UX research guide

User experience research involves studying users in their own context to understand their experiences, needs and opinions. This insight can be used to understand how best to enhance and shape their digital experience, create digital solutions or emphasise the current benefits of the user experience.

The main goal of UX research is to improve usability and overall user satisfaction with a digital product or service. This can only be achieved by gaining deep insights into your audience to make informed design decisions, so the product aligns with user expectations and business objectives.

At Graphite, our job is to help our clients understand the problems that their target users face, and then work with our design teams to create digital solutions that solve them.

When it comes to different types of UX research, these can be divided into qualitative methods, like interviews and focus groups, and quantitative methods, like surveys and analytics. We emphasise the importance of combining these methods for the most precise insights, but any insights are better than no insights.

UX research can also be broken down into evaluative or generative research. Generative methods help you identify opportunities and ideas, while evaluative methods will help you figure out if your existing solution is on the right track.

Conducting UX research in the digital design process ensures user needs are understood and prioritised and enables them to access the help and support they need, whilst also having significant business benefits. 

• User-centric design: Putting UX research at the heart of the design process is key, as understanding user needs enables you to create more intuitive and satisfying user experiences. Organisations cannot claim to be customer- or patient-centric without seeking first-hand insight to understand their needs.

• Improved usability: By observing real users as they interact with your products, you’ll uncover critical pain points, usability issues, or accessibility issues that designers or other internal teams might overlook.

• Reduced risk: By testing ideas, concepts and prototypes with users early in the digital product design process, you’ll gain valuable customer insight and enable evidence-based decision-making as you move forward. This will help you avoid wasted effort, time and money developing digital solutions that don’t resonate.

• Enhanced engagement and satisfaction: Effective UX research leads to higher user satisfaction, which improves loyalty, brand perception, and conversion rates.

Demonstrating value through user research is crucial in competitive industries like healthcare and pharma, where data is becoming increasingly important. See our new whitepaper for more insights on the priorities and focus areas of top pharma companies in 2024.

There are different methods of UX research, each providing unique insights into user behaviour and preferences. The type of user research that will be best suited to your organisation varies depending on factors like business needs, the development stage of your digital product, and your budget.

There are three main types of research; quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodology, which is a combination of quantitative and qualitative. Mixed methodology is often the most ideal approach, as it gives a holistic view of the user experience. It can help us understand both what our users are doing and why they are doing it, giving us the best chance of designing the right digital solution for them.

Qualitative research methods

Qualitative user research involves gathering rich, meaningful data by speaking with people and analysing their responses. This helps us understand why our users behave in a certain way, and why they think the way they do about certain topics.

Below are some examples of qualitative research methods:

• Interviews: Conducting 1-1 interviews helps uncover detailed insights into user behaviours, pain points, perceptions of using digital sites or products, or general understanding about a specific topic. Stakeholder interviews also play a critical role in understanding different perspectives within the organisation. Outputs may include user personas, user journey maps, or detailed interview transcripts.

• Usability testing: By observing how users do different tasks you can understand their experience of interacting with your digital product. Seeing how users experience your existing product can highlight usability issues that need addressing. Outputs may include user feedback reports, task success rates or video recordings of testing sessions.

• Concept testing: Similar to usability testing, but instead of observing how users interact with an existing product they’re testing a new concept, before development input and designer time. This way, it’s possible to see how people will respond to your future product and inform decision-making. Outputs may include concept validation reports, prioritised feature lists, or user feedback summaries.

• Heuristic analysis: Used as a quick solution to identify specific usability issues that are being prioritised, and discover any problems that are blocking or hindering user actions while using the digital product. This involves assessing a digital solution against established usability principles. Outputs may include heuristic evaluation reports, improvement action plan, or usability scorecards.

• Tree testing: Uncovers how to organise or structure a current website or product, in a way that makes sense to users to enhance their overall product experience. Outputs may include tree test results, navigation flow diagrams or information architecture adjustments.

• Focus groups: Gathering a group of users to discuss their experiences can provide a wide range of perspectives and ideas.

Quantitative methods:

Quantitative user research is about drawing conclusions from data that already exists. It involves gathering numbers and statistics by looking at things like closed-question survey responses and web analytics. This helps us understand what users are doing and when and where they are doing it. This method is typically used once the product already exists, or if the budget for research is limited.

Below are some examples of quantitative research methods:

• User surveys: Collecting large-scale data on user preferences and experiences helps to make data-driven decisions. Our insights suggest using tools like SUS scores to quantify usability.

