Conducting Market Research

Resources

Market research helps you create a viable, successful product. One of the biggest mistakes UI/UX creatives can do is to create something with themselves as the audience. If you design for only "you", your design might not be as effective (or even usable) for someone with different experience, goals, and preferences. Design in this field isn't just about making something pretty or impressive; it's about solving problems for your specific audience. By getting input from your audience ahead of time and as you work, you can make sure that your design is serving its users.

For instance,

Types of Research

There are 2 main categories of research: primary and secondary.

Primary Research

Primary research is first-hand knowledge conducted by you or your team. This can range from a small, informal study to large-scale surveys.

Exploratory research is a great first step: casual interviews, open-ended questions, and surveys with a small audience can all give you a lot of insight before you spend money or time on a larger study. Exploratory research can reveal your audience's needs, wants, and fears. Consider informally polling or interviewing those around you: phone, text message, and email results are all valid. Use open-ended questions, not leading questions, to learn the most from your audience.

Specific research isn't as loose as exploratory. After reflecting on what you learned with your exploratory research, you might consider asking some specific follow-up questions or asking more goal-oriented questions. This type of research helps you hone in on problems.

Secondary Research

Secondary research explores aggregated data and the results from external sources. Instead of one-on-one data, you can look at larger studies and results from others. For instance, the U.S. Census Bureau can help you identify average household income, percentage of age populations, and more.

Some of these sources are public, but industry insights from commercial sources are incredibly popular – and can get expensive.

Secondary doesn't necessarily have to be external. If you had an online clothing company with lots of sales data, you could run reports that collected and summarized things like the number of abandoned carts, sizes ordered vs. sizes in-stock, and so on.

If you are using data from the internet, find out as much as you can about the bias in their results. If a survey was used, was it reliable? Did the researchers ask leading questions? Was the sample size an appropriate representation?

Here are a few recommended sources with publicly-accessible data:

Ways to Conduct Research

Interviews

Whether digital or in-person, interviews give you the opportunity to ask questions, receive a response, and clarify information with follow-up questions. The back-and-forth dynamic can sometimes reveal more than what you'd get from a survey.

Make sure to prepare your questions in advance and take good notes, even if you are recording the interview (better to be prepared in case of tech troubles!). Digital interviews can be easily recorded through software such as Zoom for later review. Transcription tools such as Otter.ai can help you create a searchable record.

Before recording an interview, it's a good idea to have your participants sign a consent form, such as the usability.gov consent form template.

Digital Forms & Surveys

Some platforms such as Google Forms and AirTable allow you to view your responses in spreadsheets or run reports on the resulting data.