#65 UX Design Research Tools
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Our market has evolved a lot and became a bit even noisy. It's very hard to choose a tool, whereas in the beginning, 10 years ago, there was not so many tools to choose from. And you would go with like as simple as napkin and paper, right? And kind of mapping your research plan on the paper and that's it. And then move into the Google Docs and stuff. But my, I guess, bottom line from this point is that it doesn't need to be complicated.

start as simple as possible. When I reflect back on like 10 years ago, my process, it was so much easier, but it was very clear. And I would always be able to get both quantitative and qualitative data to make good enough decisions. And I didn't need to have fancy tools. It was less tools. They were not as effective and let's say cool and fancy, but they were doing their job and it doesn't need to be complicated because you as a designer are not defined by the tools.

Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa and today we will be discussing research tools. Which are the best ones? Which ones we've used? When? For what? How do you decide how to choose a research tool? And more on that topic is going to get unpacked in this conversation.

But before we do that, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor. Thank you, figura.digital, for supporting our honest conversations. For those of you who didn't yet check out figura.digital, go and do it. So especially if you want to land good design jobs, that's the place where you want to search them. You can think of it as a job board, but it's much more than that because the jobs are curated and the designers are very

vetted. And so both companies and designers get the best out of this relationship and out of the Figura space. So if you're a designer who's looking to get a job that you will enjoy and that understands what a designer should do and has a level of design maturity that you would be happy to work in, then make sure to check out figura.digital and make the most out of this platform. And so thank you so much for supporting us. And now for our typical, how was your past week?

Hi Anfisa, how are you? How have you been? I know you've been doing some traveling, so I'd love to hear more about that. Hello everybody. Yes, and welcome to the next episode. I had a great week. Actually, I was pretty much the whole week in Amsterdam from Tuesday until Friday, so the working week, and it was really, really fun.

First of all, I remember why I've joined this traveling company where you're supposed to talk to hotels, understand experiences, experience it, think about the touch points you go through while registering at the hotel and then kind of experiencing it. So it was really fun in terms of experience, but also it was really fun because A, it's Amsterdam. It's really, really nice and beautiful place. I haven't been there for the last 10 years. So it was really nice to reset the memory because last time I was there, it was not as hipster-ish and full of

great creative places. And B, also, you know, you spend time with your team. We went for a couple of dinners. We had a lot of brainstorming sessions. It was just really nice to meet people and kind of catch up on everything we couldn't do online. I definitely, it's almost like a vacation to me because for me, when you have people, when you have travel, when you have work and you like what you do, it's more relaxing even. It's more entertaining than going for like a

full-time vocation where you do nothing for a week or so. So I'm definitely recharged and looking forward to kind of use the insights I have derived. Particularly, I was researching how people use kiosks to self-check in the hotel and then some problems with it and typical requests they have and like the general guest journey, what you do before, during and after as you're experiencing the hotel, what kind of requests you have and, you know, a lot of

things around that. I guess it sounds very fun. And I felt really blessed to have this opportunity. Other than that, I am kind of planning right now another design thinking workshop. The one that I did also two weeks ago. I'm kind of thinking about the last weekend of November. So if you're interested in it, just go in the show notes and you'll find the registration link.

I'm trying to rethink it from just design thinking and apply it specifically to whiteboarding challenge. It's not very abstract and all size fits all, but really specific use case, which you can actually eventually use in many other instances. But to understand the context, we'll start from whiteboarding. And that is it on my side. How was your last week? You've done a lot of things.

a pretty productive week on your side. And it's great that you've been doing research because I think it's a great segue into our conversation. Exactly. And yeah, my week was pretty good as well. I've entered this new phase where things seem to be going pretty smoothly all the time. I've had a great week as well. I'm very suddenly immersed in my full time job after returning from my parental leave. And I'm working on a project that I'm very excited about. And I'm putting a lot of work and thought and

heart into it. So that's very exciting to get to do design work and sort of invent a product from scratch because it's something pretty disruptive for the industry, pretty new. It's even new to the entire automation industry. So it's exciting. I'm working on that. I'm also working closely with a UX researcher.

Maybe we will talk about that briefly in our conversation as well. So who gets to use the tools, but I'm working very closely with a UX researcher that has, I think, 40 years of research experience. So it's just incredible to learn so much about how to properly do research. And then I'm doing my UX goodies thing. And I had a very exciting week launching an article that I co-wrote with Hotjar. I have a couple more surprises coming up. So everybody on my UX goodies page, stay tuned.

And then the last thing I want to mention is that it's Black Friday, everybody has their offers, their products, discounts, like so much noise. And I kept thinking, should I do a Domestika Black Friday offer for my Domestika course? And then I decided not to. But if anybody wants to spend money for Black Friday, and they want to get into UX design and don't know where to start, check out the show notes where you'll find my Domestika course about how to get started in UX design, and essentially how to make your first steps in the industry. So

Yeah. I'm curious why you chose not to. I'm actually thinking to do this. I'm doing it every year, but I'm only doing it like twice a year, always for Black Friday and the birthday. And Black Friday is usually the biggest discount. So I'm curious why you chose not to. I think I know, but I'm still curious. Yeah.

