Research: UX Research

When I began my career as a UX designer, many product developers shared the aspiration of building great products with numerous features. While building great products is a worthy goal, teams often paid little attention to users’ real needs when deciding what features to build, which is a great shame. App development is not just about creating a product but about solving a problem for users. As an essential part of human-centered design, user research helps us to crystallize users’ problems and create solutions that directly address them.

As a design lead, I make user research an integral part of my team’s design process. We use various approaches to interacting with users to help us tailor the end product to the audience’s needs. In this article, I’ll share some of my experiences conducting different types of user research, focusing mainly on in-depth user interviews, usability testing, and surveys, but we’ve used all of the approaches that Figure 1 depicts. You’ll learn how to use each of these types of user research and discover useful methods of collecting and analyzing users’ thoughts. Read More

Why are the products we use every day simply crap?

This was the question that our founding team at Airtime asked ourselves when we started the company to build our collaborative research platform, in late 2020. Thanks to rapid digitization in all sectors, a huge amount of data is readily available for product managers in any field. So why doesn’t this data leave a mark on the products they create? To answer this question, we did some desk research, signed up with mentors, and organized user interviews.

We found that the fields of user research and product design are growing by high double digits, along with the software market. But, now that user-research tools are many and growing in number and products are still not working well, we’re convinced that there must be something wrong with the current research paradigms. Read More

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed UX research. However, there is a deeper question that also requires an answer: how has the pandemic impacted the future of UX research? I wanted to understand not only how our industry has had to adapt during the pandemic, but also catch a glimpse at what any lasting changes might be. Comparing the way we worked more than two years ago with what we’re doing now, how has our approach changed? Perhaps even more interestingly, what will we be doing two years from now?

It would have been easy to do a thought piece and try to predict the future, but none of us has a crystal ball. So I thought we might collectively be able to compare what we’re doing now with past practice and also peer over the horizon. So, in September 2021, my company Bold Insight launched a survey to answer these questions through social media—predominantly, by leveraging LinkedIn. Read More