That’s why great designers conduct user research, sometimes on their own, sometimes with the guidance of a professional user researcher.
But UX research isn’t easy—and doing your own research doesn’t make you a researcher. On the contrary, UX designers need to understand their own role in the research process, so they can do accurate, lightweight research on their own while collaborating effectively with dedicated research teams.
In this article, you’ll learn:
Why it’s important for UX designers to do research at all
The kinds of research that designers should know how to do
How to improve collaboration with UX researchers
Designer-specific tips for conducting your own studies
Tools, templates, and kits to simplify your next project
Do UX designers even need to do research in the first place?
The short answer: Yes.
As you know, design has the power to create change on both a macro and micro scale—from transforming entire industries to driving incremental increases in website conversions. And the root of that power is a deep, human-centered understanding of the user.
Whether you're for or against decentralized research, there's a significant amount of product managers, designers, and other non-researchers doing research on their own. For the designers who choose to do informal research on their own, we think it's best to provide them with guardrails to make sure they're on the right path to maximize the benefits of user research.
UX designers benefit from doing their own user research because it helps them:
Create better designs that are shaped around the user’s true needs, desires, and motivations.
Avoid costly mistakes by pinpointing bugs and usability issues before they’ve shipped.
Make confident design decisions by gathering genuine, contextual feedback from users.
Learn faster by joining (and therefore accelerating) the organization’s research cycles.
Improve lives by designing accessible, ethical, and trauma-informed products and services.
Build a reputation as a thoughtful, effectual professional whose designs have made a real impact.
“Design without research means that the product won’t meet the needs of the people who use it. Researching without design means that the insights may not get implemented at all.”
UX researcher vs. UX designer: Where do the roles overlap?
UX designers usually do some UX research. And UX researchers might have some experience in UX design. The roles are complementary, but they’re not interchangeable.
Comparing and contrasting the role of a UX designer to that of a UX researcher
Here’s a breakdown of the similarities and differences between the two.
Both UX designers and UX researchers:
Work together to create user-centered products and services
Are involved in the product design process
UX designers:
Are primarily responsible for designing effective products and services that people want, need, and enjoy using
Usually conduct research with guidance from dedicated user researchers; if they’re conducting research on their own, they tend to stick to methods like interviews, surveys, and usability tests
Create research deliverables like prototypes, wireframes, user stories, user flows
Use user insights to inform design changes and decisions
UX researchers:
Are primarily responsible for collecting user insights through research to inform design and product teams
Can conduct research independently on behalf of design and product teams
Use user insights to make recommendations about new developments or changes to existing designs
Other roles that are in the same circle as UX design and research include:
Product designers: Like UX designers, product designers are involved in designing effective, human-centered products, and they tend to use a lot of the same tools. However, while UX designers are primarily concerned with usability, product designers have a wider range of responsibilities and will more closely consider the business and market in the design process.
Product managers: Product managers are responsible for creating the product roadmap. They oversee the success of the entire project, from defining the market needs, to developing solutions, to measuring product performance post-launch. When product managers do research, it tends to skew more toward market and competitive analysis in order to prioritize their team’s work.
In the absence of a dedicated UX research team, UX and product designers will likely be doing most of the user research, working with product managers to prioritize and organize their tasks.
📌 Do you have a Product Manager on your team who might be interested in a similar guide to UX research? Check out our companion guide, The Product Manager's Guide to UX Research.
What kind of research do UX designers do?
The most common research methods UX designers use are:
“If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing, which is the most effective method to improve usability. If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what, but you often need to know why. So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.”
When in the research process should UX designers get involved?
A diagram of how and when the research process feeds into the design process
UX designers should be involved in every phase of the research process, some stages more than others.
Here’s a breakdown of a UX designer’s goals and involvement during each phase of the research process.
Discovery
Discovery research (a.k.a. generative, foundational, or exploratory research) is all about identifying opportunities. Designers do research at this stage to help them empathize with users, clearly define users’ needs and challenges, and generate ideas for design solutions.
Your goal: Develop user empathy and define roadmap
Core questions: What problems exist for users, and how can we solve them?