I think I have mixed feelings around Black Friday. On one hand, it's super noisy. So this is what's very annoying. It's just very digitally tiring period for people. I think that everybody's bombarded and there's a lot of cognitive load and mental load and it's just very noisy and loud.

And I don't want to contribute to that on one hand. And then on the other hand, I feel that in a way I'm like taking advantage or pushing something using this kind of phenomenon to, I don't know, make more sales. And I mean, that's what sales are about. I understand the concept.

But you know that I've had a long time battle with being salesy versus being like this billboard kind of attitude. I'm here. Feel free to drop by and buy my stuff. I don't want to force it. And so, yeah, I think this is just a personal battle that I have. But I think the strongest reason is that I don't want to contribute to the noise right now. I mean, I feel overloaded with offers and information and I feel I want to buy everything and I don't want to contribute to that. And I feel that you can stand out when it's more quiet.

So if I am to ever have a campaign where I give people discounts, I want to do it when it's like less noise. And yeah, and pretty much it's going to be more visible. At the same time, I do understand that folks are in the buying mindset right now. So they're probably excited. Many people I think are excited about Black Friday. I mean, I know I can see it around me. Like I'm meeting my friends and they're asking me, what are you getting this Black Friday? And I'm like, I don't know. I didn't really

think about it. But for them, it's just exciting. It's just like the shopping moment of the year, right? So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's just pros and cons, right? I'm not saying that, but I have both feelings. Yeah, no, this is really cool that you're so ethical. And I think it's smart that you're trying to not kind of take advantage of the opportunity, but really think it on your own terms. It's like, you know, with some people who say we don't celebrate St. Valentine's Day, we celebrate it anytime we want it. Like, it's that kind of mindset is for me. But

I totally get it. Especially the last, I don't know, five, 10 years, it was crazy noisy all the time. But I think at the same time, it's like people are waiting for it as a holiday sometimes. And I definitely don't want to make it cheesy. My goal is that I finally give the people opportunity because it's when, like you said, the people in this mindset. And so for me, it's really this

I don't do it often. I know a lot of like course creators would sign off, like kind of do it for a sake of sales. They would do it every month or so, every quarter, let's say. But I feel it just needs to have those boundaries and you choose when you want to do this. As long as you regulate it and don't overuse this opportunity, it's totally fine. And the moment is up to you, of course.

We kind of went astray a little bit from the topic. So let's get back on track and talk about the research tools, right? Let's do that. So let's start with a very general question that introduces us to the world of research as UX designers. So of course, UX researchers and researchers, they spend most time in the research space. But what about UX designers? What

kind of research do generalist UX designers typically run? So what has been your experience? What do you see designers spending most time in? I would separate a little the UX researcher and the UX designer. So what are your thoughts on that? I think it's really dependent on the context in which you are in. Throughout the last 10 years, I had experiences in very different contexts. For example, starting from freelance, then working in an agency, then working

Worked in a large enterprise and then starting my own startup and like early stage startup. And then, of course, now working in a scale up startup. So the one that is before IPO. And it's always different depending on the context. So when I was a freelancer, I had to do my own research, especially when I was working for early stage startup. It's this hectic environment in which you're doing everything right. You're this one jack of all trades where you do, I don't know, starting from marketing and

to the even sometimes development really depends. When I was a freelancer, I was doing the research 100% on my own. And it was really exciting to me. I think I mentioned in the previous episodes where we talked about, you know, why we decided to become designers. For me, research was part of it. And I do sometimes even asking myself,

if I should even transition to full research because it's always the most exciting part for me through the project a lot of designers are more interested in hands-on application where you sketch where you design when you become pixel perfect for me it's always the most boring part the fun part is the research is the field study is talking to people is looking how they do things and observing and making insight and clustering information and analyzing that so for me I

especially when I was a freelancer, that was my kind of bottom bread. To be completely honest, when I was a freelancer, well, basically it was 10 to five years ago. Back then, it was a little bit all over the place. It was still pretty classic when you do the typical quantitative and qualitative studies, when you do the surveys, when you do the secondary research, when you look for information outside, and then you start talking primarily to like five people from one segment and stuff like that. So it was very classic, nothing crazy. But for that reason,

because our episode is also about the tools. For that, you didn't need much tools. For that, all you needed were Google Surveys and I think I even used the Google Documents to document everything. So surveys for information, for high-level picture and literally Google Docs for interviews, notes and highlighting things up there. It was very primitive, but it was doing the job and it was really serving me well. And then...