• Analytics: Tracking user interactions through analytics helps identify patterns and areas for improvement.

• A/B testing: Comparing two versions of a design, feature or concept to see which performs better allows for iterative improvements based on real user feedback.

Great UX research is centred on 2 pillars - designing the right thing and designing the thing right.

Designing the right thing means starting with understanding the assumed problem, and conducting research to glean insights. This research is usually discovery-based and generative in nature, and can be conducted right from the ideation stage.

Designing the thing right is all about using the discoveries to inform the digital product design and execution. This focuses on designing and testing solutions and being able to repeat this process to continuously learn and improve.

Some other key considerations for conducting effective and ethical user research projects include:

• User recruitment: Selecting participants who accurately represent your target audience is crucial. It’s important to recruit users who match your demographic and psychographic profiles. If you’re working within an area with limited participant pools, such as those with rare diseases, make sure to allow enough time to source people, and be prepared to reimburse them appropriately.

• Ethics: It’s important to always obtain informed consent and ensure participant privacy. Ethical considerations are paramount, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare and pharma. (See our article about how to conduct compliant user research)

• Iterative process: User research should not be a one-off initiative — you should seek to conduct ongoing research throughout the product lifecycle to continuously refine and improve your solution.

Conducting user research to enhance an ultra-rare disease patient support programme

Our client, a global biopharma company, offers a US patient support service for an ultra-rare disease. They noticed low engagement with the service, which could impact treatment adherence and outcomes. To explore a digital, on-demand companion to boost engagement, they turned to Graphite for patient-centric research. We conducted in-depth interviews to understand patient experiences and how a digital solution could help. Our research revealed key insights into the patient journey, identifying opportunities and pain points. These insights will be used to design a digital solution that better meets patient needs. Read more here.

Optimising the HCP portal registration process to improve access to valuable content

Astellas had recently launched AstellasPro, a new HCP portal, and wanted to optimise the registration process to maximise successful completions. They enlisted us to research HCPs' experiences in key markets to identify improvements. After stakeholder input, we conducted interviews and usability testing with HCPs in five key markets, observing the user journey and identifying opportunities for simplification. This research provided insights into HCP needs and pain points, guiding us into an informed design phase. The findings will shape future portal iterations and improve overall value, aligning stakeholders and teams around shared goals through evidence-based decision-making. Read more here.
You can also find information on why stakeholder interviews in the product design and research process is important.

UX research is essential for developing products that meet both user and business needs. It ensures that your digital product is user-centric, intuitive and accessible, as well as aligned with business goals.

Start integrating UX research into your projects to see improvements in customer satisfaction and digital product performance.

If you’re looking for a specialist digital experience design partner with in-house UX research teams, get in touch.

Qualitative user research is about gathering new data from words and meaning, by speaking with people and analysing their responses. Quantitative user research, on the other hand, deals with numbers and statistics, drawing conclusions from data that already exists.

Absolutely! UX research can be done remotely. Remote studies don’t require in-person visits and can be completed from home or another convenient location. This can take different forms like interviews, usability testing, and surveys. A researcher can conduct this research remotely, for instance, in a remote usability testing scenario, people are given tasks to do on a website or app and a researcher watches from afar and records the findings.

Similar to the number of users needed for research sessions, the time it takes to complete research is also dependent on the method used. Quicker methods such as heuristic audits can take around a week to complete, but longer pieces of research such as usability testing may take a few weeks, due to recruiting participants and analysis findings.

When we know the timeframes and budgets that you’re working with, we can come up with a tailored approach that will allow you to gain the most valuable insight and achieve your objectives.

This depends on the type of research you are conducting. Our researchers can advise you on how many people — patients, HCPs or customers — are needed for the type of research you are carrying out, and can also support with sourcing and recruiting these participants.

Some research methods, like user interviews and usability testing, need as little as 10 – 15 users to gain valuable information that can inform design decisions.

Other methodologies, such as tree testing and card sorting, would require 20 – 30 participants to ensure that reliable conclusions can be drawn from the insights gathered.

Any time! User research can be conducted at any part of the life cycle of a product or service. Whether you are in the discovery phase of your project, in development or have a live website or product, there is a research method suitable.

We’d always recommend user research is prioritised as one of the first things that’s done at the start of a new project to make sure you build the right thing and build it right. But we know this isn’t always possible. Valuable research can be conducted in all cases.