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

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


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


User Experience Research Phases: Explore

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



University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Augustana College (IL)

The practice of studying user interactions and their experiences to design human-centered products that address their needs through quantitative and/or qualitative research with either an attitudinal and/or behavioral approach. UX Research reveals valuable information for the product at any point in an iterative design process.

User experience (UX) research

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

Nielsen Norman Group

Add UX research references as child nodes here.

User Experience (UX) Research References

UX research methods can be used to generate insights about users’ behaviors, motivations, attitudes, and needs. You can use different UX research methods to assess pain points and highlight opportunities to improve the user experience of a product.

UX Research Methods

A High Level Map that communicates current, next, and future work for a team to solve a problem or improve/create a product.  It is designed to assist a team’s ability to establish and perform the necessary steps of achieving a particular goal.  It is meant to be a guiding document rather than a strict schedule; a centralized resource that all team members can access.

UX Roadmap: Definition and Components

Other Disciplines Related to UX 

The social psychology discipline has intensively studied how situations impact human states including the study of attitude and behavioral consistency, which are the common variables that UX researchers study. Overall, understanding and applying social psychology theories would help UX researchers and designers create products for specific situations and human states. 

Social Psychology and UX Research 


Cognitive psychology helps designers to overcome psychological barriers and create products that are more intuitive for the products to be more readable, accessible, easy to navigate and allowing for users to use products more intuitively. 

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