The information in the remainder of this chapter will give you a glimpse into the basics of user research and testing. Though it’s not an in-depth how-to on conducting user research, it’ll give you broad insight into the types of user research methods so you can incorporate user research into your project timelines.

If you want your product’s design to be informed by large-scale data, it really helps to have metrics that reflect the quality of the user experience, and that map closely to your main goals. Try using HEART and Goals-Signals-Metrics to help you get there.

“We were able to email 10 of our customer advisory board members, give them mockups of the new feature and invite them for an hour of usability testing — we threw in Amazon gift cards as a reward — and the results were amazing,” says Peter Kazanjy, best known for co-founding recruiting startup TalentBin and his proven early-stage sales wisdom. “With a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), you essentially have a captive audience of folks who are fired up for your success, and who you can leverage on an ongoing basis to build the best product possible.”

The job of research is to distill complex problems so that your team understand the what, the why, and the how of the problem at hand.

Strategies and best practices for conducting UX surveys.

You’ll learn how to perform the most effective research activities: customer interviews, passive research, analytics, and competitor analysis.

How do you make sure your design efforts are effective? There’s no bigger mistake than just guess! Brent Palmer, a design lead at Zendesk, walks us through the tools and methods for data-driven design. You’ll learn how to approach customer research the right way, why testing is important, and how to deal with the research results.

Teena Singh, Director of User Experience at ADP, shares why she interviews customers at their workplace, how to craft user stories with context and the role of domain expertise in product management.

Michael Montecuollo, Director of User Experience and Design at DOOR3, shares how to align stakeholders on a project’s priorities and how he conducts user research when the client is the end user.

Research panels are a fantastic way to do UX research: instead of emailing the entire user list, you’re working with a small loyal segment of your audience.

In this episode, Aidan Simpson interviews UX Researcher and Sprint Master Sydney Hessel about her unconventional research background, the ins and outs of the sprint methodology, and getting people out of their comfort zones to generate creative ideas.

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traff

See how visitors are really using your website, collect user feedback and turn more visitors into customers.

Build beautiful, engaging, and conversational online forms, surveys, quizzes and much more.

Optimal Workshop offer a suite of tools to help design researchers and information architects improve the user experience of their products.

User experience recording made simple. See the screen, face, voice and touches of your users. Record in-house or remotely and without equipment.

Collaborate on all your customer emails, social media posts, live chats and calls together in one helpdesk.

FullStory's pixel-perfect session replay tells you everything you want to know about your customer's online experience. Capture every click, swipe, and scroll.

From development to launch and beyond, Fabric gives everyone on your mobile team a complete, real-time understanding of your app's performance and health at every stage. Crashlytics · Answers · Fastlane.

All the tools you need to find out what your customers are thinking, who they are and why they behave as they do.

A comprehensive solution for user research that includes a dedicated testing platform, recruiting services, and automated reporting.

This book will show you, step by step, how you can use website and app analytics data to inform design choices and definitively improve user experience

The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you're a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

The gap between who designers and developers imagine their users are, and who those users really are can be the biggest problem with product development. Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they'll be able to use what you've created.

It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects discusses frameworks, strategies, and techniques for working with stakeholders of user experience (UX) research in a way that ensures their buy-in.