Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

Unlike what some might think, reaching the final stage of a design solution or any product takes many steps and time. There are various things to be considered, and the best way to make sure that it’s the best solution is to research.

What is research?

At first glance, I know this sounds like a silly question, and everyone knows what research is, and there are different ways of conducting it. But research is much more than just searching for some answer.

To design a great product, research means diving into and having into account different aspects:

• What is the objective of the project?
• What user goals and needs are we trying to facilitate?
• What are the different ways we can solve it?
• What do users really think?

Many research methods can help discover these answers and confidently jump into working on the interface. And one is never enough — research is a complex process to get the best and most accurate results, the best thing to do is use and complement different methods.

1. Interviews/Surveys

Unmistakably one of the most common research methods used across fields. Conducting interviews or surveys is a great way to get answers and opinions from “real” users about our product.

Surveys are also a great tool to gather data quickly not only of opinions but also about who the users are as a persona (what’s their age range, what fields do they work on, are they more female or male, …).

While surveys can quickly help us gather a significant number of answers and create graphs very swiftly with specific tools — such as the old friend Google Forms — interviews allow us to go more in-depth into the information we want to know.

For example, one-on-one interviews are a reliable manner of analysing the user in person and understanding their reactions to particular questions. And like with any interview, there is more space to ask open questions and get more detailed answers.

2. Desk Research

This is one of my favourites, and we do it weekly, if not daily, basis. Desk research is the findings we can make on our own by browsing what the web, books, articles, … have to offer.

It’s a great starting point to any research process as it can be done solo and just by using a computer, per example.

As I mentioned before, even if we’re not doing it for a professional end, we all do some desk research about topics of our lives, maybe things like:

• Research about the best 5-ingredient homemade meals;
• Research about the best online free workout programs;
• Research on that news report we saw on TV one night.

This method enables us to collect various types of data faster, which allows us to create some directions in which we might want to follow with other research tools.

3. Personas

As there are billions of people on the planet, there are also billions of personalities, and everyone is different. However, people can be, in a certain way, “categorised” into some pattern.

For example, I could be associated with other young adults who design and like to write. It’s a generic categorisation. It only considers a small part of me, but that can be the essential part that categorises me as a specific target public for one particular product.

A persona is precisely that, a personification of a user/consumer type that we want to reach with our solutions. Creating personas is a complex process we can achieve by analysing date from other research methods.

It helps us understand “Who is my target audience?”. This way, we can create a better output as we know who we’re designing for. Making a product for older people is certainly not the same as designing for children. Understanding our public is vital.

4. Usability Testing

While the other methods can be applied before or during the design process, usability testing is a great way to get real insights about the prototypes we are creating.

By doing one-on-one sessions with users, we can ask them to perform a specific action with our solution and experience real-time problems and frustrations when they are using it.

By doing this, we can get outside of our bubble of designers, product managers, … who know too much about the product, and see what the users think about the problem and the things that need to be better.

5. Card Sorting

Card sorting is a research method that helps us understand how people group information. It can be used, per example, to simplify and make better information architecture for a website.

The idea is to give various people the same terms and let them group them how they think it makes more sense to them. Another way to do card sorting would be to give users those terms and allow them to organise them withing certain groups already created.

This way, we can understand how people perceive certain information and how it would make more sense to group them as we start to see a pattern within the findings potentially.