Hello Human
Over the past newsletters, we’ve talked about what UX Research is, how to not do it, and what to do when you’re on a time and money budget. Today, let’s talk about the types of research you can do. There are a lot of research methodologies you can use (surprising right? seeing as most people just do surveys, interviews & usability tests).
Anyway, let’s get into it.
How do we categorize research?
There are many ways of categorizing research and research methods, but we’ll stick to these four:
Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Attitudinal and Behavioural Research
Primary and Secondary Research
Foundational and Evaluative Research
Qualitative and Quantitative Research
This is the most common classification of research based on the kind of data it provides. You’ve probably heard that quantitative research tells you “what” and qualitative research tells you “why”.
Qualitative research usually takes the form of observations, comments, thoughts and feelings that allow you to tell a story about your user’s experience. Quantitative research on the other hand is any research that can be measured numerically.
For example, analytics is a form of quantitative research. Analytics may show you that people aren’t completing the sign-up form but probably can’t tell you why this is so. Qualitative research will help you answer that.
Qualitative research will tell you that the horrible sign-up experience is the reason why people hardly complete the sign-up form or that they were looking for sign up form inspiration or that they weren’t really interested in the product or they accidentally closed all their tabs.
It’s a little more complicated than that but that’s the simplest explanation of what they are.
A common misconception about qualitative data is that it’s not data. Most people think that if it’s not numbers, it doesn’t count (haha).
The truth is that qualitative data is very valuable and can help you better understand people as well as assess the effectiveness of your solution.
People also think of some methods as qualitative and others as quantitative, but really a number of methods can be provide both kinds of data. For example, usability testing sessions can provide both qualitative and quantitative data, but to get quantitative data, you need a lot more users (5 versus 30+).
Attitudinal and Behavioural Research
From the words you can probably tell what they mean. This categorization is based on the content of the data.
Attitudinal research gives you information about people’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions about something. It is self-reported information. In a previous letter (http://eepurl.com/hdR3Q9) , we mentioned that you do research by asking and observing. Attitudinal research is the asking part of that equation.
Behavioural research on the other hand is based on observation. It is about people’s actions, what they do. Again, most of the time whatever research method you’re using will probably cut across both kinds of research.
Using usability testing again as an example, you’ll observe people use the app or prototype or whatever and you’ll also ask them questions about their perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
Doing both is very important because what people say they do isn’t always what they do. Attitudinal research covers the ‘what they say” part, while behavioural research covers the “what they do” portion.
Also this doesn’t have anything to do with that annoying “if I asked people what they want they’d say they wanted faster horses” quote that people (mis)attribute to Henry Ford. But that’s a topic for another day
Primary and Secondary Research
This categorization is based on the source of the data.
Primary research is original research you do by yourself (yourself can be your team or hiring an external person) in order to understand customer needs & wants. So it’s the generic interviews, surveys, usability tests, etc. New research is technically primary research.
Secondary research is also known as desk research or literature review. It involves looking through what research other people have done in the past that is relevant to the topic. In secondary research, you are drawing on an existing body of knowledge–be it past research, academic texts, customer support tickets, etc.
Secondary research is very important because it can help inform primary research. Dumi personally devotes at least 3 hours towards doing secondary research for every project she runs, it is that important. Secondary research can save you time, money, and effort.
Foundational vs Evaluative Research And this categorization is based on the purpose of research/data collection.
Foundational Research aka Strategic Research aka Generative Research is research you do at the very beginning to better understand a problem space or when you have only an idea.
Basically, generative research is the type of research that helps you understand what is going on & what you should focus your energy on as you understand the problem space. It can be primary and/or secondary, quantitative and/or qualitative, and behavioural and/or attitudinal.
Evaluative research aka Tactical Research, on the other hand, is research that helps you test your product/feature at various stages from paper prototype to live solution.
Evaluative research focuses on assessing something (a flow or prototype or solution) so you can get feedback on what to improve, change, or leave as is. The core goal of this type of research is identifying issues within a product or service or solution and possible fixes.
Again methods can cut across both forms of research. This time we won’t use usability testing as an example. We’ll look at one of Lade’s favourite methods: diary studies.
A diary study can be done to understand the problem space by asking participants to record their experiences. It can also be used to evaluate a solution, think things like beta testing.
“Cool stuff, thanks for the crash course.” You’re welcome!
“Okay, but is it possible for us to get answers to both the “why” questions & the “what” questions? Is it possible for us to mix stuff up?”
Amazing question, we’ll answer that next week but till then you can read this very popular article from NNgroup on when to use which user research method (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/) .
If you learnt something new, don’t forget to share!
Till next week, kids!
Your Favourite User Researchers (Lade & Dumss)