Primary research methods: Interviews, surveys, focus groups, continuous methods
Evaluation
Evaluation research is all about testing your concepts and prototypes to see whether or not they’re on the right track. Designers do evaluative research to validate their ideas, identify issues, and iterate on their designs.
Your goal: Validate designs or make changes
Core questions: Is the design usable, intuitive, visually appealing?
Primary research methods: Surveys, usability tests, A/B tests
Continuous
Continuous research is conducted on an ongoing basis (as opposed to defined, one-off research projects) to collect fresh user feedback about new opportunities or product iterations. Designers do continuous research to maintain a deep sense of customer empathy, collect ideas, identify issues post-launch, and uphold agile functioning on their team.
Your goal: Monitor for bugs, pain points, and new opportunities
Core questions: What’s working? What can be improved? What new opportunities can we tap into?
Primary research methods: Continuous interviews, continuous surveys, product analytics, feedback from sales and customer success
How the UX designer's goals align with every stage of the user research process, plus core research questions and methods at every stage
What to expect when collaborating with UX research teams
In the past, it wasn’t unusual for UX designers, product designers, or product managers to be doing research on their own.
However, the UX research industry is growing, and you’re more likely than ever to be doing user research in tandem with a full-time user researcher. According to our State of User Research Report, the percentage of people who said their company has zero dedicated UXRs declined from 19% in our 2019 survey to just 6% in 2022.
That growth is likely correlated to an increasing recognition of the vast and differentiated body of work performed by designers and researchers, and the value of specializing each function. In other words, designers do design better when it's their main focus, and researchers do research better when it's their main focus. As The Zebra’s Director of Research Sarah Kettles and Product Design Manager Marivi Carlton say in their article about collaboration between design and research:
“We believe having designers and researchers perform separate functions and serve separate roles makes our collaboration stronger, and the products we build even better for our users. Designers and researchers bring fundamentally different skill sets to the table that, combined together, form a mutual responsibility to make decisions, build things, and test things with the user’s best interests in mind.”
If and when you have a dedicated researcher on your team, it’s important that you’re able to collaborate with them effectively, for the benefit of both teams. As Sarah and Marivi also say about their design and research teams:
"We participate in the research and design together, making it easier to assess the data we get from a similar lens but with entirely different views. This makes it easier to come to the table with insights from both our perspectives to tell a richer story."
To set you up for success, here are some more tips for collaborating with a dedicated UX research team.
Tips for designers collaborating with UX research teams
How designers and researchers can work better together
Here are some tips and considerations for designers working with UX research teams:
Ask your researcher questions instead of asking for specific methods. The question dictates the method. A researcher won’t perform usability tests for the sake of it; they need to know what you’re trying to learn to design an effective study.
Sit in on interviews as either a note-taker or an active observer. The notes will help speed up the researchers’ analysis process, and your unique perspective can lead to new insights that the researcher might not have picked up on.
Debrief after sessions. If you do choose to join or moderate sessions, schedule a quick, 15-minute chat with your researcher immediately following the session to discuss what stood out to you.
Try to use similar tools across teams. When everyone’s using the same tools for recruiting and conducting research, it’s easier to collaborate and oversee all the research activity happening in the org. An easy way to collaborate with researchers is through whiteboards: Learn how to use Miro for more collaborative UX research.
Provide thoughtful critique on research plans and findings. Your feedback is valuable. When you’re reviewing a researchers’ work, don’t be afraid to ask questions and advocate for the types and topics of research that will help your work as a designer.
Discuss the implications of research on your work. Whether you’re designing the study for a new research question or reviewing findings from previous research, be open about how the research will impact design decisions; it’s important that researchers understand the potential impact of their work to guide and focus the study.
Set boundaries and work around each others’ priorities. The design team and the research team are always working together to support the user experience as a whole, but on a practical level, your day-to-day priorities might clash. Clearly communicate your timeline and priorities, and make them known as early as possible so each team can plan to work around each other.
Schedule regular, cross-functional meetings. Putting a regular, weekly or biweekly meeting on the calendar ensures that designers and researchers get the chance to collaborate, share ideas and insights, and keep up with what the other team is doing. Need help streamlining meetings? Use these 37 free UX meeting templates for briefs, agendas, and recaps.