When I transitioned towards more of the enterprise or bigger company environments, that's when this role becomes more separated. And I think that's what your question was more about. So as a designer, my role became more design focused and I was really doing more of the hands-on projects. I was using the information served by researchers. I sometimes worked with researchers or I would do some design and I need the validation for their research. So they would do that part. So as a designer, when I started working for bigger companies, they...

then it became a little bit separated, especially an enterprise where you would have specific roles. You would not have this one general design role, which encapsulates multiple parts of the process. But yeah, it was a specific role researcher. And very often we would either need to get the discovery insights from them. We just present them what we need to do or

We would give them, here's a design we need to validate it. Or here are the, I don't know, icons we need to do the card sorting to understand if they're easy to understand. Stuff like that. In the Citrix, we also did a lot of collaboration with the researchers. So they would be a part of the project from the beginning. They would know what we're doing. They would be a part of the research and discovery. They would be kind of always on the calls and provoking us and asking us questions and seeing what...

we have gaps they need to fill. So it would be very collaborative. And then right now at Muse, in my role, we have like this kind of also line because we have a very small research team of two people. Throughout this year, they were building sort of research ops, research operations to automate a lot of processes. So at the moment, we have like this little line where the researchers will handle more the discovery parts while they will try to look

The bigger picture, well, they would try to understand like environment, journeys, before we even have a product, finding the right insights. And we designers would handle the validation part of things. So usability testings, the card sorting, truth testings, and everything that is related to tangible designs you're working on. And that's where I would draw the line, right? So long story short, freelance, you do everything. When you join teams, you'd most likely have different roles. And depending on how big is the team, this role will either handle everything,

or you will collaborate with them, or you will separate the responsibilities where somebody will be just doing the discovery and you probably will be doing the validation. That was my experience. How about you? I think it's very similar. I think you just described most of my design career as well. As you said, it's very typical when you work in small startups, early stage startups, or as a freelancer to do your own research and be a jack of all trades. When you join more mature design teams, mature organizations, bigger companies, of

course, then you could ideally have a research team or mature researchers that you can work with. And so the dynamic, of course, is different in each of these cases. But I've had a very similar experience. I think we should talk in a future episode about how to collaborate with researchers. I think that's very interesting to unpack.

because sometimes there's an overlap, right? So sometimes it could be like, where do we draw the line between what we do as designers and what the researchers do? And so it would be interesting to spend more time on that. But now I'm going to get back to the topic for today and discuss tools. Let's talk about research tools. And I'm going to go ahead and ask you, what are the current tools on the market that you're excited about? What are the most prominent research tools right now? What are the tools that our listeners need to know? It's just so many of

It's crazy. I think in the last 10 years, the market evolved tremendously. Every single part of the research right now could be automated or digitalized. It's pretty crazy. Like I mentioned, 10 years ago, I was only using Google Forms and Google Docs. That's it. Then later, we started having Miro for information organization, I would say, for clustering information, for throwing information, for working with information. Back then, it was still called a real-time board.

I loved it till when I just started because I think it was 2016 when I had to do the offline courses. And in my team, we needed collaboration awards and there was nothing. And I was like craving it. And literally one year after I see this tool in the market, I was so excited about it. I was screaming about me, Rami.

we have real-time board back then. So that was like a big revolution for me already. And then I think I started more and more like information clustering tools popping up, especially in the last maybe like four or five years. So first, the next tool I got really excited was Airtable. If in the mirror, my typical use case would be to throw there all the information starting from the client interviews, workshops, and then like kickoff workshops, and then secondary research. So information I would find related to that topic.

online from the second sources. So Miro would be my place where I would throw, like dump everything I find about it. When I needed like a primary information quantitatively, sorry for a lot of smart words, I started using Airtable. My typical use case for this was back then to use the surveys. So let's say Google surveys and all the announcements I collect there, throw them into Airtable because in Airtable, you can really nicely organize that information.

You can group them by answers. You can group them by meaning. You can find insight. You can create sort of user personas and profiles. And it's also creating the reports. For me, Airtable was also like, boom, mind-blowing. I was that person that doesn't work very well with Excel sheets because it's very mathematical. But when I saw Airtable, which is like the next level of Excel and also very digital and very, I don't know, hip, it just...

was perfect for me. So I was very excited about Airtable. And the next thing I believe is started using Notion and Coda. Those are the same as for me. I would call it Wikipedia when you have information, not in a messy way, but in a nice organized way. A lot of people today use it also for portfolios, right? Or Coda kind of appeared in the same time around 2020. Other tools, which now it's getting very messy. Yeah.

because then it's like a timeline when tools started popping up as mushrooms around. Next tool I was really excited was Dovetail. It's this tagging and organization insights tool where you can throw recordings of the video or interview with your user and then they become automatically transcripted and you can literally make insights out of it, of the interview. It just became also magical because now you suddenly don't have to rewatch all the interviews. It does all the hard job for you. And now it

It becomes focused on the insights and organizational and clustering the insights. So again, magic. And I think later on, we started seeing more particularly unmoderated testing tools such as UX Tweak, Amaze. For me, the biggest and the most favorite tools right now actually is Usbury. UX Tweak helped me to work with my web tools.

