Triangulating user insights

A mixed methods approach for reliable research

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Back in 2019, Caylie Panuccio and I wrote an article on how to combat common criticisms that UX research, or qual research in general, isn’t “valid”. See below👇

Yes, UX research is valid: How to handle assertions it’s not real research

More strategic or risky projects often require more evidence to back them up. We implied this in the original article, but here I’ll make explicit my go to process for robust research.

I’ll explain each step in this article, but the TL;DR is:

1. Conduct interviews with 12–15 people
2. Analyse the interview findings
3. Codify responses into a survey & run a survey study
4. Analyse the survey findings
5. Collate the findings of both studies
6. Experiment to test actual behaviour.

I used this mixed-methods approach for my PhD research. Much of the content of this article is pulled from the research design chapter justifying the methods and the reliability of those methods.

It’s now a go to method I pull out at work or suggest my team to use.

Stakeholders love it — it gives them more confidence to make decisions and to make decisions that they feel more sure of. It’s become the gold standard of research for the last 2 CEOs I’ve worked with.

Read on to learn how to do it.

Conduct interviews

First, run an interview study using semi-structured interviews.

Most UX designers/researchers will be familiar with this method. You’ll have a general outline of the questions to be asked, but this is only followed where appropriate. It should be flexibly changed based on the participants’ responses. If they raise something, you follow that line of questioning, and only return to your script if useful. This style of interview is particularly appropriate for exploratory research — when you don’t understand a lot about what…