Keep an insights repository. A repository is a shared, accessible resource for all of the insights discovered about your company, product, and users. Everyone doing research—including designers, researchers, product managers, marketers, and more—should be able to access and add to the repository when they’ve learned something new.
Work with the research team to align on org-wide tools, processes, and guardrails. Certain aspects of the research workflow—like distributing incentives, scheduling sessions, collecting consent form signatures, targeting specific recruitment audiences, etc.—need to be standardized across teams. The research team (or research ops team, if you have one) will likely be responsible for this work, but your input can help them define processes and choose tools that work for every team member.
🤖 Curious about how AI tools like ChatGPT are affecting the UX research industry? The 2023 AI in UX Research Report (based on a survey of 1,000+ researchers!) is full of great data and insights about how researchers are currently using artificial intelligence, which tools they’re experienced with, and what they think about AI’s strengths and limitations.
What research can designers do alone, and what research should be reserved for UX researchers?
The split of research responsibilities looks different for different organizations. In some companies, you might be expected to own the research process end-to-end, while others might require you to funnel all research through a dedicated UX research team.
At Bulb, for example, designers conduct their own research with guidance from researchers, as Product Designer Nicolo Arena and User Researcher Caroline Wilcock writes in their article:
"Our designers have worked hard to learn good research practices and are confident running usability testing themselves. They work with researchers to sense check their research plans and discussion guides. Being able to independently carry out research empowers us to gain as much knowledge about our members as possible. However, it’s important to be mindful that designers performing research on their own designs can result in unwanted bias, so we try to make sure that a researcher is on hand to sense check and that a secondary researcher is always in the room with the designer for balance."
In the increasingly-popular democratized or decentralized research model—in which dedicated UX researchers guide and enable other teams to do their own research—the typical split of work might look like this:
Work reserved for the UX researcher: Complex/strategic studies, ethnographic research, diary studies, some moderated tests, defining research strategy/methods/ops, any research concerning major developments or changes
Work that requires guidance or input from UX researchers: Research plan/design, choosing methods and incentives, screener survey design, writing interview scripts, moderating interviews or focus groups, analysis, collaborating with/among stakeholders
Work that designers can do on their own: Surveys, unmoderated usability testing, A/B testing, literature review (secondary research), recruiting, any research concerning minor/reversible design changes
Research responsibilities that designers can take on vs. those that require the oversight of a dedicated researcher
How do UX designers do user research? Designer-specific tips
Our UX Research Field Guide is a comprehensive how-to guide to user research, so it’s the best resource you can reference to become a total pro at doing research—from planning and conducting sessions to analyzing and reporting your findings.
Since we’ve covered everything from recruiting to reporting in the Field Guide, we won’t go into too much detail below. But, here you’ll find some specific tips for designing, conducting, and analyzing research (by study type).
Tips for designing focused, effective, unbiased studies
Below are some quick need-to-knows for effective research study design. For a more in-depth overview, head to the Planning for UX Research module of the UX Research Field Guide.
Craft a specific, actionable, and practical user research question. Your research question (not to be confused with interview questions or hypotheses) is a succinct way of defining what you’re hoping to learn over the course of the study. Make sure it’s clear, concise, and directly linked to your design goals.
Choose the right research method based on your research question, product development stage, and available resources. For example, if you want to understand the motivations behind user behavior, use qualitative methods like 1-1 interviews. On the other hand, if you want to measure the effectiveness of a new design, use quantitative methods like usability testing. If you’re working with a researcher, you’ll probably want to consult them to select the best method.
Which research methods help you make different types of organizational decisions? (Source)
Create a focused UX research plan. Your plan should outline your research question(s), related business goals, chosen methodology, target audience, timeline, logistics, and next steps. In particular, it’s helpful if you define the design decisions your study is meant to affect. Download our study plan template here.
Decide on your recruiting technique. You might need to talk to existing users, non-users, or a mix of both. Additionally, you’ll need to define the right sample size, choose fair incentives, and create screener surveys to weed out unqualified applicants. Use a purpose-built recruiting tool like Recruit by User Interviews to streamline recruiting logistics and start talking to the right people in a matter of hours.
When to recruit customers vs. when to recruit non-customers for UX research (Source)
Take steps to reduce bias, such as developing self-awareness through a reflexive practice, mixing methods, asking open-ended questions, and inviting other designers, product managers, and researchers to join sessions. As a designer, you have pre-existing biases about your designs, so it’s important to consult other teams and remember that it’s your design being tested, not you.
Recruiting is one of the most dreaded tasks in the user research world—but there are tools and techniques you can use to make it simple, fast, and painless. Visit the How to Recruit Good Participants for User Research chapter of the Field Guide to learn the step-by-step process of effective recruiting.
Ask “articulation questions” to find expressive participants for qualitative research. If you’re recruiting for qualitative research, you’ll need to find participants who can clearly articulate their thought processes, and short-response “articulation questions” can help you identify these folks in screeners.
Articulation questions are short-response questions designed to test participants' ability to describe what they're thinking and feeling. (Source)
Work with your legal team to create and collect necessary forms, such as consent forms and NDAs. Consent forms are always required, while NDAs may only be required in certain cases. Ask your legal team for help—they probably already have templates on hand that you can use.
⭐ User Interviews is the fastest, easiest way to recruit high-quality participants for UX research. Launch a project in minutes, get matched with your first qualified participants in hours, and complete your research in days. Try it for free.
Tips for conducting research (by study type)
Below are some quick tips for conducting research, organized by the study types you’re most likely to encounter as a UX designer. For a more in-depth overview of each method, check out the Discovery, Evaluative, and Continuous Research Methods modules of the UX Research Field Guide.
User interviews
Assign an experienced moderator. Interviewing is a skill, and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone. You can get better with practice, but don’t be afraid to admit if you’re not at a place where you can moderate effectively—ask the UX researcher on your team to make sure you’re making the best use of your (and your participants’) time.
Choose a quiet venue. Trying to conduct an interview in a crowded coffee shop is a great way to create misunderstandings. If possible, remote sessions are a cost-effective option that allows you to have more control over the environment.
These examples are bad user testing questions because they’re leading or phrased in such a way that they won’t lead to useful insights.
Mind your own body language. Avoid any physical gestures—e.g., gasps, frowns, grumbles, etc.—that might give away your emotions. Your body language can introduce bias into live sessions. Learn other tips for minimizing bias in UX research.
Follow your moderator guide, but be prepared to go off-script. Your moderator guide (like the one in our User Interviews Launch Kit) is a tool to help you keep sessions on-track and make sure you’re getting the most out of your interview. But sometimes, your participants might surprise you—be flexible and ready to divert from your script to follow unexpected insights.
Surveys are easy to run—but don’t let that fool you. Your surveys are guaranteed to suck if you don’t take the time to plan them carefully, choose the right survey tools, craft thoughtful questions, and accurately interpret the results.
Identify your most crucial question (MCQ). Your MCQ is the question that provides the most essential information for the design decisions you need to make after the study.
Keep it short and sweet. It’s hard to keep people engaged with a long survey. Keep it as short as possible by cutting out all unnecessary questions to minimize participant fatigue.
Use simple, jargon-free language and straightforward syntax. This will ensure that your questions can’t be misinterpreted by participants, causing inaccurate responses (which ultimately cause bad designs).
Avoid leading or double-barreled questions. Leading questions suggest the desired answers, such as “did you like our new-and-improved product?” Double-barreled questions ask two things at the same time, such as “did you like our new product, and would you recommend it to a friend?” These types of questions can cause bias and inaccuracy in survey results.
Include an “other” option to collect info you didn’t think of. Sometimes, participants will want to include responses that aren’t listed in the multiple choice options. That’s great, because it means you’re collecting valuable feedback on your designs that would’ve been entirely off your radar! Provide a short-response “other” option to capture these answers.
Screen for personality. Every participant should get the chance to talk—but this won’t happen if your focus group includes one domineering person who monopolizes the conversation, or ultra-timid folks who refuse to participate. Try to find a balanced group that’ll give everyone the space to speak up. Learn how to avoid the biggest focus group mistakes.
Run individual usability tests first. Feedback based on actual experience with the design is more useful than feedback based on out-of-context questions. To get the most out of the session, run usability tests with each of the members individually before bringing them together for the full discussion.