So for example, web design, websites. Actually, UX Week was also in sponsor of our podcast, so you might have heard about it, but that's the tool that helps you to create card sorting, tree testing, prototype testing, surveys on the website and stuff like this. They have everything related to web testing. Maybe right now also with Figma.

But for Figma testing, let's say you have created a prototype and you just want to see how quickly people go through it, time per task, success rates, where people fall out, the user journeys. But the hot jar of Figma for me is Useberry, where you see the heat maps and really like all the details about how people

will go through your prototype plus the videos. So UX Week, Hotjar, Useberry, Maze. What else? Oh my God, there's just so many, right? The other tools which are more enterprise like UserBrain, UserZoom, UserTesting, I believe. FullStory maybe. I don't know if it's still up. Boy, so many.

I didn't even know if there is something else you want to add, Johanna. I'm sorry if I throw all the tools already. No, that's great. I mean, you've made a pretty extensive list there. I can just talk about my own experience, I guess, where I've started using research tools. In my first role as a UX designer, I was at ING Bank and it was a huge company.

But we didn't have a researcher at that time because the design team was just starting to be established. And so it was on the way of becoming mature. It was by no means mature yet. So we didn't have a UX researcher. We pretty much did all the research ourselves, but we didn't even have a good system for that. So I remember we were using just a very honest methodology.

Google Doc, where we would write an interview guide and then take notes from interviews. And then yeah, those notes were immediately transformed in PowerPoint presentations. So we didn't have the real time board yet. We didn't have a single source of research truth. We didn't have affinity maps. We weren't doing things in a very structured way. And that obviously costs

a lot when you're a UX designer because it makes it really hard to socialize the interesting insights that sit at the foundation of your design decisions and to get buy-in and to just stay organized in your process. So we weren't doing that at that time. But then eventually in my second job, I became very aware and pretty much obsessed about

having a proper research process as much as possible. So I'm all up for flexibility when it comes to process. I don't think there's a one size fits all. We've been through that again and again. So I think that it depends on the context, the company, the project team, resources, whatever problem you're trying to solve. But I was discovering real-time board at the time when I started my second job with UiPath. And yeah,

I introduced it in my work. And then I remember very clearly that I also discovered a tool called Userbit. And Userbit was basically a very strong tool for interviewing. So I would create an interview guide directly in Userbit. And then I would capture answers for all the questions. And I could

organize the questions around tags. At some point, I did a stakeholder interview effort in my company. I talked to 24 people and I pretty much asked the same questions with some differences based on their role and experience. And you can imagine that at some point, I just wanted to see how the answers for one question behaved or appeared or like...

What were they? So this tool really helped me navigate that complexity of different answers, different nuances, different topics, mostly based on tags. But they also had affinity mapping capabilities, persona building capabilities, and so on. So I started introducing tools slowly.

And fast forward till today. Now in my roles, consulting or doing work for early stage startups, I do all the research myself and I use a combination that's pretty basic. And I think every UX designer can start with that. So if you want to do quantitative research, you just need a place to build an interview guide and then in that place, capture the answers or in a different place. And

And you will definitely need Miro or FigJam or some sort of tool where you can add the insights so that they're visible. There is also Mural, right? But it's not as popular anymore. Yeah. But I mean, someplace where you can put in all the insights that you've gathered and then socialize them with your team and spot patterns and understand which are the categories, the groups of information, the research themes or the insight themes that start to surface. So that's one thing.

And then also you will need some sort of video tool because probably all the research we're doing these days or most of the research, in your case, it was pretty particular that you went out and observed people interacting with the information kiosk or checking kiosk in your industry space. Yeah, in a federal space.

Yeah, but typically most of the research, especially with the pandemic, is done online. So you're going to need Zoom or some sort of other tool for running interviews, ideally recording them. So how I typically do even usability testing sessions remote right now is through Zoom and then I record them and that's one pillar. Yeah, so pretty much you need some tools to cover some of the main research missions that you'll have. And one of them is articulating what you want to do. And you can just use Google Docs for that or an alternative.

And then you can map everything in a board kind of tool. And then you can use different survey tools, Typeform, Google Survey, SurveyMonkey. I'm personally a fan of Typeform. I think it's a nice product. You don't need to have 100 research tools, I think. And especially when it comes to

Oh, yeah. So one other mention I wanted to make is that when I started using real-time board and started introducing user bid and everything, I understood that there's a way in which I could use tools that give me insights. So not just use the tools to generate insights by asking questions or surveys or everything, but tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar showing me heat maps and click maps and everything. There were tools that could capture those insights for me in a more, let's say, unmediated way.

