UX Research Playbook | Review — Table of Contents
Chapter 6. Designing research methods
1) Selection methods
? 2) Research types
3) Beyond the book: various methodologies
As mentioned earlier, research types can be divided by data-collection method and data nature.
First, by collection method, research can be split into attitudinal research and behavioral research. Attitudinal research listens to what people think, their opinions, and their motivations (What They Say) through questions, while behavioral research observes what they actually do (What They Do).
Representative attitudinal methods include IDI (in-depth interviews) and card sorting, while behavioral methods include eye tracking and A/B testing.
When you split research types by data nature, it essentially breaks into qualitative research — directly observing human behavior or attitude (Why) — and quantitative research — collecting user opinion indirectly, in data form (How many, How much).
In qualitative research, in-depth interviews and ethnography are representative; in quantitative research, surveys and A/B testing are commonly used.
If you mix this together with the development-stage split between exploration and evaluation introduced in the previous post on a single sheet, it forms a three-dimensional framework as shown below.
For reference, dharmesh has abstracted these various methods into The UX Research Method Matrix in a more digestible form. Mapping that together with the 3D framework introduced in this book, you can roughly simplify the methods per situation into four representative buckets, which I tried to do below.
By the way, Chapter 6 on designing research methods is allocated the thinnest number of pages in this book. To understand on what basis and context the framework was built, I dug deeper and found posts by Christian Rohrer on the Nielsen Norman Group’s site that add additional material on users’ behaviors and states.
That framework additionally covers the context in which users use the product, so I organized the book’s per-stage material together with those extra points.
First, from the user’s perspective, the before-using-the-product stage corresponds to exploratory research and to the early stage of setting up the project strategy; depending on the company’s development stage, you can selectively pick methods from the chart below.
At the first stage, you can see methods are concentrated on the attitudinal-qualitative side. Note: the methods in blue are not in the original source — I added them because, at the idea stage, you often do user research on existing or competing products to derive or redefine features for a new product.
Next, there are methods for when unit testing is going on or during closed beta — situations where users have limited access to the product.
These were distributed in a shape that mostly shifts the frame from attitudinal to behavioral research.
Finally, for situations near launch or already post-launch — where users have had ample experience with the product — the methods can be arranged as shown below.
Here the method types are spread the widest. Because the product is already live, the goal is probably to set up diverse touchpoints with user experiences and collect them.
For future re-use, I also organized the methods and distributions into an open-source tool called datawrapper.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7cLDB/1/
Reading this book, I ended up researching the bits that were partially omitted, and stumbled upon a surprising number of research methods I had not expected. And that was already different from the book I read two years ago, so imagine how many more methods exist in the world. I wrote up the related material separately in another post (3) Beyond the book: various methodologies.
