An overview of popular UX research methods

Qualitative research can provide unique and powerful insights to help brands and organisations shape anything from new product development, improve service delivery, expand markets or improve their targeting to their audience if they’re looking to improve diversity or expand.

But as you’d expect, there’s not one approach to qualitative research that fits all needs. Having an understanding of what type of research approach is going to provide the best results is as important as recruiting the right type of people to use in your cohort, the structure and moderation of the sessions and then the analysis that happens after the research data has been collected.

For the purposes of this post we’re going to focus on the research methods associated with user experience (UX) research for digital service delivery or brand engagement, be that mobile or web based interaction.

A review of UX research methods commonly

We pulled together a summary of the main types of user experience research that are conducted by research organisations, such as ourselves. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it covers the types most frequently used and should give you somewhere to start if you’re thinking of conducting a research project and need overview of the benefits of each.

A good research project often has a combination of methods deployed to gain a richer data set to analyse and draw any conclusions from. Equally, whilst most research is often conducted at the start of projects, deploying research at later stages of development of a project can provide equally important data and insight, and continues to provide a sense of user involvement in a project that they might be heavily invested in.

User interviews (In-depth interviews)

User interviews are a rich way to discover information that might otherwise be hard to find. In summary, a user interview is a one to one conversation between researcher and user (or potential user) that has an objective and is usual has some form of structure to it.

They can be structured interviews (i.e. a script you follow) or semi-structured (a rough subject plan, that is followed loosely).

They are usually conducted to be generative, to find information that you currently don’t know from the people who are going to be using whatever you’re creating. They are usually used at the early stages of projects. When using as a generative source of data it’s best that they are structured, so that you’re asking the same things from different people. Generating a wider perspective on the things you’re trying to discover, but in a structured format that allows you to compare the data more easily.

You can use interviews in a contextual format too. Best conducted in the usual use environment of the users, to provide the contextual element that can affect behaviour and thinking. For example, you could interview users whilst they complete a series of tasks on a legacy system to discover what aspects they might look to improve or issues they encounter.

Finally, interviews can be conducted on a continuous basis. More than anything this can give users a sense of agency in any development process, and emphases how important user input into the design process is to all stakeholders. But it can also help identify and collect data on anomalies that might occur only on an irregular basis. This approach can produce data of a similar nature to a Diary Study, that is detailed below.

Card sorting

This technique can be great for information categorisation, most importantly, from the contextual point of your users.. 

When we think of “this subject” or “function”, what else is similar and by what name do we associate it with? 

Too often assumptions can be made around this type of behaviour that don’t represent the norm for a specific cohort. With this considered, strategic and representative recruitment (as with all qualitative research) is essential.

This can be particularly helpful when working on Information Architecture planning or navigation design. 

• What word would you associate with this type of activity or service?

• Where would you expect to find this service offer?

Card sorting can also be a good break in other types of qualitative research, if you’re running a Focus Group or have just completed an interview. It can be moderated in an engaging manner, and involve movement and debate.

Field study

This is form of qualitative research is conducted with users in their usual use environment. 

Where many UX research methods might happen in mutually convenient spaces for researcher and cohort, or even in the cohort's own space but somewhere other than their desk or usual work space, Field Research happens in a user's default use environment, to ensure variables are as aligned to typical use as possible. 

Outside of a UX use, we might use the method of deploying Secret Shoppers to provide a similar type of insight, putting users into the physical space that they typically engage with a brand or organisation and observing or interviewing them about their experience in that environment or space, whilst giving them a task often completed in that space.

Field study work can bring memories of past experiences to the fore, or environmental variables into play that are absent from other forms of qualitative research.

The challenge with Field Study research is that it can be time consuming and also, it can feel more intrusive than other forms of research, so you’ll need buy-in from the cohort. The flip side of this is that “buy-in” also brings a sense of agency and involvement that might not be achieved from other forms of research.

Diary Study

A Diary Study is a documented account from a user of their use of a digital process, platform or task. When a user records their experience of this task, interface or process in a format that can be collated and analysed at a later date.