Choose an experienced moderator. The moderator is in a crucial position to make or break a focus group. If you’re not confident in your moderating skills, ask someone else to do it. Choose someone who understands group dynamics, can rein in strong personalities, and knows how to encourage quiet participants to speak up. (Hint: If you have a UX researcher on your team, they’re well-trained to handle this.)
Try conducting focus groups remotely. Remote sessions can help mitigate some of the negative effects of group dynamics, by encouraging focused turn-taking and a mix of private and public responses. Plus, remote sessions save a bit of time and resources, so you’ll get back to your design work faster than with in-person sessions.
Record the session with both video and audio. Group discussions are too complex for note-taking, so having recordings on-hand will be helpful. Plus, you can use clips from the recordings in your reports to emphasize and humanize the insights.
Make sure participants have access to the necessary tech. In many cases, your designs will require specific technology to access—like WiFi, a laptop, or a webcam. You can do this by screening for technical requirements (e.g. Windows OS, smartphones, etc.), bringing participants into the lab to use your own equipment, or sending them prototypes to use at home.
Consider breaking your test into multiple sub-tests. For example, if your design is for both web and mobile, you might want to run separate tests for website and mobile applications, or for different user groups. This will help you cover all your bases.
Choose the right type of moderation. There are different approaches to moderating usability tests, from asking testers to think aloud as they work to remaining quiet during the test and asking questions after the fact. Pick the approach that best suits your needs—but remember not to lead or correct testers when they’re doing something you don’t want them to do. You may be attached to your design as-is, but interfering will bias the results.
Always test your test. You might notice glaring usability issues yourself, or general issues with the way the test is set up, such as buggy tech or unclear tasks. Learn other best practices for usability testing.
Write clear task goals; don’t provide instructions. The point of the test is not to walk testers through it—give them the goal, and see if they can achieve it. For example, if you’re testing a banking app, ask testers to transfer money from savings to the checking account—don’t tell them to click into the savings account, find the “transfer money” button, enter a dollar amount, and click “complete transfer.”
Don’t correct testers when they do something wrong. Your product is being tested, not the tester. When you let them make their own mistakes, you’ll learn the best information about what isn’t working in your product design.
Boomerang questions back to participants. Testers might ask you questions about what they should do or how the design is supposed to work. If this happens, don’t answer them, and instead say, “what do you think?” or “what would you do in this situation?”
Clearly identify your problem. A/B testing is only appropriate when you clearly understand the problem you’re trying to solve—for example, why people aren’t clicking a button as often as you’d like. If you’re looking for more general insights, such as participants’ emotional responses to the design, use a different research method.
Form a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess that you can confirm or deny during the test, and is generally stated in an “if/then” format. For example, your hypothesis might be: “If we change the button color from red to blue, then people will be more likely to click it.”
Define statistical validity and the sample size needed to reach it. This is the threshold you want to reach to confirm that one version is better than the other. For example, you might not care if A performs 1% better than B, but if it performs at least 5% better, you’ll make the change. From there, determine the number of users you’ll need to test to make the results conclusive.
Create the B version to test your hypothesis. Run the test, and try not to peek at your data until the very end.
Only test one variable at a time to avoid muddling the results. For example, you might want to test the color, size, and copy on a button—but if you want to test all of these at once, you’ll need to switch to multivariate testing methods. Otherwise, do three different A/B tests at different times.
Be careful altering your website’s code. Website testing typically involves altering the site’s code. Doing this improperly can negatively affect your site’s SEO. For more info, check out Google’s documentation about how to run A/B tests without impacting your site’s performance.
Conduct lit reviews before a formal research study. Why waste your time researching stuff that other researchers have already learned? Conduct a literature review prior to more resource-intensive methods to see what’s already known. Consult both external sources (like Google, research publications, etc.) and internal sources (your company’s insight repository, old research reports from the UX research team, etc.).
Lit reviews are most appropriate at the “explore” stage of research – by Konrad
Determine the type and scope of the review. Lit reviews can range from years-long systematic reviews to week-long narrative reviews. Determine which type makes sense for your research question and capacity. As a designer, you’re probably not going to get much more in-depth than a narrative review.
Find both internal and external sources. Depending on the research question, you might need to find sources from both your company’s own insights repository and public reports from researchers outside of your org.