And those were great because you had so much information in there to explore. And sometimes what was hard was processing that information. So navigating the Google Analytics thing. How do you know how to make something out of that? So that's when a senior researcher would be very helpful. But those were the kind of things that I started playing around with. I think that there are many tools that enable scenarios like that. So just gathering information without having to be there to moderate. And of course, there's unmoderated usability testing and all sorts of things that you can do.

But many tools enable that today. I think Maze can do that for you. UXtweak can do that. I haven't used Useberry. And in our company right now, we're using user testing to run our studies. And yeah, at this point, I'm lucky enough to be working with a very experienced researcher, as I said, so I'm not spending so much time in the weeds of these tools.

The last point I want to make is that there are a lot of tools out there and some of them are brilliant. And I think we're going to see more progress. We're going to see AI capabilities. We're going to be able to have so much information. But then the ultimate challenge that we're going to have to deal with is what do we do with all the information? What do we do with all the insight? What do we do with all the data that's being produced? I think that's the challenging part, spotting patterns. I think it was always a challenge, like from the beginning, even when we just have Google Docs, like it was...

back then already oh how do you derive the right information from it and it's the more tools we get from collecting information it never got easier we do have like automation a little bit like dovetail with process information for you and suggest you insights sometimes but then it's still not as qualitative and you can't always use that information it's not so reliable yet

But you're right. The analysis part of it is the hardest key for us. Yeah. So let's talk about a very particular challenge of the UX research process and efforts that I see a lot of questions about in UX groups and on UX goodies. You probably get that a lot. Yeah.

So there seems to be a big pain point that wasn't really solved yet, or it was solved, but for a price that's not always very affordable for folks. Let's talk about recruiting. How do we recruit users? Where can we find them? What's the best way to go about it? What's the worst way?

what are the do's and don'ts of recruiting users? And how can someone who's on their own, a person that doesn't have the big company and the big resources and capabilities behind them, how can they find users to run research with? So that was the topic I think like everybody was really challenged by in the beginning of COVID when suddenly you have to recruit a lot of people, not near you, but online and find the people at the rational cost. And I think that was like

For me, when I was still a freelancer at the beginning of my career, that was sort of an easy one because back then we didn't have people tapping on social media for running research as much as we had recently, probably the last five years. When I was starting out, I was using a lot like Facebook groups, like communities, Slack communities. Even like before COVID, I would just go on the street and sometimes do ad hoc in-fields

study. So I would go to shopping mall and ask people surveys, questions. I would go on the streets and just randomly ask people. I would do, I think it's called guerrilla testing, if I'm not mistaken, on the cafe and the shop and like literally in the place where I believe those people would hang out.

good for me i was a bit of an extrovert so that was not a problem but you know taking advantage of surveys on the social media on instagram and stuff that was usually the place to go for me later on it was becoming harder and harder because everybody would do this sort of social media plugging in communities and then we became more moderated so each group moderator would start asking for a fee or would just say no don't post your surveys in our groups and stuff like that so

it was becoming harder and harder. More and more people started turning to the external recruiting services, but they were very expensive, right? Maybe five, 10 years ago, each participant would cost you 100 bucks to recruit, which was insane for a special like early stage startups. So it was not very, I guess, accessible. And I think

there was this middle ground sort of take advantage of your client approach, at least for me, when I would ask clients to reach out to their communities. Because usually clients, they would know industry very well and they would know people in the industry. So they would either use email list with their community or they would know influencers who would throw the survey and from the survey recruit people for primary research, for interviews, you know, kind of taking advantage of the groups where those people hang out.

but not in a direct way like Facebook group, right? But more of a, you know, like, how can we reach out to those people? Where do they hang out? So understand that the tracks where they're coming from. And then I think in only the last two, three years, maybe recruiting became a little bit more affordable. So for me today, we're talking about two big topics, one being continuous research. And this is a very interesting topic. Honestly, we're at the moment building the continuous research

framework, and I will definitely want to talk more about it as we figure it out. But it's basically when you have a practice on an ongoing basis with your user panel to run interviews every week. You have a topic, you don't have a topic, you have a mock-up, you don't have a mock-up, it doesn't matter. You jump on the interview and

and talk to them about their experience. So it's like an ongoing process almost without preparation or you would have templates prepared in advance where with very little effort constantly have interviews scheduled during the week. And so that's the key thing to have is to have a user panel, which you also would have to recruit in an ongoing process, either through websites or social media or throwing it everywhere for an incentive.

