Watch, listen & learn from the world’s best UX experts.

Topic: User Research

Conduct interviews, watch users' navigation and behavior, and analyze existing analytics for conversion data you can use to make UX decisions. These are just a few user-research techniques discussed in a variety of engaging seminars that apply to all of us who work in the web.

Headshot of Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Quesenbery

Getting from Barrier-free to Delightful

Headshot of Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Quesenbery

Why can’t we make it easier to be accessible?

Why can’t we aim for great user experiences that are also accessible? Creating accessible technology has to go beyond minimal compliance with standards that meets the law but may not be usable.

We need a bigger goal: creating delight for everyone. We’ll start by exploring what makes a delightful experience and how a good balance small pleasures and anticipated needs supports accessible UX in both big and small ways. Like any UX, this concern for users has to be part of every design decision.

Accessibility Experience Design Usability Testing User Research Strategy
April 18, 2017
Headshot of Melissa Perri
Melissa Perri

Designing To Learn: Testing Your Minimum Viable Product

Headshot of Melissa Perri
Melissa Perri

What You’ll Learn

  • Approach your MVP as an Experiment to test your product hypothesis and learn more about your customers
  • Design the most effective product experimentations and MVPs
  • Gain support within your organization for using MVPs as a testing method
  • Incorporate MVPs into your overall product strategy
Design Usability Testing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) User Research
November 1, 2016
Headshot of Cyd Harrell
Cyd Harrell

Metaphors in Qualitative Research & Analysis: The Force is Strong

Headshot of Cyd Harrell
Cyd Harrell

What You’ll Learn

  • Use games and tricks to identify the important metaphors within a qualitative dataset, particularly ones that surface hypotheses you can test
  • Invite stakeholders who may be focused on quantitative research to see the power of the qualitative side of things
  • Turn information into useful data by using spreadsheet programs to tackle big qualitative datasets
  • Gain deep insights when you categorize and cluster information more rigorously
User Research UX Skills Collaboration
November 1, 2016
Headshot of Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez

Infectious Research

Headshot of Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez

As a researcher, you spend your days understanding the customer—who are they? What problems are they solving? How do they behave today? How are they making decisions?  How do you get that knowledge from your head into everyone else's heads? 

You can't be in every meeting, you can't rely on everyone to read research reports, and—to make things even more challenging—you're often the bearer of bad news. Nope, the customer doesn't need this; sorry, the customer acts in totally unexpected ways.

In this talk, I'll share my tactics for spreading customer insights through an organization (even when they're not popular). You'll walk away with templates and some ideas to put into practice ASAP!

Starting UX Projects User Research UX Skills Customers
October 11, 2016
Headshot of Abby Covert
Abby Covert

Making Sense of Research Findings

Headshot of Abby Covert
Abby Covert

What You’ll Learn

  • Learn what you can do before, during, and after research activities to make gathering insights more efficient later on
  • Gain confidence in breaking down large sets of research data into manageable areas to focus on
  • Improve the way you communicate research insights to clients and colleagues
Starting UX Projects Team Management User Research Collaboration
October 11, 2016
Headshot of Leah Buley
Leah Buley

The Right Research Method for Any Problem (and Budget)

Headshot of Leah Buley
Leah Buley

The mighty user research toolkit is packed with techniques. It can do everything from blue sky innovation research, to need-finding and requirements gathering, to product validation and testing. But many teams don't exploit the full toolkit, sticking instead to one side or the other of the quant versus qual divide, or returning again and again to that tired old workhorse—usability testing. In this session, Leah Buley will share a primer on the range of research methods available, and guide you in determining which is the best technique for what you’re trying to learn now (and for your budget).

Usability Testing User Research
October 11, 2016
Headshot of Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan

Good to Great

Headshot of Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

Lots of product teams have progressed substantially over the past several years from very weak/novice to generally capable/competent. The dialog has moved from “why can’t we have a product designer or user researcher on our team?” to “why is it that our product manager and product designer are not always working together effectively?” and “why is it that the user research is being largely ignored when they have such seemingly valuable findings?”

This is actually progress, and we can see the improvements in the results, but in the commercial product world, it’s not sufficient to just have mediocre products, at least not for long. Our products have to provide substantial value over and above the alternatives. In this presentation, Inspired author Marty Cagan will focus on raising the game of product managers, product designers and user researchers. He will highlight several of the top issues/problems for these roles, and discuss how you can address each.