These provide longitudinal insights that might not be apparent in an in-depth interview or field study, where you’re either asking a user to recount a situation that happened in the past or illustrate how they complete a specific task in the moment. Somethings only become apparent through continued use, over time.

As these are unsupervised, thinking about a framework to simplify completion can help users. Perhaps a script for them to consider on a regular interval or completing a common task. Equally, providing them with simple tools for recording or documenting the study, so that the data gathering isn’t a chore in any way.

Diary Studies either require a degree of foresight to implement ahead of a project commencement, or a project of enough complexity or scale that it’s going to take sometime to implement - i.e. they need a larger time frame to bring real value.

Focus Groups 

A rich source of qualitative data, with ability to test ideas and concepts in front of a recruited cohort of representative users (or potential future users). However, they need to be used with caution, as they can lead to creating a data set that is not representative of the actions people may take when operating in isolation. They also need to be moderated well.

Focus groups are good at unearthing ideas or concepts that might not see the light of day when talking to people one on one. Ideas that might seem obvious, or for that matter, obscure, might not be raised by an individual, that might be raised in a group conversation where individuals feel more comfortable in a supportive social dynamic.

They can provide a wider sense of feelings about a concept or idea, that can help create data that might not come from other forms of qualitative activities.

Good moderation of Focus Groups is essential. A good moderator will present concepts and ideas and encourage discussion or exploration, without creating bias. They can encourage participants to explore an idea in greater detail, but should not suggest or indicate that by exploring a particular subject or concept in detail, is in any sense their advocation of a particular idea.

Equally a good moderator will be able to manage more dominant members in a group and ensure that all members of the group are able to participate and express their views, without being dimissed. If a group has been recruited well, all members of the group should have valuable data to share with the moderator. 

Groups need to be recruited well to ensure they represent the audience or user groups that you should have identified whilst establishing your research plan, these can be current users or future (prospective) users. This is too often an area of research work that is rushed. Without good planning here, the data gathered can bias the whole outcome and value of the work.

Equally, having a well structured plan and introduction to your Focus Group is an essential piece of good moderation. Tell your group what the objective of the day is, how long it’s likely to take, what you’ll be doing and how you might be recording the session. Ensure that everyone is happy with being recorded, it might be that some are happy to have an audio recording, but might be unhappy with video or photographs being taken. Respect your cohort's wishes and you’ll have a more productive session.

UX research methods in summary 

These are just some of the things to consider when contemplating conducting user research, and just some of the things that we can help you to consider and develop in a strategic manner to ensure you get the most out of any investment in user research.

As with all research, the value of insight that can be gained can be integral to the direction a well conducted project can take. We have conducted many research projects when a client has gone into the work with a particular view, only to come out the other side with a completely new direction or view to take under consideration.

Tools such as software can help with the implementation, recording and analysis of research data, but nothing that will be more valuable than a clear research objective, plan and good moderation.

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

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Or, reach out and get in touch to see how we can help….

Audience Segmentation and how to start the process

Image by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash

What is segmentation?

Audience/customer segmentation (for the  purpose of this article we’re going to use the term audience, but it could be interchanged with customer at most points) and market segmentation is the process of splitting audiences or markets into different groups based on various criteria.

Audience segmentation is the segmentation of those people that you are already able to communicate to and are actively engaged with you already, whereas market segmentation is the segmenting of the entire market available to you.

By splitting our audience or markets into these segments we’re able to tailor and develop products, service and communications to specific people with the hope that we’re more effective at providing people with what they want.

Types of segmentation

There are typically 5 types of segmentation used in marketing and product or service development. These are:

Demographic - segmenting your audience by factors such as age, gender, education, occupation.  By dividing your audience by these factors you can reach people in specific life stages or of a particular economic profile.

Psychographic - this type of segmentation relates to things such personality traits, opinions, lifestyle choices or other interests. This can help with distinguishing between two markets that might look demographically similar, but behave differently based on one of factors listed above.