So people can sign up to that user panel sort of list and be reached out at any point when we need them. So continuous research is one big topic, which I see happening a lot in many companies. And we're also doing that. And the second part is user panels on user testing tools. So for example, I'm taking advantage a lot of the UX tweak user panel tool and also use Brie user panel. And they're actually not as expensive when you're asking for a quick and moderated test. You

Can't remember the exact cost, and it really depends on the demographic, but I remember for like a one to five minute test, we would pay up to five euros per participant, which is very cheap if you think about it, like 10 years ago, where it was like 100 bucks per participant. So it became more and more affordable, and with like a budget even under 100 bucks, you can have a pretty decent amount of unmoderated tests and results in it.

At the moment, at least in my company, we're taking advantage of continuous research plus the user panels at the user testing tools, which become more and more affordable. And it's easier to also plan the budget for them. I would do a lot of testing through my social media, which you also have my beauty of. So that's another thing, but not every time everybody can have it. So I guess I'm curious also about your types of recruitment processes.

Yeah, well, in my experience, in early stage startups or small companies, I think the best way of reaching users is either through the CEO or the person who has the domain knowledge. So typically in startups and in small companies are either salespeople or somebody who comes from the domain of that startup that has a basic network, has some connections. So typically there is someone there who is in the industry that you're trying to research.

So I rely on those people to connect me with folks that I can run research with. Or if it's generative research, then you do need to have an entry in the beginning to those folks to have longer interviews, maybe spend over one hour talking to them, unpacking their needs and asking a lot of why's and everything. And even if it's evaluative, which you would think might take

less because you just show them a prototype and they interact with it and then you spot the problems. But if you give them multiple scenarios or if you want to go in depth on one of particular research questions, so I'm not saying interview questions, but research questions, like what do we want to find out, then it could take longer as well. So in the beginning, in these small ecosystems, you kind of need to have a relationship with those people.

And maybe I have the bias of working mostly with B2B companies in the past years. So in B2B companies, there has to be sort of a basic relationship with that company that you want to go with and explore their problem. If it's a B2C, so if you're designing for end users,

like individual users, then you could also reach them in the communities that they spend time in. So I always advise my mentees to go and search for those folks wherever they might be. So if you're building a travel app, call on travel groups and try to reach out to people who are more present or more involved because they would be more open towards participating in this kind of study. And

And I know that there's a conversation in the industry also about incentivizing users for their time. So there could be, let's say, buy me a coffee kind of gesture, send them over some sort of digital artifact, like a small Amazon voucher or anything to repay them for the time that they put in. Yeah, many times it feels very daunting, especially for a junior designer. It feels very challenging. Where do I find the users? I'm embarrassed to reach out to random strangers on the internet and to give me their time. But

people many times are happy to help and they're excited to be part of these kinds of processes and everything. And this leads me to a very important point that I want to make around UX research. I think it's the biggest problem I see online these days around running UX research and especially in the junior space or mostly in the junior space. I don't think senior designers make that mistake anymore, but junior designers seem to make it like all the time. Don't test with other designers. So I

I see it again and again on design groups, on Facebook, on Instagram, on whatever social platform I'm on. Junior designers are recruiting testers or interview respondents from UX communities. And

that's something that we shouldn't do. Because when you test with other designers, of course, they might be more open because they understand your pain and they want to help you. And yeah, they could be people who also travel. But at the same time, if they are designers, they have multiple layers of biases. They know the process many times. So they might give answers that facilitate that process. So you're going to get probably not false responses all the time, but unreliable responses.

So what I want to tell every junior out there is try to test with people who have nothing to do with UX design. Because even if it's easier and if they're more helpful and responsive and it's like the fastest way to find people to talk to, you're not going to get the most reliable answers. And there's going to be a lot of bias in there. And it's not the best experiment to run if you want to do proper UX research.

So go on different social groups and not the ones where UX designers hang around in because that's not what you should be doing. And I wanted to make sure that I get this message across. So with this message across, I'm going to jump to our last question for today's conversation. And that question is, how do you know what tool to choose when? Like, how do you make the decision of I'm at this stage in the process?

What tool do I need now? How do I choose between multiple tools that serve the same need? How do you decide what tool to use? What's your decision-making process? To be honest, it really depends, again, on the context which you're in, right? In a company, most likely there will be either some stack that you will be offered to use, or if there is no, then you will have to go through like a political process of getting a buy-in and onboard the new tools and go through the legal checkups and stuff like that, which is always a big

big problematic downtime process, but it is what it is. For example, when I was in NCR, a POS American company, three years ago, I had to introduce two tools. It became much easier to leave and make decisions because without those tools, it was very hard to build a case for your design and otherwise we would just be pixel pushers, right? So sometimes you do have to make a case and kind of introduce those tools and

make the wheel rolling so people can all take advantage of the data in the process. But at the same time, so in the companies, it's a slightly different case where you either already have a stack or you'll have to introduce one. Good luck with that. But in the more, I guess, smaller and startup-ish environments or even agencies environment, it is easier because you rule the process often, especially when you're a freelancer and you choose your tools. I think the challenge there is to...

more of a get a buy-in from the client for like screening, recruiting, incentivizing and stuff like that. That is sometimes extra budget costs that they don't rely on. They don't expect to have maybe. And especially those clients who never worked with designers, this is a new information for them. So they might need to get prepared for that. But regarding the tools,

especially in the environments in which you're driving the tools and choosing the tools that fit you best for your needs. I guess it's also relevant for our aspiring designers who are like just building their portfolio and choosing the tools. It's really a combination of, I guess, answering the question at which stage I am in the process. What information am I looking for?

