What is user experience research, and how do you do it?

What is user experience research?

User experience research is the process of understanding the needs, behaviours, and motivations of the people who use your product or service. It exists to answer the questions that decide whether a design succeeds: who are your users, what do they need, and where does your product let them down?

For many brands, poor design or an underwhelming experience can prompt a potential customer to look elsewhere, leaving your product or service behind. UX research bridges the gap between brands and what customers actually need. It isn't a standalone initiative. User experience research should be an ongoing process that draws on inputs from across the business, with the end-user's perspective kept at the front of product design and development.

To build the right prototype, and ultimately design the best product for the people you're trying to reach, you need to understand their motivations, behaviours, and needs. UX research, through a range of methods, answers the questions that are central to a brand's success.

UX research in a sentence: Watching and listening to real people use (or struggle with) your product, so design decisions are guided by what users actually do rather than what the team assumes they want.

Who are your users?

Most organisations already hold a wealth of information about their customers' experience, the way they use a product, and the way they buy. Traditionally, market research relies on quantitative techniques to build a broad picture of the customer. UX research has an important role to play alongside it. The needs and desires of customers shift, and changes to products and service design can influence customer loyalty. A customer-centric organisation is built on the insights that come from user experience research. Qualitative methods, usually through a generative research approach, help brands work out who their customers are, and who their future customers could be.

What do users need?

User diaries, observations, and mobile usability testing are built into a UX research plan to capture what users need. UX teams use these techniques to put themselves in the customer's shoes, understand their needs, and build genuine empathy with them.

What are the pain points for customers?

The digitisation of most brands makes it harder to see a customer journey as a single thing. People interact with a brand through websites, mobile apps, and increasingly other channels too. No two user experiences are identical, and the various touchpoints and interactions don't always join up smoothly. Good product design depends on a rich understanding of the pain points customers hit along the way, and UX research is how you uncover them.

How do you do user experience research?

There's no single formula. A good UX research project starts with a clear plan and objective, brings internal stakeholders along, and then chooses qualitative methods that fit the question, before fieldwork begins. The steps below walk through that process.

Your UX research plan should be informed by insights you've already uncovered and by trends coming from your marketing team. This guide focuses on the qualitative side of user research, which is increasingly where UX research sits. Generative research, in particular, is usually designed with a distinctly qualitative focus.

Share your UX research plan

Your plan involves identifying historic and ongoing trends about your customers, and highlighting the key areas your research needs to address. Most importantly, bring all internal stakeholders to the table and combine their aims for future improvements to your product or service. Silos form quickly in any organisation. One way to stay customer-centric is to take on board the goals of different internal stakeholders and share your UX research plan openly.

Outline your UX research objective

Every project should have an overall objective. Yours will be formulated through the problem statements your team and stakeholders have identified, and those statements should be informed by insights from past UX research. With a qualitative approach you don't necessarily need hypotheses to test. Instead, you take an exploratory approach, also known as generative research, which lets you design an objective built for user discovery rather than confirmation.

Design your UX research

There are many methods and techniques you can adopt for effective UX research. Under a generative approach, a project can apply one or several qualitative techniques. Research design is about identifying the best ones for your project. Ethnography, user observation, and UX diaries are all commonly applied and lend themselves well to user discovery.

Fieldwork duration matters too. It isn't unusual for exploratory research to run longitudinally, over days or weeks. Your design needs to consider how long participants realistically need to describe and report on their experiences with your product.

Plan your fieldwork and user activities

The activities and tasks your team needs to uncover insights have to be built into the research design. These are what your participants will complete over the course of fieldwork. A generative approach lets you explore the environmental factors and influences that shape your potential customers' experiences, rather than narrowing the lens too early.

What are the benefits of user experience research?

The core benefit is that you design for how people actually behave, not how you assume they will. That reduces the risk of building the wrong thing, and the financial upside is real: McKinsey's research links strong, user-centred design directly to faster revenue growth.

User experience research is not new, and it's now strongly integrated across many parts of a brand. CX management, UX design, and marketing teams all draw on the insights that come out of it. The reason is simple: your customers are the most important stakeholder you have.

The business case is well documented. In its Business Value of Design study, McKinsey tracked 300 companies over five years and found that the top design performers, those that continually listened to, tested with, and iterated alongside end-users, saw 32 percentage points higher revenue growth than their peers. Tellingly, more than 40% of the companies surveyed weren't talking to their end-users during development at all. UX research is how you avoid being in that group.

UX research puts the spotlight on the parts of a design that don't work for customers. Mobile usability testing, for example, will always surface the issues people hit with specific features. It shows you how well users can actually achieve the goal your product is meant to help them reach.

One of the strengths of UX research is that it captures both what users think and what they do. As the Nielsen Norman Group puts it, qualitative research answers "why" and informs the design process, while quantitative research answers "how many" and supports benchmarking. A well-designed exploratory study can be both attitudinal and behavioural, and mobile technology, using video and photos, makes it possible to capture attitudes and behaviours together.