Record and analyze the data from all sources. Look for trends, patterns, themes, and whatever else stands out to you. What surprises you? What information is missing?
Write a summary of your findings. Summarize the sources you referenced, what you learned, and recommendations for next steps in the design process. In some cases, you’ll have found enough information that you can jump right into design decisions, while in other cases, you might identify the need for future research.
Choose the right form of continuous research program. There are different types of continuous research, including user analytics, feedback surveys, and interviews. Depending on your needs, goals, and bandwidth, you might want to use some or all of these approaches.
Continuous research is a key component of the continuous delivery process in product development
Assign panel ownership, roles, and responsibilities. You'll need someone to oversee the build and management of your internal panel for continuous research. As a designer, you probably won’t be responsible for building and managing the whole panel—that responsibility is more likely to go to a UX researcher or ReOps manager on your team.
Define participant criteria. Who is eligible to participate in your continuous research program? You might want to only talk to new customers or long-term customers, for example. And you’ll probably want to limit the number of studies customers can participate in to avoid introducing bias.
Set a length and cadence that works for you. Continuous research doesn’t have to be a major time-suck. A 30-minute interview per week is ideal, but you could also get away with 5-minute check-ins or longer interviews at a less frequent cadence.
NPS surveys are a widely-used continuous feedback tool—here’s an example from User Interviews
Follow up with participants. If you make changes to designs based on customer feedback, tell them! It shows customers that your company is listening and truly cares about their experience—and it makes them more likely to provide feedback in the future.
Analysis starts at the beginning, not the end. As you’re creating your user research plan, you should already be thinking about what you want to learn and how you’re going to approach analysis after the study. For example, if you’re running a qualitative study, you’ll want to create a plan for qualitative data analysis.
Take notes immediately after each session. After each individual session, jot down some quick notes about what stood out to you. This’ll help you reflect on what you're learning throughout the study and ultimately streamline the analysis process once you sit down to look at the data in detail. Establish structure to your notes with these note-taking templates.
Review all the data upfront. Before doing any formal analysis or organization, take a look at everything and see what jumps out to you. Orient yourself to what’s there and start digesting information slowly.
Tools, templates, and kits to help you conduct your own studies
Ready to get your research off the ground? These time-saving templates, tools, and kits can help you accelerate every aspect of the research process, from recruiting high-quality participants to synthesizing insights.
User Interviews: Great research requires great participants—and User Interviews is the fastest, easiest way to find high-quality participants for UX research. Target niche audiences from our 3-million-strong proprietary panel Recruit, or build and manage your own panel using Research Hub. It’s free to get started.
105 Free UX Research Templates for Tools You Already Use: Most UX designers are already using tools like Miro, Asana, Figma, Maze, and more. This massive round-up of templates by tool will help you conduct better, faster research with the tools you’re already familiar with.
128 Best Prototype Templates and Examples: You’re probably already regularly building prototypes for concept validation and usability testing. Check out these 100+ templates and examples to get inspiration for your next design.
54 Templates for User Personas, Jobs to Be Done & Other Mental Models: Personas, JTBD, and other mental models are clear and effective tools to help UX designers understand and empathize with users. Simply plug in the latest insights from your research into these templates for an effective, visual representation of your user segments.
40+ Time-Saving Usability Testing Templates and Checklists: As a UX designer, usability testing is probably the most important user research method you’ll use on a day to day basis. Why not streamline the process with some templates?
Yes, designers do research—and it all starts with top-tier recruitment
Great designers do research to create effective, evidence-based designs. And the first step to conducting that research is finding good participants.
You may have heard that research recruiting is hard, but User Interviews makes it quick and easy.
User Interviews is the only tool that lets you source, screen, track, and pay participants from your own panel using Research Hub, or from our 3-million-strong network using Recruit. Target professional segments, demographic groups, consumer behavior, or any niche audience you’re looking for. If you want support, you’ll have a sourcing expert to guide your recruit every step of the way.
Marketer, writer, poet. Lizzy likes hiking, people-watching, thrift shopping, learning and sharing ideas. Her happiest memory is sitting on the shore of Lake Champlain in the summer of 2020, eating a clementine.
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