Behavioural - our typical behaviour might make us quite different from another customer in marketing or purchasing. For example, one might like to spend 6 months researching an item online before purchasing in a physical store, someone else might be more impulsive in their purchasing behaviour or someone else like to order on a regular, repetitive basis.

Geographic - Segmentation based on the location of the audience. Might be used for products or services that are designed specifically for a particular climate or culture, or proximity to a particular location you offer services from.

Firmographic - Predominantly used in the B2B market as it relates to the characteristics associated with organisations. It can include factors such as industrial sector, legal status (plc, ltd. etc in the UK), years in business, size (number of employees usually), geographical location. 

As you can see, there are a range of ways of segmenting your market and audience, all of which will have more relevance to different types of product or service.

Starting up and having no audience

When you start a new business in all likelihood you’ll have very little audience and need to start afresh, building and developing a community of people that over time will become your customers.

Unsurprisingly, this means that you’ll have no audience segmentation of any real value to start with. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need to think about what audience segmentation you might use in the future and what method of segmentation might be most appropriate.

What you should be able to do is get a sense of your market segmentation. Part of your product and service development should have included establishing who you believe your customers are and what their attributes should be, to help you reach them better by fulfilling their needs. Persona development is a great way to record this and start the process of collecting information that can help with segmentation later.

Persona development

Persona development is an essential part of developing and better understanding your audience. It allows you to record various segmentation factors in one place, ensuring that when you create your products or service, or marketing communications, you’re doing it in an informed manner and targeted at an audience or market profile that you’ve already identified. 

It also helps you to emphasise and in some part understand the needs of your target audience, to help speak their language of needs and meet them in the places they turned to for help or advice.

We wrote another article that is focussed on how and why to develop personas and we’ve also created a basic template for you to download and use to help you get started.

Read our article on persona development and download our persona template.

How to choose what to segment by

Choosing what to segment by is most likely to be driven by the type of product or service you are developing and promoting. In all likelihood, you may find yourself segmenting by a number of different segmentation types. For example, in a B2C market, you could easily find yourself segmenting by both demographic and geographic factors. Imagine a new gym chain developing its targeting around the new branch it has opened.

Again, this is where Persona Development can really help. It can allow you to walk through purchasing journeys with a specific persona in mind. 

What you probably don’t want to do is to segment too much, initially. Each segment requires new communication considerations and development and individual marketing streams on paid or email communications. This takes time and effort, not just to write in the first place, but to maintain and analyse the effectiveness.

With time, you’ll be able to allocate larger budgets to this type of activity, allowing you to utilise more resources to manage and employ greater automation tools to help you streamline both the deployment of the additional segmentation, but also to analysis.

Evolving segments with time

As with all things in developing a new business or organisation, it doesn’t stand still, and you can’t stand still either. As an organisation or business grows its audience, so should your understanding of that audience.

But bigger isn’t always better.

With time and experience, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what works for your organisation with product or service development. There might be other factors at play that shape the trajectory of your business, for example production development or restraints might push you down a particular avenue.

You’ll also start to get a feel for your customers within the market, as your brand develops you’ll get a better understanding of who your people are and why they choose you as a provider of the service or product you offer. 

This will allow you to fine tune your segmentation and personas to better meet the shape of your various customer profiles. Don’t be afraid to revisit already developed persona profiles and adjust them as you learn, all organisational or business growth is a matter of testing and learning, no one knows all the answers from the start and in all likelihood you never will. But you will grow in your understanding of your audience as you grow as an organisation, if you’re listening.

How you can help to gather segment details

We recently wrote a short piece on the wellbeing and wellness sector and what you can do to get a better understanding of your audience needs, including what you can put in place to gain this knowledge. Whilst this article was focussed on the wellbeing sector, the same principles apply, whatever sector you’re operating in.

A richer understanding of your market or audience can come from qualitative research work, but there are things that you can and should do to start this process from day 1. All of these activities will inform how you can approach market and customer segmentation at a later stage. 

These are just a few ideas you could implement.

