- Pay attention to user sentiment via social media or any platform for gauging user problems, successes, frustrations, and references. 
- Reduce the need for training. Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
- Communicate future directions and be transparent with any modifications or changes to Customers’ experience or use with a product or service.  Users can be adaptable to changes, but poorly implemented or unexplained changes can undermine the success of that product or system.  
- Recruit people for future research and testing. Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.


Activities for the Listening Phase

Be open and attuned throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and identify new ones. Analyze data to identify patterns and trends.

- Survey
- Analytics review
- Search-log analysis
- Usability-bug review
- Frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) review


University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Augustana College (IL)

User Research can be done at any point during a project or design project as ongoing research activities can provide valuable information and insight that can always help improve a project, and come in multiple varieties.

- Discover
- Explore
- Test
- Listen



UX Research Cheat Sheet

Nielsen Norman Group. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2022, from https://www.nngroup.com/ 

Nielsen Norman Group

This used primarily to identify, validate, and discard with whatever assumptions, data or insights a team has.  This type of research should ideally be done in the early phases of a project.

- Competitive testing 
- Field Study 
- Diary Study 
- User Interview 
- Stakeholder Interview



User Experience Research Phases: Discover

User Experience Research Phases: Listen

Testing and validation methods are for verifying and validating the functionality and use of a system in order to determine whether the system works as it was designed to work. 

- Qualitative usability testing (in-person or remote)
- Benchmark testing
- Accessibility evaluation


User Experience Research Phases: Test

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs.

- Competitive analysis
- Design review
- Persona building
- Task analysis
- Journey mapping
- Prototype feedback & testing (clickable or paper prototypes)
- Write user stories
- Card sorting


Learn Before

Related

Learn After