Maybe do I need to analyze information? And plus constraints such as budget, timeline, understanding if you have a user panel or not, if you have it accessible or you'd have to kind of also get a buy-in for it from the client. So you kind of take into account multiple factors and choose what's best for you. I think there is even some mapping in internet.

Maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe I'm imagining the better world, but I'm pretty sure in Google, you can find like mapping of the tools. Oh yeah, I think I've seen this like metro kind of mapping. I don't know if you have seen year by year about the tools on different stages of design. It's a bit of a complex one, but if you take a simple double diamond, I'm sure you can map out some tools on that scheme. So yeah, early stage information gathering, there is a lot of tools. Analysis, I kind of see a little gap that we discussed today because I know obviously it's always Figma.

I think now at this point, it's no brainer. And then for design validation, there is also like a lot of tools that you can choose from. And I would really just encourage to try out a couple of those top market ones. Some of them we've mentioned and see what sticks with you, what has the better pricing, usability, and really choose what works again for you for the next project. In the boot camps or in the educational programs, you always have an intro to those tools. So you can kind of play around and understand the basics.

I guess, fundamentals, just understanding the stage you're in, the goal behind the tool, the constraints and the budget, and then just choosing it from your past experience where you hopefully played around with those tools. But if you don't want to complicate things, again, I think it's even okay to go with like a Google Doc, a Google Survey, maybe some unmoderated testing tool like Hotjar or UX Tweak

or usebury for me it's pretty cheap and affordable and they have freemium packages where you can collect data already and just go with that it doesn't need to be as complicated as we make it on the market today how about you what would you do you covered a lot of things here i think like with everything it depends on the context i hate starting my ideas it depends always

But it's really true. I mean, we can't have universal answers and universal processes because there are dependencies based on your budget, the context, how big is the risk that you're taking and you want to de-risk assumptions or de-risk the solution. And so everything has to be taken into account. And then I think that there's an interesting map of research resources. And what I would typically do

If I'm not sure what tool to use, I would try to reach out to senior folks in research and pick their brains very quickly, like being mindful and respectful of their time and everyone's availability. But I would tell them like, hey, here's what I want to find out. And I have these two tools that I'm considering. Which one have you used or what?

Have you heard works best? And can you point me? And just something very quick, but like let people who really understand that problem space or the thing you're trying to achieve guide you if you're not sure what you should be doing on your own. And with that, I would say, let's jump to a very brief top three findings and then we wrap up this episode.

So what are your top three ideas for this conversation? Let's see. Our market has evolved a lot and became a bit even noisy, you know, in a way where it's very hard to choose a tool. Whereas in the beginning, 10 years ago, there was not so many tools to choose from. And you would go with like as simple as napkin and paper, right? And kind of mapping your research plan on the paper and that's it. And then move into the Google Docs and stuff. But my, I guess, bottom line from this point is that it doesn't need to be complicated at

start as simple as possible. We are creating more and more frameworks, terminology, processes, a lot of things today on the market. And it really is just becoming a bit more noisy, harder to grasp an environment, especially for aspiring designers. Whereas to be a good designer, and I personally, when I reflect back in like 10 years ago, my process,

It was so much easier, but it was very clear. And I would always be able to get both quantitative and qualitative data to make good enough decisions. And I didn't need to have fancy tools. I just need Google Docs and Google Surveys and like some unmoderated testing. That's it. That's enough of the triangulation of the data for me to get it. It was less tools.

they were not as effective and let's say cool and fancy, but they were doing their job. And it doesn't need to be complicated because you as a designer are not defined by the tools and by how tech savvy you are and how quickly you can collect information or organize information, but really you are evaluated

by the quality of information and by their thinking and how you formulate your queries and how you're being able to ask good questions and make unbiased decisions and stuff like that. So I guess start simple. Don't go into like too crazy every single tool. I mean, we just did a point that maybe it's good to experiment with tools, but make it as playful as possible. Don't kind of throw yourself in the tools and make it must, right?

for you to use. Start simple, start even with the paper. I always actually, every time I run research today, I still use my notebook and map their groups of questions, clusters, ideas, things I want to account. And then from there, I start kind of sorting it and cleaning it up, using other tools, be it Amiro or even Figma sometimes, whatever. But tools are just a means of information gathering, but they're not the definition of the value that you're providing. So I guess my takeaway number one is start simple.

