Learning session 22: Conducting User Research

7 min readOct 6, 2022

🚁 Topic

There are many different ways to conduct user research, but some common methods include interviews, focus groups, surveys, and usability testing. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, so it’s important to choose the right method for your specific research goals. User research can be conducted online or in person, and it can be conducted by professional researchers or by users themselves.

🤓 What I learned

Companies often think that they know their users and don’t want to consume their time in user research. Without realizing it daily, we always think everyone knows what we like and hate. What makes us angry etc. Designers should fight this bias by interacting with users and getting valuable insights from them.

Talking to users sometimes doesn’t result in valuable insights; not that the users want to lie to us, but people say different things and act differently.

It takes skill to make them reveal their needs and behaviors. Without those skills, user research doesn’t give us what we need, just some useless insights and a waste of time.

If done correctly, user research can serve as a robust foundation for everything that comes after. A solid understanding of the users and their difficulties can empower a team like nothing else.

Start with broad themes

UX research is most effective and valuable when you know what you’re looking for. The first step to determining what you want to learn from users is to decide on a broad theme for your research.

Here are some examples of questions you can make towards the users.

How do users decide which website to shop from?
What makes a user think a product is trustworthy?
How do users shop online?

Defining your research theme will allow you to narrow it down later and ask more specific questions that will yield valuable insights. Get multiple stakeholders and team members involved in coming up with ideas for the theme of your research to ensure you cover all bases.

Start with easy questions

When interviews are progressive, they produce the best results. Warm-up questions are an excellent way to ease your participants into the interview. You don’t want to overload your participants with too many in-depth questions that require them to think at first.

For example, you can ask some questions about how often users use online shopping apps.

How often do you shop on online apps?
Which online shop apps do you use regularly?
When was the last time you bought something through an app?

Open-ended questions

A user interview, by definition, is fascinating. It enables you to ask users questions to evoke the most information from them. Open-ended questions are an excellent way to elicit unrestricted responses from users who are not limited to a single word such as “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.”

An open-ended question usually starts with “who,” “when,” “where,” “why,” “how,” and “why,” which encourages participants to share more.A study with too many closed-ended questions will yield unsatisfactory results.

Ask open-ended questions that allow your users to respond in any way they want to gain deeper and richer insights.

Here is an example of two types of questions:

Close-ended question: Do you think our product is suitable?
Open-ended question: What feature(s) of our product do you like/dislike the most, and why?

Ask about specific moments

If you ask your users a generic question, you’ll get a generic answer that doesn’t provide you with the specifics you’re looking for. Users are not always good at recalling and summarizing their past experiences.

With the additional pressure of a user interview, they are more likely to forget and overlook important details. Asking questions that allow them to recall specific events and experiences will help them remember and respond to you better.

Follow-up questions

Don’t accept the first response you get from your participants. It may be the first thing that comes to mind, but it may not accurately represent how things are. Ask them clarifying questions until you better understand their answers, especially if they are unclear.

Follow-up questions usually start with “why,” “how,” and “what.”

Use the “Five Whys” technique when asking follow-up questions. It entails asking “why” five times in a row as a series of follow-up questions until you are satisfied with gathering information from the users.

Avoid leading questions

The primary goal of an interview is to evoke honest and insightful responses from your participants. Leading questions that influence their responses can work against this goal.

A question is considered leading if it:

It includes your opinion. For example: “What about this UX is it useful?”
It prepares your participant to focus on one emotion and respond in a specific way. For example: “How excited do these colors make you feel?”

Rephrase leading questions to make the participant feel free to think and give the response freely.

User introduction questions

Even if you have all of your users’ demographic data, asking user introduction questions during an interview is recommended. This can help you fill in any gaps in your knowledge about your users and learn more helpful information about them.

You can also help the participants feel comfortable throughout the interview. User introduction questions will depend on the goals of your research and what you hope to learn.

For example, you can ask participants for lifestyle questions that are related to your user research topic.

Topic-specific questions

Topic-specific questions should follow user-introduction questions. These questions help you understand users’ motivations, needs, and wants around the topic being researched.

Examples of topic-specific questions include:

What do you do to perform this task?
How much take time to complete a task?
Can you describe when was a recent issue that you had while trying to accomplish a task?
How much does this issue affects you?
How critical is it to find a solution to the issue?

Product opportunity questions

Product opportunity questions can help you determine how your users feel about your product after a brief demonstration or after using it for a short time. These questions are designed to help validate the value you provide through your product.

Examples of product opportunity questions contain:

What do you think about this product?
Are there any issues you see with this product?
Why do you believe someone will use or not use this product?
Do you see yourself interacting with this product? Why or why not?

Product reaction questions

You may ask product reaction questions after a user has interacted with your product for an extended time. These can assist you in gathering suggestions and ideas from participants to improve your product.

It can also demonstrate what users dislike about your product and assist you in determining a course of action for improvement.

Examples of product reaction questions contain: