When it comes to the user experience, designers have this natural gut feeling about how to make products delightful and easy to use. However, the gut feeling can only take you that far. After all, you are not the user of the product you’re designing.

There is still a misconception that user research requires a lot of time and money. In fact, you don’t have to rent a UX lab with a mirror, do eye-tracking studies, or hire a team of qualified UX researchers to get valuable user insights. Don’t get me wrong, all these things are undoubtedly great, but not every company has a dedicated budget for research, yet for every company to succeed the insight into user behaviour is crucial. In this article, I will cover four affordable and quick techniques you can use for ongoing user research.

Surveys

Surveys are one of my favourite research methods that allows you to get an insight into reasons for user behaviour in a fast and easy way. It can be utilized at any phase of your product development, from discovery to the assessment of a feature, you’ve introduced.

✅ Pros

• Creating surveys is fast. With a proper hypothesis in mind, it takes less than an hour to put together some questions to validate your assumptions.
• It is an excellent method to recruit people for user interviews. Just add “Can we contact you in case we have further questions?” and when someone says yes — voila, you have users who are willing to share their in-depth experiences with you.
• Surveys are great conversation starters. When you invite someone for a follow-up chat you can open your interview by going deeper into the answers this person gave you.

❌ Cons

• You have to be careful with the questions you ask, so you won’t bias your interviewee towards the answers you want to hear. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is a good read on how to ask questions.
• You get high volumes of data that might reveal the symptoms but won’t reveal the real problem. For that, you’ll need to talk to your users.
• Creating surveys is fast but the waiting time could be quite long. However, the insight you’ll get is absolutely worth it, and while waiting you can focus on other tasks.

Some of my favourite tools for surveys: Typeform & Google forms.

Customer Support

Your colleagues from Customer Support own first-hand insights from your users. They are the people who are in the contact with users every day, mostly listening to struggles and concerns.

To get this information you just have to invite your colleague from CS for a chat and ask what are the most popular problems people are facing. Alternatively, you can wear a Customer Support hat once in a while and answer tickets yourself. Trust me even one day in Customer Support shoes will give you quite a lot of fruitful insights.

✅ Pros

• This approach is absolutely free
• You get first-hand insights

❌ Cons

• As with all qualitative data you have to keep in mind that to validate it you have to find ways to quantify it. Basically, answer the question: “How many people besides user X are struggling with Y?”
• It works only for the companies which have a customer support department.

Silent Observer sessions

This is one of the methods we used in one of the companies I worked for. It resembles Field Research with a difference that for Field Research you observe your users doing job in so to speak natural habitat, so you can understand them better and how does their day look like. On the other hand, Silent Observer requires less time as on each session you spend an hour or so and doesn’t require the observer to be present next to the user.

It works best for B2B products where the Customer Success team is doing a walkthrough for new customers joining. All you have to do make friends with the Customer Success team if haven’t done so yet, and next time when they will be onboarding a new customer ask to join the meeting to listen and observe:

• What features Customer Success team is highlighting?
• What questions new customers are asking?
• Which products new customers mention?
• When it comes to product tryouts, where users struggle?

✅ Pros

• Sometimes it takes a lot of time and in the B2B environment to organize a formal user interview, this method allows you to get insights faster.
• Because you’re only observing but not interacting with people, you can get unbiased reactions to your product.

❌ Cons

• Because it’s a silent observation and not an interview you cannot ask follow-up questions.
• Keep in mind that sometimes on such sessions you might meet not the actual users, but rather their managers.

Guerilla testing

This research technique allows you to test the usability of your app, website, or prototype by approaching strangers in public spaces. It is a fast and easy way to get insights into possible UX issues of your product. Usually around five interviews is enough to highlight the majority of critical problems.

So this is what you have to do. Find a public space where people are not in a rush, for example, a cafe or a library. Identity your respondent and after introducing yourself give this person a back story and a task on what to do. For instance: you are planning your vacation in Barcelona, you found this website with hotel deals, could you please book the hotel that is closest to the city centre? Ask respondents to talk out loud about what they do.

At the end of the session ask your participant to highlight which part of the app/website/prototype you’re testing they found the most difficult and why. Stay away from the questions like: Did you like it? or Would you consider using something like this in the future? People are generally trying to be nice to strangers so they will tell you what you want to hear.

✅ Pros

• You don’t need to recruit participants
• In one day you can eliminate critical usability issues

❌ Cons

• This method doesn’t work well for products with a longer learning curve, so if you’re working for a B2B or SaaS project it wouldn’t bring you any results.
• This method is only good for spotting UX issues, don’t try to validate your design hypothesis with it.

Bonus tip: Meet your users where they are

Okay, it’s not really a research method per se, but it could give great insights into the problems your target audience is facing with your or similar to your’s products.

Study your users in their natural habitat. Interviews and surveys can be quite intimidating and even if you asked all of your questions correctly people would still give you refined answers based on how they want to perceive themselves and how they want you to perceive them.

Go to places like Facebook communities, Reddit threads, or specialized forums to get some unfiltered insights. Observe which things bring joy to people in these communities and which things cause the struggle. It can be quite painful especially when people are talking about the struggles with something you’re working with but it is worth it.

Always keep in mind that these people might not be your users or a representative part of your audience, so when you get insights don’t get too attached and think of the ways to quantify them.

Summing up

User Experience doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you need users to validate design decisions, even most thoughtful designs without data are just assumptions.
To get user insights you don’t need to have huge budgets, in fact all you need is curiosity and some spare time. User research is not expensive especially if you think of it from the long term perspective — couple hours per week is way cheaper than delivering an unusable feature that doesn’t add any value to your product.