Every type of research carries the risk of bias, and UX research reduces it significantly. Feedback from the user's own perspective helps you and your team build empathy for your customers and keeps them front and centre during design. The ideas of other internal stakeholders become secondary, because the voice of the end-user directs where the real needs and opportunities lie.

What are the challenges of UX research?

The main challenges are stakeholder buy-in, recruitment, participant burden, and the time it takes to analyse qualitative data. None of them are blockers, but each one is worth planning for up front.

Every research project faces challenges, and it helps to document the likely ones before you start. For UX research, internal buy-in can be hard to secure. A lack of it can squeeze your budget and reduce the flexibility you have to meet your objective.

Recruitment is another, or more specifically, under-recruitment. Exploratory research doesn't need a large sample. Because you're focused on qualitative insight and behaviour, a smaller group works perfectly well. In fact, Nielsen Norman Group's classic research found that just five participants will typically surface around 85% of the usability problems in an interface. That said, it's always worth over-recruiting slightly. Participants don't always complete every task, and a few extra people protect you against being left short when it comes to analysis.

Participant burden can affect both the volume and the quality of what you get back, and that comes back to your research design. Be mindful of the commitment you're asking for. Too many activities packed into too short a timeframe will hurt engagement. So can repetitive tasks. Being creative with your activities, mixing media types and gamifying parts of the fieldwork, keeps participants engaged and the data richer.

Analysis can be a challenge too, especially if qualitative research is new to you. Digging into unstructured data takes time. The upside is that this type of research gives you room to explore: start by segmenting and identifying keywords, draw out behavioural patterns, and surface emotions through techniques like sentiment analysis. Technology now does a lot of the heavy lifting here. With Indeemo, generative AI handles transcription, translation, theme detection, and sentiment analysis, and you can even import interviews and focus groups from Zoom, Teams, or your computer to analyse alongside your mobile fieldwork, all in one centralised repository.

What tools do you need for UX research?

UX research is best supported by tools that capture experience in the moment and pull it into one place: mobile screen recording, journey mapping, UX diary studies, and a dashboard where insights come together. The aim is to get closer to your customers without getting in their way.

User experience research keeps evolving. As new user needs emerge, researchers look to new techniques, methods, and technology for their projects.

Journey mapping tools are increasingly built into research design. Technology that captures the user experience in real time can feed straight into visual journey maps.

Mobile screen recording is integral to UX research. Mobile usability testing relies on technology with built-in screen recording, so you can watch exactly how someone moves through your website or app while hearing what they're thinking.

A UX diary study captures user attitudes over time. With videos, photos, and screen recordings, you start to see user behaviour directly, and those visual insights feed straight into design decisions.

The real value comes when these capabilities sit together. Indeemo's UX research tool is designed to bring you closer to your customers by combining them in one place: recruit participants from a global panel, capture in-the-moment video, photos, and screen recordings, analyse with AI in 30+ languages, and turn the highlights into subtitled reels you can share with stakeholders. In-the-moment data is drawn together into a single dashboard, where it becomes the user insight your team can act on.

Do you need to be a research expert to run UX research?

No. Whether you're an experienced UX researcher or a brand team running discovery work for the first time, Indeemo can support you.

Use the platform independently if you have the expertise in-house. Or partner with our Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, and analysis, whatever you need to get from question to insight. If you have research ambitions but not the capacity to run the project yourself, we can lend a helping hand as and when you need it. Indeemo can be more than a platform. It can be a partnership.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between UX research and market research?

They overlap, but they answer different questions. Market research traditionally leans on quantitative techniques to build a broad picture of a market or customer base. UX research is usually qualitative and focused on understanding how real people experience a specific product or service, and why they behave the way they do. Many teams use both together.

What's the difference between qualitative and quantitative UX research?

Qualitative research answers "why" and "how" by observing a small group of people in depth, through methods like diary studies, interviews, and usability testing. Quantitative research answers "how many" and "how much" by collecting metrics from a larger sample. Qualitative work shapes the design; quantitative work measures and benchmarks it.

How many participants do you need for a UX research study?

For qualitative UX research, fewer than people expect. Nielsen Norman Group's research found that around five participants typically surface about 85% of usability problems. Most discovery and diary studies work well with 15 to 30 participants, and it's sensible to over-recruit slightly in case some don't complete every task.

What methods are used in UX research?

Common qualitative methods include ethnography, user observation, UX diary studies, mobile usability testing, interviews, and journey mapping. The right mix depends on your objective, and a generative approach often combines several to explore behaviour from different angles.

When should you do UX research?

Ideally, continuously. UX research is most valuable as an ongoing process rather than a one-off, feeding insight into design before, during, and after development. Early generative research helps you understand users and frame the problem; later research helps you test and refine what you've built.