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The 4 types of research methods in ui/ux design (and when to use them).
- User Experience
- 4 minute read
- by Rich Staats
Design research is a necessary part of creating a user-centered product. When done right, you’re able to gather data that helps you:
- Identify and solve relevant design problems.
- Better understand the product’s end users.
- Improve your designs based on data-driven research.
Though there are many different ways to collect data and do design research, they can broadly be categorized as either primary, secondary, exploratory, or evaluative research. In this article, we’ll explain these four types of research methods in the context of UI/UX design and when you should use them in your design process.
Primary research
Primary research is the simplest (and perhaps most effective) way to come up with data to get a better understanding of the audience for which you’re designing. The purpose of primary research is to validate design ideas and concepts early on in the design process. The data you collect from primary research allows you to design meaningful, user-centered solutions.
Let’s take a look at some examples of primary research:
Conducting interviews with individuals or in small groups is a great starting point, and there are many ways to go about it. Depending on your project, you might conduct direct interviews or indirect interviews. Direct interviews are simple question-answer format interviews whereas indirect interviews are set up in a more conversational style. You’ll also have to decide whether you’ll interview people in-person or remotely.
Focus groups
Focus groups are structured, group interviews in which a moderator guides the discussion. As a UI/UX designer, you might consider using this research method when you need to gather user insight quickly.
Usability testing
Once you develop a prototype, you can recruit test participants and conduct usability tests to uncover foundational issues with the product’s user experience and gather user feedback. The idea is to define user goals and turn them into realistic task scenarios that the test participants would have to complete using your prototype.
Secondary research
Secondary research is when you use existing books, articles, or research material to validate your design ideas and concepts or support your primary research. For example, you might want to use the material you gather from secondary research to:
- Explain the context behind your UI design.
- Build a case for your design decisions.
- Reinforce the data you gathered from primary research.
Generally speaking, secondary research is much easier (and faster) to do than primary research. You’ll be able to find most of the information you need on the internet, in the library, or your company’s archives. Here are some places you can collect secondary research from:
- Your company’s internal data, which may include information contained in your company’s files, databases and project reports.
- Client’s research department, e.g. the data your client has regarding user behavior with previous versions of the website/application, user interests, etc.
- Industry statistics, i.e. the industry’s general consensus, standards and conventions.
- Relevant books, articles, case studies and magazines.
Websites have evolved a great deal over the last two decades, and so has the way users interact with them. This is why one of the most common challenges with secondary research in UI/UX design is outdated data. In such cases, UI/UX designers resort to other research methods (such as primary research or exploratory research) to gather the data they need.
Exploratory research
Exploratory research is usually conducted at the start of the design process with a purpose to help designers understand the problem they’re trying to solve. As such, it focuses on gathering a thorough understanding of the end user’s needs and goals.
In the Define the Problem stage of the design thinking process , you can use exploratory research techniques to develop a design hypothesis and validate it with the product’s intended user base. By doing so, you’ll be in a better position to make hypothesis-driven design decisions throughout the design process.
You can validate your hypothesis by running experiments. Here are some of the ways you can validate your assumptions depending on where you are in the design process:
- Conducting interviews and surveys
- Organizing focus groups
- Conducting usability tests
- Running various A/B tests
Essentially, you’re combining exploratory research and primary research techniques to define the problem accurately. You can do this by asking questions that encourage interview participants to explore different design concepts and think outside the box.
Before you begin collecting data, remember to write down the experiment you’re running and define the outcomes that validate your design hypothesis. After doing exploratory research, you should have enough data to begin designing a solution.
Evaluative research
Exploratory research gives you enough data to begin designing a solution. Once you have a prototype on hand, you can use evaluative research to test that solution with real users. The goal of evaluative research is to help designers gather feedback that allows them to improve their product’s design.
There are two main functions of evaluative research: summative and formative .
- Summative evaluation is all about making a judgment regarding the efficacy of the product once it’s complete.
- Formative evaluation, on the other hand, focuses on evaluating the product and making improvements (i.e., detecting and eliminating usability problems) during the development process.
For example, you can conduct usability tests in which you ask test participants to use the product to perform a set of tasks. Keep in mind that the purpose of evaluative research is to gather feedback from users regarding your product’s design. In case you’re short on time or low on budget, you can choose to conduct usability studies that fit in your time and budget constraints (such as guerrilla usability testing ).
Deciding which research method to use depends on what data you’re trying to gather and where you are in the design process. The information you collect through your design research will enable you to make informed design decisions and create better user-centered products.
Let’s quickly recap the four types of research methods UI/UX designers can use in the design process:
- Primary research is used to generate data by conducting interviews, surveys, and usability tests and/or organizing focus group sessions.
- With secondary research, you’re able to use existing research material to validate your design ideas and support your primary research.
- Exploratory research is when you come up with a design hypothesis and run experiments to validate it.
- Once you have a prototype, you can use evaluative research to see if there’s any room for improvement.
Which of these research methods do you use in your design process and how? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Inside Design
4 types of research methods all designers should know
Emily esposito, • oct 22, 2018.