User Research Product Management Collaboration Strategy
February 3, 2016
Headshot of Braden Kowitz
Braden Kowitz

Designing for Startups

Headshot of Braden Kowitz
Braden Kowitz

Most startup designers focus on delighting customers with how their products look and feel. But if a product isn’t solving a problem or meeting a need, customers won’t care how pretty it is. So, how can design be used to help shape the core of products? And how can designers convince their teams to let them go beyond visual design?

Braden Kowitz will share his insights into what startups really need from designers, as well as his team’s “Design Sprint” process for rapid prototyping. You’ll learn how user research lets you move faster and take more risks. How to work at the right level of fidelity. And how ugly things can lead to great design.

Prototyping Design Process Design User Research
December 4, 2014
Headshot of Leah Buley
Leah Buley

Hunches, Instincts, and Trusting Your Gut

Headshot of Leah Buley
Leah Buley

What You’ll Learn

  • Assess the effectiveness of layout, typography, messaging, and more by looking at the hierarchy of information
  • Achieve maximum simplicity and conceptual coherence by looking at elements that feel out of place and asking yourself why
  • Examine the success of calls to action and ask, “What can I, the UX designer, do next?”
Design Process Critique User Research Typography
October 27, 2014
Headshot of Dana Chisnell
Dana Chisnell

Recruiting for Usability Testing: Getting the Right People in the Room for User Research and Usability Tests 

Headshot of Dana Chisnell
Dana Chisnell

What You’ll Learn

  • Understand where to source your participants and how to use selection criteria to screen them
  • Improve the show rate of participants, learn how to compensate them, and deal with no-shows
  • Do the recruiting yourself, but also know how you can work effectively with a recruiting agency
  • Do this process the right way, improve your results and get beneficial user research
Recruiting Participants Usability Testing User Research
September 21, 2009
Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit

Headshot of Jared Spool
Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Form a search implementation strategy around your customer's mission (and why that's the fastest way to success)
  • Find a hidden resource on your server that shows you exactly how to make search more effective
  • Understand why focusing on "searchers" is a design strategy that gets teams into trouble
  • Put together your own Search benchmark test, that will give you regular feedback on how well you're doing
Searching User Research
July 21, 2009
Headshot of Dana Chisnell
Dana Chisnell

The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild

Headshot of Dana Chisnell
Dana Chisnell

It's not clear when "quick and dirty" became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, and that takes time and money — luxuries not often available to many development projects.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. Useful insights can come just by having the chance to talk with and observe participants in the most informal of settings, such as cafés, trade shows, and the company cafeteria. You can get value from a quick test, even if you only have 2 days to pull it off, or don’t have a working design yet. Traditional by-the-book testing has its merits, but you can still get valid, useful results by cutting out the time-consuming and budget-busting expenses.

Usability testing expert Dana Chisnell knows what it means to work by-the-book – she co-wrote “the book” (The Handbook of Usability Testing) with Jeff Rubin. In this seminar, Dana will break down the process of collecting user research data, exploring the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the certainly-can-do-withouts. You'll learn how you can answer your essential design questions using methods that would make MacGyver proud.
This presentation is perfect if you have yet to conduct your first usability test. If you’re experienced with testing, Dana will show you some new ways to inject user research into those tight-on-resources projects that keep cropping up.

Usability Testing User Research
October 21, 2008
Headshot of Larry Constantine
Larry Constantine

Don't Panic: Design and Usability Under Impossible Pressure

Headshot of Larry Constantine
Larry Constantine

What You’ll Learn

  • Leverage Sample-of-One Testing to increase valuable information from just one user
  • Improve your time-boxed project management techniques to conduct design activities faster and push your design team to the limits of agility and ingenuity
  • Take advantage of the decision triage, identify your design's most important features and focus resources on those areas
  • Pare down your field research efforts while still learning everything you need to create a successful design
  • Use tactical modeling techniques to quickly capture insights about users and their needs
  • Identify key information about your users and learn not to waste time on unproductive design activities
Usability Testing User Research
September 1, 2007
Headshot of Christine Perfetti
Christine Perfetti

Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics

Headshot of Christine Perfetti
Christine Perfetti

What You’ll Learn

  • Set up your usability testing lab, including an overview of User Interface Engineering's typical test set-up
  • Recruit the right users to get the most accurate test results
  • Know how many users are really necessary for a usability test
  • The basics of task design, and different types of tasks
  • Become a better facilitator and communicate with users and test observers
  • Collect test results and evaluate what makes an effective report
  • Fundamentals of remote usability testing
Usability Testing User Research
February 20, 2007