Making the design process simple and transparent while shifting the focus away from the product team and the business toward the user. It's important to emphasize that design isn't just about aesthetics—such as colors, typography, graphics, or form. Design is measurable. This measurability allows us to analyze and address challenges more effectively, leading to better solutions that directly serve the user's needs.
Core UX Research Methods
1. Empathy Mapping
Empathy Map showing user insights across different dimensions
Visualizes the needs, feelings, thoughts, and challenges of users to create a shared understanding.
Identifies user pain points and motivations
Creates a shared understanding among team members
Helps in making user-centered design decisions
2. User Journey Mapping
User Journey Map illustrating the user's experience over time
Analyzes and visualizes user experiences and interactions along a defined action to identify pain points and improvement potentials.
Maps user interactions across different touchpoints
Identifies emotional highs and lows
Reveals opportunities for improvement
3. Persona Creation
Persona cards representing different user types
Helps create detailed profiles of typical users to ensure user-centered design and align decisions with real user needs.
Provides clear user archetypes
Guides design decisions
Keeps the team focused on user needs
4. Rapid Prototyping
Different stages of rapid prototyping
Enables quick, iterative testing of concepts with simple prototypes to gather early user feedback and validate design decisions transparently.
Quick iteration and testing
Early feedback collection
Cost-effective validation
5. Usability Testing
Usability testing session in progress
Measures how users actually interact with the product, capturing both quantitative and qualitative user experience data to optimize design decisions objectively and measurably.
Direct user observation
Quantitative and qualitative data collection
Objective performance metrics
Advanced Research Approaches
6. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)
Jobs-to-be-Done framework visualization
Analyzes and identifies precisely what users want to achieve (what tasks they want to complete), focusing on user needs and measurable successes.
Focuses on user goals rather than features
Identifies unmet needs
Guides innovation opportunities
7. Lean UX – Hypothesis Testing
Lean UX hypothesis testing framework
Makes assumptions about the impact of specific design decisions and quickly validates them through user experiments, making design measurable and improvable.
Rapid hypothesis validation
Data-driven decision making
Iterative improvement
8. Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation checklist
Systematically evaluates based on clear usability criteria (e.g., according to Jakob Nielsen) the quality of a product, making design transparent and verifiable.
Systematic evaluation
Standardized criteria
Quick identification of issues
9. Kano Model
Kano model feature categorization
Identifies user requirements and categorizes them into basic, performance, and delight features, helping prioritize design decisions based on user needs.
Feature prioritization
User satisfaction analysis
Resource allocation guidance
10. A/B Testing
A/B testing results visualization
Compares measurable different design solutions based on concrete metrics (e.g., conversion rate, click rate) and enables data-based design decisions with clear focus on user preferences.