Feedback from clients

We shape our own workflows and processes as a start-up or early stages business as they are needed, but often what is done in the early years is the foundations that future work is built upon. Building a feedback loop into your service and product delivery can help you normalise a process that can be insightful and rich in detail that can help with shaping segmentation later.

There are various points in the journey that you can implement this types of feedback loop, these are just a few you might what to consider for appropriateness:

On-boarding - when you bring a new customer or audience member on-board you have the opportunity to ask them a series of questions about how they found you, a little bit more about their background, or how they found the on-boarding process. Depending on what service or product you’re providing the depth of this will need to be measured appropriately.

Post project - this is for those delivering service based solutions, rather than product based, but equally it could be used at product delivery. A quick review of what worked, what didn’t, possibly other demographic details can be completed here if you don’t know them already. Some behavioural insight too, frequency of future implementation (of a service) or interest in subscription based services etc.

Fixed reviews - 6 monthly or annual reviews. Follow a similar format to the post project, but allow you to put a date in the calendar to provide a feedback loop from your audience members to you about how they’ve found working with you, what they like etc.

Email

Email and further integration into eCRM platforms are often the frameworks for storing a lot of segmentation data, but also often the place where segmentation of market and audience members is most tangible, visible and frequently used.

Automated email flows, triggered by web behaviour or engagement with other online tools are usually an easy way for you to identify specific behaviour about your audience. An obvious psychographic insight to gain is activity around different types of content type, going back to the article we wrote on wellbeing and performance at work, what types of content are they engaging with that is answering the needs they have in their role at work? Are they seeking to build better interpersonal skills within their team for example, or are they more interested in measurement of productivity and seeing ROI on projects, these factors can help you to decide which comms segment they might need to go into in the future or what product is showing the potential for future development and resource investment.

Web analytics

Web analytics are a great baseline for building segmentation information. There’s geographical data that is relatively easy to collate and segment, although you do need to move it from an anonymous state to an identifiable state using downloads or other exchanges of value on your web platforms. 

But even at an anonymous state it can provide you with helpful insights. What keywords are more popular in what region? What regions are interested in exploring what you have to offer in more detail, and therefore potentially a warmer market for you to explore.

Google Analytics 4 has a lot more granular information available off the shelf now, but you need to configure your tracking correctly in order to gain this insight. As a side note from an ethical point of view, you also need to let those that are visiting your website know that you’re gathering this information about them with the aim of providing them with more appropriate services or products in the future. You should always provide the option to opt out of this type of data collection.

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

Or just get in touch…

It's not unusual to know little about your audience…

Many organisations, especially startups, know little more about their audience/customers, than a very rough gut instinct. This isn’t something to be ashamed of, just a reality.

But the sooner you get to know more about them, the sooner you can make your product development and marketing more effective, turning your market development from a guessing game, to insight led strategic business development.

The best way to learn more about your audience or customers is through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research, but for many smaller businesses this at scale is out of the reach of most budgets.

So what can you do in the interim?

Startup audience profiling

We’ve all got to start somewhere and whether you’re a startup or an established small business, gut instinct is what we usually rely on. When in product development, we usually imagine our customers to some degree. All we suggest is that you create a profile of these imagined customers to help you to frame your thinking - over time these can be developed as you learn more about your actual customers or audience.

To start this ball rolling, we suggest you include some of the following details in a profile or persona:

Imagined name - it always helps to be able to reference a persona in discussion

Role - what does this person do at their workplace? If we can understand their work position more, we might be able to have a greater understanding of their needs and then how we can help them.

Interests - we need to reach this person, so that we can tell them about our great product, service or organisation. Finding them in their natural habit or talking their language can help us become part of their trusted network.

Needs - what needs might this individual have from us? If we can frame our thinking to reflect their thinking, we can shape our communications or even product development to meet these needs. 

What they might already know of us or our product/service area -  getting an idea of whether they’ve heard of us or even heard of the product or service area that we’re working in can really help. Do we need to explain what we do so they can see how we help? What do they understand of our product already?

Why choose us over competition - always good to reflect on this question to help shape strategy and deifine USP’s. But even better to do it through the eyes of a specific persona.

