Conducting Qualitative and Quantitative Research

We can use various techniques to reach out and connect with customers to stay informed about various pain points. Quantitative user research is research that gives us numbers, while qualitative research gives us information that is harder to fit into a calculation. What kind of research we do depends a lot on our research goals and what kind of data will help us understand our users’ needs the best.

Don’t think that either type of research is less important than the other. Both can give us valuable information that can help guide our design process and lead to great results.

For quantitative research, we use different types of user testing to collect and analyze data that is objective and can be measured. Quantitative data almost always consists of numbers, and its analysis is based on statistics, math, and computers. As the name suggests, the goal of quantitative user research is to get measurable results.

Analytics is an effective way to get a lot of quantitative data for UX design. Using analytics, we can track things such as how many people visit a page, how many people stay on the page, and how many people buy something.

User testing sessions are also a great place to get quantitative information. We can get quantitative data from user testing, such as the time it takes to finish a task, the number of mouse clicks, the number of mistakes, and the success rate.

Since quantitative user research is objective, the data that comes out of it is less likely to be affected by human bias. This is because it’s harder to lead participants to a certain result and the study conditions are well-defined, strict, and controlled. Quantitative data is also usually easy to collect, quick to analyze, and easy to see in pie charts, bar graphs, and so on. Customers may also prefer to see hard numbers and find it easier to connect them to their KPIs as a way to justify spending money on improvements for the future.

Qualitative research gives us a deeper look at our users and often shows things that quantitative data can’t. Qualitative testing uses a “think aloud” method that lets us walk in our customers’ shoes and learn about how they use our API product in their own environment and their responses to and frustrations with it. Qualitative data lets us make good decisions for our users without guessing about what caused what. Getting this kind of evidence, which is based on empathy and emotion, can make it easier for stakeholders to invest in making changes to the product.

In the following sections, we’ll look at some common qualitative and quantitative ways to do research on our users.

Qualitative research methods

Here are some of the most common ways to do qualitative research for user research:

• User interviews: User interviews follow a structured method where the interviewer comes up with a list of topics to talk about, writes down what is said during the interview, and then analyzes the conversation systematically after the interview.

• Focus groups: Focus groups are used to understand what customers think about new ideas or concepts and how they feel about them. Most of the time, they are used during the design phase and the early stages of research to find out what customers think. Focus groups are also helpful after the product has been released because they help users share their thoughts on a product that already works. A focus group should contain between eight and ten people. It is also a good idea to run three or four separate focus groups to get a good mix of ideas and points of view.