R emember that fifth grade science project where you learned about primary research for the first time? Like most things we learned in elementary school, you probably didn’t expect it to creep back into your day-to-day adult life. However, in reality, designers have to conduct research and analyze data all the time.
Design research is a critical step in creating the best user experience. It helps you understand your customers’ behavior and turn it into actionable insights to improve your design.
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Primary research.
Perhaps the most important method in design research, this involves you or your team going directly to the source (your customers) to ask questions and gather data. Most often, the goal is to better understand who you are designing for or to validate your ideas with the actual end user.
Some examples of primary research include:
One-on-one interviews are a great place to start when collecting primary research. There are three main types of interviews: directed, non-directed, and ethnographic. Direct interviews are the most common and follow the standard question and answer format. Non-direct interviews are used when participants may not feel comfortable with direct questions. Instead, this interview is set up as a conversation (with some rough guidelines). Ethnographic interviews involve observing people in their day-to-day environment (very similar to the contextual inquiry method covered below).
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User groups.
Also known as focus groups, these are structured interviews involving three to six participants. A moderator guides the discussion, providing verbal and written feedback through the exercises. This research method is best when you need to get a lot of user insight in a short period of time.
Contextual inquiry
You first ask users a set of standard questions, then observe them in their natural environment as they complete their everyday tasks. It’s not just an interview or an observation—you want to watch people perform tasks as they explain what they are doing and why. This type of research is especially important in the beginning of the design process to learn what is important to users and how they interact with similar tools or services.
Asking users to document their own experience will help you see your product through their eyes.
“Design research helps you understand your customers’ behavior and turn it into actionable insights to improve your design.”
Diary study
Occurring over an extended period of time (from a week to a month, or even longer), participants are asked to keep a diary and log specific information about their activities. In-situ logging is the simplest way to collect data from diaries—users report all details about the activities as they complete them.
Usability testing
Once you’re deeper into the design process and have a prototype to share, usability testing helps you put that design into the wild to gather feedback. Here, you would ask potential or current users to complete a set of tasks using your prototype.
Secondary research
Secondary research is when you use existing data like books, articles, or the internet to validate or support existing research. You may use secondary research to create a stronger case for your design choices and provide additional insight into what you learned during primary research.
Work with existing content, like presentations or articles, to present a strong case for your design choices.
This type of research method is quick and cheap—all you need is internet access or a library card to start. However, some common challenges with secondary research include not being able to find the specific information you need, or battling outdated, low-quality data.Here are some places where you could gather secondary research:
- Internal data, like your company database, sales reports, or historical information
- Government statistics or information from government agencies
- University research centers
- Respected magazines and newspapers
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Generative or exploratory research.
Generative research, also known as exploratory research, focuses on a deeper understanding of user needs and desires. It is usually conducted at the beginning of the design project when you need to answer basic questions like, “What problem are we solving for our customers?” This discovery phase helps you to identify a design hypothesis and validate it with your customers. You won’t always know what the outcome or answers will be, but they will create a strong foundation to make good design decisions going forward.
You’ll see a lot of overlap between generative research and primary research since the whole point of generative research is to get out and talk to your users. Examples of generative research include interviews, user groups, surveys, and contextual inquiries.
Before you start your research, make sure you know what you intend to learn from the results.
Evaluative research.
After gathering your generative research, you’re prepared to design a solution for your customers. Evaluative research allows you to test that solution, giving users the opportunity to “evaluate” your prototype. Your goal is to collect feedback to help refine and improve the design experience. One of the most popular ways to conduct evaluative research is to have people use your product or service as they think out loud (again, a subset of primary research). A perfect example of this research method is usability studies.And, for whichever type of evaluative research you choose, there are two types: summative and formative. Summative emphasizes the outcome more than the process (looking at whether the desired effect is achieved) and formative is used to strengthen idea being tested (monitoring the success of a process).
Keep asking questions
How do you decide which research method to use? It depends on what you’re trying to learn. You may start with primary research and find that more questions arise after getting to know your customers better (and that’s a good thing!). These new questions will help you decide what you need to learn next. When in doubt, always follow the questions.
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by Emily Esposito
Emily has written for some of the top tech companies, covering everything from creative copywriting to UX design. When she's not writing, she's traveling the world (next stop: Japan!), brewing kombucha, and biking through the Pacific Northwest.
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Secondary Research in UX
February 20, 2022 2022-02-20
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You don’t have to do all the user-research work yourself. If somebody else already ran a study (and published it), grab it!
Have you ever completed a project only to find out that something very similar has already been done in your organization a couple of years ago? That situation is common, especially with rising employee-churn rates, and fueled the popularity of research repositories (e.g., Microsoft Human Insights System) and the growth of the research-operations community . It should also inspire practitioners to do more secondary research.
Secondary research, also known as desk research or, in academic contexts, literature review, refers to the act of gathering prior research findings and other relevant information related to a new project. It is a foundational part of any emerging research project and provides the project with background and context. Secondary research allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants and not to reinvent the wheel every time we initiate a new program or plan a study.
This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to conduct secondary research in UX. The key takeaway is that this type of research is not solely an intellectual exercise, but a way to minimize research costs, win internal stakeholders and get scaffolding for your own projects.
