Three Main Types of Qualitative Research in UX Design

Qualitative research is attitudinal and gives non-numerical data. The purpose of attitudinal research is to understand or measure people’s stated beliefs. Methods used to gather qualitative data includes user interviews, stakeholder interviews, subject matter expert interviews, contextual inquiry, and ethnography. Focus groups and participatory design are additional research methods. The following three main qualitative research areas involve conducting interviews with stakeholders, SMEs, or regular users. It includes observing participants in their environment and talking through the decision-making process.

One of the most common methods of qualitative data collection is conducting interviews. User interviews are usually one on one and have a clear goal and objective. Interviews do not help answer specific design questions or feature usability. Stakeholder and subject matter expert (SME) interviews are ways to build useful qualitative data.

Contextual inquiry involves observing participants and having them talk through the performance of the task. There is a more active role by the participant. Some benefits of contextual inquiry include detailed information gathering; it is user-centered and is highly accurate. The researcher observes and probes a process in a natural setting. Such a method can take time since observations are done one at a time and consume resources.

Ethnography is about observing users in their everyday tasks while in the field. As stated in the article Making the Most of Ethnographic Research by Jessica Weber, John Cheng, ethnographic research is all about discovering the unknown — disproving assumptions about user behavior and uncovering unexpected insights. Whenever you’re in the field, something you see will surprise you, and those surprises are almost always at the root of innovation.