the thinking is the key. Tools are not here to save you, but tools, if you're a person who's interested in the tools and if you're having fun with that, I think that's the key and not sort of stress yourself out with like learning too many tools. You have to know it all and you have to take advantage of them all. No, it's a nice thing to have. And if you want to do that, go for it, explore them, find the tools that fits you best in your free time in the

Like, for example, for me, it was always about creating the content, exploring new tools. So it was like a playful process, but it doesn't need to be as hectic and hard to grasp environment in which we ended up in today. And I guess the last takeaway for me would be that I guess we're still missing some sort of

an umbrella, a platform that encapsulates most of those processes in a good way. So a lot of things we can still do today, right? In just Figma and even like I said, paper. But in a way, it would be fantastic if there will be this platform. And I'm pretty sure some of the platforms already working on bridging the gap, but it would be fantastic if we would have one Figma for all the research, right? So we would have some sort of a combination of Miro plus Airtable plus...

I don't know, Dovetail plus UserBeat, maybe the one that you mentioned, plus Maze, plus Usbury and stuff like that. It would be fantastic if there will be one platform that is not too complex, but in a way encapsulates everything we need to have. Yeah, I think the trick is that this industry is too crazy and involved in processes very often and very hectic processes.

pace and i think the takeaway also from here is that we are still missing this analysis bridge because it's easy to gather information and it's easy to validate information but it's not easy to analyze information and that's where i hope this new platform that i'm dreaming about would also focus on and that would be the use case that would attract the industry and thus then also sort of buy other tools merge them become a big research stigma of everything what are your takeaways i think

they're pretty aligned with yours, but I'm going to try to build on top of the last point that you made where you're imagining a world where we have a couple of... And I think we're seeing that trend because many research companies, I think, are buying other research companies. So I keep seeing the small resource startups getting bought by bigger companies. So probably we're going to see these clusters, B companies becoming the dominant players in the market, which on one hand is good. On the other hand, competition sort of creates progress.

But you can still have it even with big established tools. So I do feel that...

We need that ecosystem in which we could go in and solve all our problems for research in one place. And I think we're going to see that. Again, building on top of your point, I feel that in the past year, we've seen like the fourth industrial revolution, if you want, when it comes to AI progress. I'm very much immersed in this space lately. I'm learning about GPT-3. I'm learning about different ways in which we're using AI technology to create products and improve our workflows. And so when it comes to the interpretation space,

and to like the analysis, which is hardest for us. And when the human mind is very, very much needed, I think we're going to have an assistant from AI technologies. I think we're going to have some support there, at least in showing us the patterns and then deciding us as designers.

empowering us to decide which are the interesting patterns that we want to look deeper into and like how we will process that information. But we're going to have this, let's say, AI assistant in the research interpretation stage. And I can't wait for that to happen because it's going to make us more powerful and better informed and more insightful, right, in our work. And then talking about insightful.

So the last point I want to make is that, like you said, tools are just a means to an end. We keep saying that in the industry, and I think people should really absorb that idea. But I do feel that the most important part around research is the intent behind it. Like,

Having clarity on the research goals, having clarity on what it is you want to unpack, what it is you want to find out. This is in the generative space. Of course, anything can happen. Like you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what's going to come up. That's why it's called a discovery stage, right? We are discovering things. In the evaluative parts, you have more specific things that you're looking at. You're measuring, judging, understanding, and so exploring how a solution is used.

So but in both ways, like having some sort of clarity, having the direction, having the intentionality is what will guide you towards a particular tool or another. So to answer the question, what tool do I use? Start from the need. Start from the need. Have clarity around your research need. Have clarity on the goals. Have clarity on what you hope to achieve. And then the tools will kind of just surface, just appear. OK, so probably I need a survey for that or whatever.

kind of thinking, right? So that's the last point I wanted to make. And with that, I want to just wrap up this episode and thank you everyone who listened to this. I'm very happy that you joined us for today's conversation and feel free to send us your ideas for future episodes. We really want to discuss about things that are really interesting to you as a listener. So send us your ideas either on our Instagram, Honest UX Talks,

or on UX Goodies, or on Amphisign, or if you want to support us in any way, you can simply rate our podcast in your platform of choice. And I guess that's it. Amphi, do you have any other closing thoughts? Just wanted to say that we have 93 reviews on Spotify. Thank you, everybody. We are almost at 100. So we would really appreciate if you would help us get into 100. Yay. That would be amazing. That would definitely make my day. I had no idea we had so many reviews. That makes me so excited. Yes, it's a lot.

Yay. Okay. Yeah. So thank you everybody for listening and for supporting us. It's really appreciated from us. That's all for today. Thank you everyone. And see you in the next episode. Bye-bye. Bye everyone.