Topic

UX Research

Interviews, usability tests, surveys, and synthesis that inform product decisions.

UX research reduces guesswork. The value is not the method name. It is asking a clear question, talking to the right people, and turning what you hear into a decision.

From the community

Latest articles

A List Apart · by <a itemprop="url" class="author" rel="author" href="https://alistapart.com/author/gerry-duffy/">Gerry Duffy</a> · May 30, 2024

User Research Is Storytelling

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could mak.

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Natalie Baron</name> · Nov 18, 2021

The cross-government user research blog is back

We’re relaunching the user research in government blog

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Paloma Jain</name> · Jan 16, 2023

Tips for communicating across a language barrier

Good communication with participants is a foundation of user research. But how can you get meaningful insights when communicating isn't straightforward.

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MeasuringU · Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD · Jun 23, 2026

What Are the Different Types of Synthetic Users?

Recruiting participants for research is expensive. It’s also rife with problems: Are these people really who they say they are? Are they actually paying attention? Or is the data from some survey farm where people click through and make money? AI is disrupting UX research. But the disruption is leading to more softwar.

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Dr Erin Bramwell, Senior User Researcher</name> · Feb 9, 2023

Conducting ethical internal research

As User Researchers, we champion user-centred approaches, and our work can be internal or external facing. As part of being user-centred, we have a duty to protect our participants’ data, as well as their wellbeing and safety; this applies whether they are members of the public or other civil servants and staff. In th.

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MeasuringU · Jeff Sauro, PhD • Lucas Plabst, PhD • Jim Lewis, PhD · Aug 4, 2026

Can We Trust AI to Moderate UX Interviews?

Can AI Replace UX Researchers? Some criticized us for using that headline in 2023, calling it clickbait. Fair criticism, given the inflammatory nature of AI (for the record, we did have a subtitle). But here we are three years later, and we’re not talking about just the tedious task of having AI code comments—a task [.

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Nielsen Norman Group · Therese Fessenden · Aug 7, 2026

Dogfooding vs. QA vs. User Research

Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Alison Foley - User Researcher, CDDO</name> · Jun 3, 2021

How we use user research to inform Service Manual guidance

In this first of two blog posts, Alison Foley shares the user research approach and various methods her team has used to inform guidance.

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Lea Verou · Jul 26, 2023

Help Design the Inaugural State of HTML Survey!

You have likely participated in several Devographics surveys before, such as State of CSS , or State of JS . These surveys have become the primary source of unbiased data for the practices of front-end developers today (there is also the Web Almanac research, but because this studies what is actually used on the web,.

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Dovetail · Jan 10, 2019

Looking forward to 2019—our goals and our plan to get there

2019 is all about nailing our core and scaling to become the obvious user research platform for businesses. Read on to learn about what we’re focusing on to make that a reality.

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Alison Foley - User Researcher, CDDO</name> · Nov 11, 2021

Working with users and economists to evolve the Service Manual

The team behind the Service Manual used collaborative workshops for gathering user inputs and exploratory research to understand the perceived value of the Manual.

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GOV.UK User Research · <name>Jonathan Nicholls, Head of User Research, Ministry of Justice</name> · Jan 9, 2025

Updating the User Researcher role in the Capability Framework

Those of you with eagle eyes will have noticed the ’user researcher’ role in the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework, published by the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), has recently been updated. This blog post shares some of the background and thinking behind the changes, and highlights.