Choosing the right Research Method

The term methods refers to how one conducts research. There are many different ways to get the answers you need, and you will decide which research method to use based on the questions you want answered. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

There are two ways to categorize research methods.

The first type is based on who is conducting the research. The second type is based on the type of data collected.

Type of Researches

So let us first think about who is doing the research:

Primary Research A research that you conduct yourself. For example, you might interview users, conduct a survey, or conduct a usability study to hear directly from users.

Secondary Research A research that uses information that someone else has compiled. Secondary research can be information from books, articles, or journals. You have probably done secondary research before and not even realized it. Most of the time, secondary research is done at the very beginning of the product development cycle, before any idea is born. Secondary research is often done by product owners, not UX designers. But the insights they share can help you better justify your design decisions and gain more empathy for your users.

Another way to categorize research methods is to look at the type of data collected. Data can be collected through qualitative or quantitative research.

Quantitative research focuses on data that can be collected by counting or measuring. Quantitative research is often based on surveys of large groups of people using numerical responses. This type of research often answers questions such as: How many? How much? If you want to know how the majority of users experience a product, you should use quantitative research.

Qualitative research focuses on observations. Qualitative research is often based on interviews, where we focus on a smaller number of users and understand their needs in detail. This type of research answers questions like: Why? Or: how did this happen? If you want to know why users have bad experiences with your product and how you can improve it, you should use qualitative research. Here is a quick way to remember the difference.

Quantitative research gives you the "what" and qualitative research gives you the "why".

Interviews are a research method used to gather in-depth information about people's opinions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings. Interviews are usually conducted in person and involve a series of open-ended questions in which the researcher asks the user about their experiences. Use interviews when your questions require a detailed response.

Surveys are an activity where many people are asked the same questions to understand what most people think about a product. Surveys allow us to hear from a larger number of users than we can with interviews. Surveys include a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions. Surveys are most useful when you have an initial understanding of user pain points and want to solidify that by interviewing a larger number of people.

Usability studies are a technique that helps us evaluate a product by testing it on users. The goal of a usability study is to identify pain points that users experience with different prototypes so that the problems can be fixed before the final product hits the market. During a usability study, you have the opportunity to see how your end users interact with your new product or feature, and then you can interview users to learn more about their experience. The usability study data is then used to improve the UX design. If the product has already been launched, a post-launch usability study may include data such as success metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important measures of progress toward an end goal. KPIs for an app or new product launch could include things like how much time the user spent on a task or how many clicks they made a purchase.

The key thing to remember is that the research method we choose is decided by the question we are trying to answer.