There’s more that we can add to a profile over time, but the above should give you a solid foundation to use. Now you just need to remember to use them when designing your comms, does a communication resonate with our profiles?

Continue to test and learn

Accept the fact that we don’t truly know our audience or customers and have an always on approach to testing and learning across all of our comms platforms, refining over time as we go. Below are some ideas on how we can do this on different channels:

Email -  inevitably we might find ourselves using some cold data to grow our customer base initially, this isn’t something to be ashamed of, just a reality when you’re new to the market. Try creating multiple email funnels with content that can either address different needs or approach those needs framed in different ways. Try changing your recipient audience, perhaps the person you have been targeting is too senior, move down the management line and see if that works better, or vice versa. Likewise, as you grow your own email data, test what content works well with your audience by analysing open rates and click throughs.

Paid digital ads - don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Run small campaigns targeted around either one content or need theme, or audience. Next time run a campaign targeted using something different. Compare the two, which one gave you better returns. Numbers are usually small when you’re starting out with paid media, so keep your campaigns in clear silos so that you can analyse and compare data against each other more effectively.

Social - brands need communities to grow, they need advocates and ambassadors, people who believe in what you’re doing. Social platforms are a great place to form these communities, from here you can encourage them to join you in other channels, such as email, for greater conversion possibilities. But as with other channels, you need to learn about your customers to begin with. Try testing different types of content, see which is most appreciated. Play with your tone of voice a little to see which resonates best. Feedback on other similar organisations social feeds, so that you can capture a little of their reach. Find time to play and learn.

Web - Web is mostly likely to be your shop window for many brands in the market today. But the primary website is just one use of web based content that we have available to us. Landing pages can be a great way to communicate a specific message to a specific audience. You can tailor-make the experience, increasing the chance of attracting a new customer. Play with your tone of voice on your main website too. We might believe that our customers are revisiting our website daily to see what’s new, but the reality is, they’re unlikely to be. So test some new copy on key pages to see if you can better craft what you’re trying to convey about a product or service, especially if you’ve recently learnt something new about your market and prospects.

Talk to existing customers

So many brands are scared to ask their existing customers about why they choose you over competition, but done correctly this can be a mutually beneficial situation. Why not run a small workshop around the experience they are having to date with the service or product that they have with you. Or, if workshops aren’t possible, use a questionnaire. Working to improve the service or products you deliver to existing clients can help you to better understand your market as well as improving relationships with existing customers.

Look at your competitors customers

We’ve all done it. Unless it’s a completely innovative product we’re trying to create a market for, there’s usually someone that’s gone before us. It’s always helpful to understand who your competitors are in your market, but this type of work can be more valuable in understand who their customers are. 

Social is a great place to do this. Most brands' followers are public, take some time to have a browser through and get a better understanding of their potential customer base. Platforms such as Twitter have the function to target ads that are “Look-like” customers of specific brands to help you get your brand in front of competitors customers as an alternative to what they already have.

Tools such as Ahrefs can allow you to see the performance of specific areas of content marketing. Support what you think might be a good area for you to develop content around, with insight on how your competitors might be performing in specific areas.

It’s just a start, but one worth doing

We all have to start somewhere, so it is best to do that “somewhere” with at least some form of strategy and tactics in play. Over time we need to revisit all of these areas and refine them until we become more and more assured that this is our market and these are our customers.

Ideally, with time, you can recruit potential customers for qualitative research to get a deeper understanding about your market, to help you to shape new product development or fine tune comms, we can help with this, you can read more about that here.

But in the first instance we can really help shape our thinking in a more informed manner by simply completing the tasks above. If you need help doing these, we run half day and full day “understanding your audience” workshops where we work with you to pull all of this together into a plan that you can then use to help you grow.

You can download a starter template that we’ve created for developing personas here:

Need some help to do this?

We’re always happy to help people to get started with this type of work. Whether you’re startup finding your feet or a growing brand wanting to define your audience with greater clarity.

We’ve got a number of ways to help, check out the below to see just some of the ways we can.

Or just get in touch…