Academic publications include a literature review at the beginning to showcase context or known gaps and to justify the motivation for the research questions. However, the task of incorporating previous results is becoming more and more challenging with a growing number of publications in all fields. Therefore, practitioners across disciplines (for instance in eHealth, business, education, and technology) develop method guidelines for secondary research.
In This Article:
When to conduct secondary research, types of secondary research, how to conduct secondary research.
Secondary research should be a standard first step in any rigorous research practice, but it’s also often cost-effective in more casual settings. Whether you are just starting a new project, joining an existing one, or planning a primary research effort for your team, it is always good to start with a broad overview of the field and existent resources. That would allow you to synthesize findings and uncover areas where more research is needed.
Secondary research shows which topics are particularly popular or important for your organization and what problems other researchers are trying to solve. This research method is widely discussed in library and information sciences but is often neglected in UX. Nonetheless, secondary research can be useful to uncover industry trends and to inspire further studies. For example, Jessica Pater and her colleagues looked at the foundational question of participant compensation in user studies. They could have opted for user interviews or a costly large-scale survey, yet through secondary research, they were able to review 2250 unique user studies across 1662 manuscripts published in 2018-2019. They found inconsistencies in participant compensation and suggested changes to the current practices and further research opportunities.
Secondary research can be divided into two main types: internal and external research.
Internal secondary research involves gathering all relevant research findings already available in your organization. These might include artifacts from the past primary research projects, maps (e.g., customer-journey map , service blueprint ), deliverables from external consultants, or results from different kinds of workshops (e.g., discovery, design thinking, etc.). Hopefully, these will be available in a research repository .
External secondary research is focused on sources outside of your organization, such as academic journals, public libraries, open data repositories, internet searches, and white papers published by reputable organizations. For example, external resources for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) can be found at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library , Journal of Usability Studies (JUS ), or research websites like ours . University libraries and labs like UCSD Geisel Library , Carnegie Mellon University Libraries , MIT D-Lab , Stanford d.school , and specialized portals like Google Scholar offer another avenue for directed search.
Our goal is to have the necessary depth, rigor, and usefulness for practitioners. Here are the 4 steps for conducting secondary research:
- Choose the topic of research & write a problem statement .
Write a concise description of the problem to be solved. For example, if you are doing a website redesign, you might want to both learn the current standards and look at all the previous design iterations to avoid issues that your team already identified.
- Identi fy external and internal resources.
Peer-reviewed publications (such as those published in academic journals and conferences) are a fairly reliable source. They always include a section describing methods, data-collection techniques, and study limitations. If a study you plan to use does not include such information, that might be a red flag and a reason to further scrutinize that source. Public datasets also often present some challenges because of errors and inclusion criteria, especially if they were collected for another purpose.
One should be cautious of the seemingly reputable “research” findings published across different websites in a form of blog posts, which could be opinion pieces, not backed up by primary research. If you encounter such a piece, ask yourself — is the conclusion of the writeup based on a real study? If the study was quantitative, was it properly analyzed (e.g., at the very least, are confidence intervals reported, and was statistical significance evaluated?). For all studies, was the method sound and nonbiased (e.g., did the study have internal and external validity )?
A more nuanced challenge involves evaluating findings based on a different audience, which might not be always generalizable to your situation, but may form hypotheses worthy of investigating. For example, if a design pattern is found okay to use by young adults, you may still want to know if this finding will also be valid for older generations.
- Collect and analyze data from external and internal resources.
Remember that secondary research involves both the existing data and existing research. Both of those categories become helpful resources when they are critically evaluated for any inherent biases, omissions, and limitations. If you already have some secondary data in your organization, such as customer service logs or search logs, you should include them in secondary research alongside any existent analysis of such logs and previous reports. It is helpful to revisit previous findings, compare how they have or have not been implemented to refresh institutional memory and support future research initiatives.
- Refine your problem statement and determine what still needs to be investigated.
Once you collected the relevant information, write a summary of findings, and discuss them with your team. You might need to refine your problem statement to determine what information you still need to answer your research questions. Next time your team is planning to adopt a trendy new design pattern, it may be a good idea to go back and search the web or an academic database for any evaluations of that pattern.
It is important to note that secondary research is not a substitute for primary research. It is always better to do both. Although secondary research is often cost-effective and quick, its quality depends to a large extent on the quality of your sources. Therefore, before using any secondary sources, you need to identify their validity and limitations.
Secondary (or desk) research involves gathering existing data from inside and outside of your organization. A literature review should be done more frequently in UX because it is a viable option even for researchers with limited time and budget. The most challenging part is to persuade yourself and your team that the existing data is worth being summarized, compared, and collated to increase the overall effectiveness of your primary research.
Jessica Pater, Amanda Coupe, Rachel Pfafman, Chanda Phelan, Tammy Toscos, and Maia Jacobs. 2021. Standardizing Reporting of Participant Compensation in HCI: A Systematic Literature Review and Recommendations for the Field. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 141, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445734
Hannah Snyder. 2019. Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines. Journal of business research 104, 333-339. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.039.
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