Usability and user experience (UX) are important concepts in the design and evaluation of products or systems intended for human use. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of design ...
Evaluation framework design. Assessing the UI/UX design quality of a cyberlearning environment first requires understanding the key elements of any cyberlearning design. There is some variability in the definition of cyberlearning. This disagreement reflects the underlying differences in understanding the purpose of learning and how people learn.
Journal of User Experience (JUX) is a peer-reviewed, international, online publication dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, and education of user experience (UX) design and evaluation.The journal aims to provide UX practitioners and researchers with a forum to share:Empirical findings and case studies Emerging methods and tools from within the user experience profession ...
The concept of UX casts a broad net over all of the experiential aspects of use, primarily subjective experience. User-centered design and design thinking are methods used to produce initial designs, after which they typically use iteration for design improvement. Service design is a relatively new area of design for usability and UX practitioners.
Secondly, to examine the UI design principles considered for the development of any software system to elevate the usability and user experience of literate and semi-literate users, and finally, to point out the research gaps and provide potential future research directions to improve the usages, usability, user experience, and adoption of such ...
In 2020, studies showed that approximately 68% of all e- commerce users exit a website due to bad UX design, 44% of online shoppers. will make the effort to share their negative experience, and 62 ...
This three volume set LNCS 12779, 12780, and 12781 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10 th International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2021, held as part of the 23 rd International Conference, HCI International 2021, which took place in July 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually.
Thus, understanding how AI can be leveraged for UX has important research and practical implications.,This article builds on a systematic literature review approach and aims to understand how AI is used in UX design today, as well as uncover some prominent themes for future research. ... User experience; User interface; Design; User-centred ...
Plasticity of user interface design research is the latest trend in the domain of AUI design, facing many challenges. Some criticism arises from the fact that it is allied with AI, and thus some scepticisms have been raised by the HCI community. From the literature survey, most of the AUIs are designed for office and web-based applications.
User Experience (UX) has been a buzzword in agile literature in recent years. However, often UX remains as a vague concept and it may be hard to understand the very nature of it in the context of agile software development. This paper explores the multifaceted UX literature, emphasizes the multi-dimensional nature of the concept and organizes ...
UI and UX design in an online art gallery has a big impact for user satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to find out how UI and UX design affects user satisfaction and how to design good UI and UX in an online art gallery. We evaluated 27 research papers related to UI and UX design in an online art gallery using literature review approach. Furthermore, we used a survey to measure ...
User Interface Design in the 21st Century. Abstract: The articles in this special issue report on user interface design on the frontiers of computing. They investigate topics with significant potential or risk, showing the maturity of new concepts and evidence of usefulness. Each article summarizes interesting research, engages readers, and ...
As businesses extend their online offerings, demand for UI-UX and digital services is increasing. Both in-house teams and agencies will be under pressure to offer services on time, with the total number of internet users worldwide increasing by 301 million since April 2019 (We are Social). After the covid-19 it's demand in e-commerce market is also increasing exponentially. In this paper User ...
This research is a case study amongst Japanese, North-American, English and Dutch users. It investigates the cultural applicability of user evaluation methods. It sheds light on how some user evaluation methods are less applicable than others are for a culturally diverse user base. Read the research paper here. 5. Culture-based User Interface ...
A UX research method is a way of generating insights about your users, their behavior, motivations, and needs. These methods help: Learn about user behavior and attitudes. Identify key pain points and challenges in the user interface. Develop user personas to identify user needs and drive solutions.
Generalization of the experience of using research on psychology of behavior for designing UX design software products. The article deals with the analysis of the influence of the psychology of human behaviour on user experience. The evolution of the conceptual apparatus in the field of designing the user interface, taking into account user ...
Use Figma's UX design tool to: Give and receive instant feedback on designs or prototypes—and enjoy real-time collaboration with your team. Figma's Maze integration makes testing prototypes easy. Set up design libraries to quickly launch user research projects and improve UX design. Easily share assets between Figma and FigJam to help keep ...
Researchers often want to ask about sensitive topics in surveys and screeners. Handle them appropriately and delicately to avoid dropoffs and inaccurate data. Research-based articles about user experience (UX), interaction design, web usability, user testing, and UI/GUI design by Nielsen Norman Group authors, including Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman ...
Miya & Govender, International Journal of Research in Business & Social Science 11(10) (2022), 316-327 318 UX/UI Design in General A software application's UI is one of the very first screens a ...
Start in the middle with your research findings and then zoom out to your summary, insights and recommendations. 2. Combine qualitative and quantitative data. When possible, use qualitative data to back up quantitative data. For example, include a visualisation of poll results with a direct quote about that pain point.
Tips for integrating UX and UI. Collaboration from the start: Ensure that the UX and UI teams work together from the early stages of the project.. This fosters a mutual understanding of user goals and needs. User research: Conduct thorough research on your users to understand their needs and behaviors.. This will inform both the experience design and the interface.
When we don't take these principles seriously, we risk drawing conclusions that don't reflect reality, which can lead to design decisions that are ineffective or even harmful to the user experience. This, in turn, can lead to a loss of trust in UX research and UX design, both within organizations and among users. How to avoid sloppy UX ...
If you think you've got UI/UX design all figured out, meet Gen Z — the generation that's rewriting the rules and flipping the script on user experience. Born into a world of instant gratification, social media addiction, and a digital landscape that changes at lightning speed, Gen Z's behavior is pushing designers to rethink everything they know about crafting effective experiences.
ISO 9241-210 defines user experience as "a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service". User Experience Design is a subset of ...
Lookback is a user research platform designed for qualitative research, including usability testing and user interviews. ... paper, and sticky notes during the design thinking process: Empathise: ... Courses Graphic Design User Experience (UX) Design User Interface (UI) Design Interior Design Motion Graphics. FOR COMPANIES .
The true potential of 3D animation and VFX in UI/UX design is realized when these elements are seamlessly integrated into the user experience. This requires close collaboration between UI/UX designers, 3D animators, and VFX artists. Together, they can create interfaces that are not only functional but also visually stunning and emotionally ...
TLDR; Design and build your design portfolio in 30 days by completing simple tasks that contribute to your portfolio to do list. Work on a task a day: First by finding inspiration and practicing your design skills with other designer portfolios as a reference, second making note of elements you want in your portfolio, third mashing those ...
This research applies the design thinking method to redesign the user interface and user experience on satupersen.net with the aim of making it easier for users to use satupersen.net. This research produced a prototype redesign of the satupersen.net application with an average SUS result of 78, where this number is included in the good category ...