Research is a critical step in the product development process. It ensures we’re solving the right problems for users and finding the right, viable product opportunity for a business. Understanding the humans who will use the product and the business’s investing needs is critical to a successful product outcome. And it will come as no surprise that exploring these options could require different types of design research based on those desired goals and outcomes.
However, research itself doesn’t guarantee success. Research should be integrated into a product development process to ensure we’re deeply focusing on the correct information to build the right product with an impactful outcome.
But hold on, please. Don’t run to your team and say, “We’re going to do research!” Simply saying, “We need to do user research,” is like saying, “I need to be healthy, so I’m just going to do healthy things.” If you invest in doing research with your team, I encourage you to be specific in the type of research you plan to do.
Types of Design Research
All research should seek to validate or invalidate a stated hypothesis. Just like the scientific method we learned back in grade school. I’d like to say there is a magic wand to select the right research approach, but there isn’t. Just like there are many ways to stay healthy, there are countless approaches to researching to validate your hypotheses. However, there are scaffolding and frameworks we can point toward.
I’ve cataloged a handful of research types that I’ve found to fit many different research scenarios.
In this article, you’ll learn about:
- Primary Research
- Secondary Research
- Generative/Exploratory Research
- Evaluative Research
- Attitudinal Research
- Behavioral Research
- Qualitative Research
- Quantitative Research
1️⃣ Primary Research
Primary Research is perhaps the most important type of research one can do to support the “why” behind a product’s purpose. It’s the partnership between user goals and business goals that makes a great experience. This work involves going directly to the humans and stakeholders involved with the product to gather data to better understand needs, wants, goals, etc. We want to see the world through someone else’s experience.
Types of Primary Research
- Contextual Inquiry: Directly communicating with a user or business to watch and observe behavior and systems.
- Stakeholder or User Interviews: Speak directly to impacted personas affected by the product.
- Benchmark Testing: If the product exists, usability testing techniques can probe deep into current use patterns and behaviors.
- Focus Groups: These involve gathering multiple personas into a room and asking about their experiences or the wants and needs of a product.
2️⃣ Secondary Research
Secondary research uses existing data to support your story of coming together in a current or future state. You may use the internet, books, magazines, existing data sources within your company, etc. You’re using this information to validate your approach or decision. You may also use it to gain insight and dig deeper into what you learned during primary research.
Types of secondary research
- Company information: Look to resources already aggregating data, such as product analytics, call center data, databases of information, etc.
- Exemplars: find and collect examples from within the solution space that have already solved similar problems
- Competitive analysis: Compare your product to other products in the market to uncover niche opportunities or ways to stand out in the market
- Market research: Look deeply into the market to ensure this product will serve to understand the landscape and opportunities
- Research article repositories
- Magazines, internet, newspapers
3️⃣ Generative Research
Generative Research is a practice that goes deeeeeep into understanding users’ needs, wants, goals, etc. In most cases, we need to start our work doing this type of learning—hopefully with the entire cross-functional team. This wide-reaching learning process helps provide data and input into the decision on how the product comes together, helping validate your hypothesis. This is mostly done when identifying and empathizing with the problem space. This work should be done not once but continually throughout the development of a product.
4️⃣ Evaluative Research
Evaluative research comes into play when you’ve made something specific for the product that you’d like feedback on from your business stakeholders or users of the product. We invite the applicable personas to test the solution and give feedback on what’s been created thus far – evaluating how the product is coming along. Teams collect information from the testing to determine how the product meets user and business needs. We ask our participants to use a think-aloud technique – whatever runs through their head, how they’re making a decision, why they’re engaging where, etc., helps the research team know what could be a stumbling point within the product.
When we get this feedback, it’s a great time for the team to assess where they are in the product development process, what was learned from the activities, and how that information may affect the backlog of work yet to be done. Some things may be added to your backlog, some things may change, and some things you find yourself saying… “Cool idea, but not right now.”
Evaluative Research has two additional classifications:
- Formative Research: Formative research is used to evaluate usability and understand whether designs are meeting user needs—aka usability testing. By repeating this process throughout design and development, the team can ensure they’re driving down risk and meeting business objectives and user goals.
- Summative Research: Summative Research evaluates the outcome. This research can be applied to every release (in summary, work planned vs. work released) or rolled up to learn the success of the entire product lifecycle.
Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Research
Attitudinal Research and Behavioral Research will give you parts of a story. Each of these studies is valuable on its own, but you may need to bring in another study to dig into the other side of the story. For instance, if you do all attitudinal research, you’ll learn how people feel. Or, if you do all behavioral research, you’ll see how people act. But, doing one study without the other will not give you the full picture. Seek a good balance of both types of research to help inform your product’s development.
5️⃣ Attitudinal Research
Attitudinal research activities are done to glean information from someone about how they think about something. These opinions are user-reported. The research could be an existing product, service, etc., or simply how they think about doing something (i.e., pains around keeping a to-do list up to date). The goal is to uncover what participants do, why they do it, when they do it, and perhaps with whom they do the activity. We may ask “how” questions along the way to get the research participant to introspect within and reveal their thinking.
Since this research is subjective, it’s best to pair it with other research activities that give harder metrics, should they exist. For example, suppose I was going to measure the listening habits of a podcast platform. In that case, I’d identify various listening personas, meet with a few of each to learn about how they listen to podcasts, and then dig into metrics across the application to understand behaviors.
Types of attitudinal research
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Diary studies
- Participatory design studies
6️⃣ Behavioral Research
Behavioral research is done when we need to learn how someone does something. Ya know, that old saying, “What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are very, very different things.”
Well, behavioral research is designed to see what people actually do. When doing this research, you’ll discover how users actually use a product or service. As the participants use the product, you’ll find pitfalls that the user may not have thought to mention but are actually really valuable to your team.
The most widely known version of behavioral research is Usability Testing. This type of testing can be done in person or asynchronously using a tool like UserTesting.com. All other types are captured using tools that monitor traffic/behavior in a product.
Types of behavioral research
- Usability testing
- Analytics studies
- A/B testing
- Eye-tracking studies
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research
Qualitative and quantitative research are classifications of the type of data you’ll get back from a study. It’s best to ensure you’re getting some of both to inform your research findings.
7️⃣ Qualitative research
In this type of research, we’re looking to learn someone’s thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. This work can identify features or experiences that are hard to use, are not being used as originally intended, or do not meet the needs of users. This type of research will lead to attitudinal research outcomes. They inform our understanding of the “why” around someone’s experience.
If doing usability testing to gather this information, researchers may create scenario/task-based protocols to measure performance for a product or service, gleaning someone’s thoughts and opinions. These questions are usually asked as a research participant does a “think-aloud” protocol, and the researcher can ask questions to dig deeper into the why. These findings should help understand where a deviation from the original intent of the design occurred.
8️⃣ Quantitative research
In a quantitative study, things like completion rates, time on task, lostness scores, system usability scale (SUS) scores, etc., are measured to understand the product’s usage, evaluate hypotheses, and make predictions. This type of research will lead to behavioral research outcomes. Usually, a researcher wants to understand the percentage of participants who can successfully use a product. This data can help inform problem areas, high-traffic areas, drop-off points, etc. to help inform the focus of future product improvements.
If doing usability testing to gather this information, participants are not encouraged to think aloud in these studies. Though you can intermingle qualitative and quantitative studies, it is recommended that these studies are completed asynchronously, and remotely, to truly see how the user behaves inside of the product. These findings should help point towards problem areas in the application.
So What’s the Right Approach?
For now, just find your hypothesis. Start uncovering how you may best validate that hypothesis. A good mixture of primary and secondary activities can give us a well-rounded insight into our problem space. Also, consider: Do I want to know what someone thinks, or do I want to see how they use it? Do I need a lot of rich qualitative data, or do I need hard metrics to decide?
The process of choosing the right approach can potentially give us all the crunchy feels. I encourage you not to label it; just align your questions to an intended outcome that helps you do something within your product. As you get reps to do research, you can dive deeper and deeper into different approaches.
The bottom line is that research can play a key role in driving down risky assumptions regardless of where you are in your product development lifecycle. And done incrementally, research can help teams feel confident that they’re de-risking and building the right thing for all parties involved.
Stay tuned for future blogs that dive deeper into the research types mentioned above and discuss how to utilize research to improve development throughout your product lifecycle.
Let’s build awesome things together.
Our approach to Product Design & UX is holistic, integrating business, tech, user needs, and market demands.
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