Discover a better way to make sense of your user research

User research aims to understand the needs and behaviors of an organization's or company's users or customers.

Researchers employ user research for various purposes:

• determining customer satisfaction with a company's services
• developing products and services to suit customers' needs
• identifying issues in the user experience with a website or application
• collecting user feedback on new products during prototype testing

User research involves numerous research methods:

• surveys
• interviews
• focus groups
• usability testing
• field studies

The most effective method for user research depends on the user experience researchers want to study.

For example, suppose a company wants to optimize its website to make it more accessible to its customers. In that case, it can employ usability testing and record the user's interaction with the website. However, surveys or interviews with those customers are more appropriate if the company wants to determine whether customers perceive its services to be effective.

Product management revolves around planning, developing, and marketing products. Knowing what customers need and want makes user research an indispensable tool for product managers.

Having the target customers' perspectives in mind can help those involved in product management optimize their products or services and ultimately become more effective in generating more demand.

Besides answering questions related to product management, user research can examine the actual behavior of a researcher's target audience. UX research (user experience research) evaluates the experiences users have with a product, a website, or a service. Researchers pursue UX research when they want to optimize users' interaction with a company or organization.

For example, libraries with online databases can benefit from user research by investigating how their users can easily search for books. Identifying any issues in the user experience with their online databases can minimize the time required to find the desired books and improve the perceived acceptability of library services.

User research can also discover insights regarding the customers that use a company's products or services. A product manager can make assumptions regarding, among other things, the age, income level, and education level of the most common customers of their products. However, surveys conducted for user research may reveal that the company's actual customers belong to different demographic groups, requiring the product manager and their company to reconsider their product strategy.

Product developers, product managers, and service providers can often have different worldviews than the user. Researchers encounter bias frequently during the research process, whether users adjust their interview answers to satisfy their interviewers or adjust their behavior while under observation during usability testing. As a result, researchers should be skeptical of user research that relies on just one form of data.

One marker of the quality of user research is whether the insights a researcher draws from their inquiry can be commonly found across multiple forms of data. This objective requires the researcher to pursue numerous appropriate research methods for answering their research questions. Still, it does make insights more compelling if they are found repeatedly, regardless of the research method.

For example, suppose a product manager is interested in what customers think of the ease of using a particular product. In that case, they may ask the same question in user interviews and surveys while observing users interact with the product. Suppose the same issue (e.g., the learning curve required to use the product) appears across the data from these three research methods. In that case, the need to address the ease of use is more compelling than if only one interview respondent or one usability test participant was associated with the problem. In such cases, UX research can benefit from research methods that gather user feedback.

Survey research can provide data that researchers can use in various ways. A survey can pose questions about users' level of satisfaction with a company and perspectives about the quality of service they receive. These questions can ask users to rate such concepts on a numerical scale that researchers can analyze quantitatively. Surveys can also ask open-ended questions (e.g., "What suggestions do you have for improving this service?") from which a qualitative analysis can identify frequently occurring themes and patterns in users' perspectives.

Text as data

Research methods such as user interviews and focus groups generate data such as transcripts that researchers can analyze for patterns in respondents' opinions and perspectives. Text is the traditional form of qualitative data that ATLAS.ti can use to help researchers generate meaningful insights.

Video and audio as data

UX research can also produce data in the form of video recordings and field notes. For example, a user researcher can observe how a user interacts with a website to order a product. That researcher can document what they see in their field notes, record video of the user's reactions while using the website, or use screen recording software to capture the user's actions. Text, audio, and video from UX research are valuable forms of data that ATLAS.ti can analyze.

Regardless of the research method, ATLAS.ti can analyze all your research in numerous ways depending on your research questions and context.

Analysis from coding

Researchers can code their data to see if common themes arise across different forms of user research on the same product or service. Using the document group feature in ATLAS.ti, researchers can categorize their documents by the type of research method, such as interviews or usability tests. The Code-Document Table tool then lets researchers see what issues or considerations appear in which groups. This sort of insight determines if there is a universally perceived issue or if a particular research method has uncovered a problem that requires further study.

Content analysis

Interviews and focus groups can also benefit from determining the most frequently used words and phrases through content analysis. The Word Cloud and Concepts tools in ATLAS.ti can analyze data for what words or phrases appear the most often. Suppose a researcher is studying users' interaction with a smartphone application, for example. In that case, interviews with the users of the application can reveal the frequency of keywords like "convenient," "fast," or "accurate." These insights can give the researcher an idea of how customers perceive their service.