User Research

What it is

User research is finding out what people actually need and do before designing anything for them. It covers choosing a method that fits the question, getting the right people into the room, running the session without leading them, and turning what you saw into a decision the team will act on.

Why it matters

Every product decision is a guess about human behaviour; research decides how expensive that guess is. A team that has watched ten people attempt the task argues differently — about what to cut, not about whose intuition is better. It also protects against the most common failure of experienced designers, which is designing for themselves. The cost is real: recruiting takes a week, and a badly run session produces confident nonsense. That is why the four stages below are learned in order.

In this track

1. Choosing a method (03-design-ux/05-user-research/01-choosing-a-method) — matching the question you are asking to a method that can answer it.
2. Recruiting participants (03-design-ux/05-user-research/02-recruiting-participants) — finding people who actually do the thing, without selecting for the ones who will be kind.
3. Running a session (03-design-ux/05-user-research/03-running-a-session) — the plan, the prompts and the discipline that keep the evidence clean.
4. From findings to decisions (03-design-ux/05-user-research/04-from-findings-to-decisions) — turning notes into findings, and findings into a change someone owns.

Prerequisites

None.

Go deeper

• Design Thinking (03-design-ux/02-design-thinking) — the wider loop that starts with this evidence.
• User Interviews (03-design-ux/20-user-interviews) — the most common research method, in detail.
• Survey Design (03-design-ux/21-survey-design) — the method to reach for once you know what to ask.
• Quantitative UX Research (03-design-ux/24-quantitative-ux-research) — measuring at scale what research first found in the small.