How to speed up your UX research

Get actionable insights faster

User feedback is essential for building great user experiences. It helps you understand how your target audience thinks and feels and gives you actionable insights that you can use to improve the experience you provide to your customers.

By optimizing your UX research and analysis process, you can get actionable insights faster—plus save yourself a lot of time and energy! Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get to the heart of what users are telling you. 

Use a test template

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to build your tests. Templates are designed by research experts to address common UX challenges and objectives and can be customized to fit your needs. 

You can choose a template that helps you better understand your customers’ behaviors and challenges, one that helps you test ideas and prototypes, or one designed to provide fast feedback so you can iterate and launch quickly. By using a template that addresses the challenge you are trying to solve, you can get fast and targeted feedback and free up more time for insight analysis. 

Perform a pilot test

While it’s tempting to jump straight in and start gathering insights, testing your test first will lead to better insights and save you time in the long run. A pilot test can help you determine if your test is missing any vital questions, if anything is unclear to users, and if all components are functioning correctly. 

Once you’ve had your test user go through a dry run of your script, you can make any necessary adjustments and try it again. When your test looks good, it’s time to roll out the full study to your test audience. 

Learn the shortcuts to video review

Videos provide a wealth of useful information for UX analysis, but going through all the footage at your disposal can be a very time-consuming task. Luckily, there are a few tricks you can use to analyze your videos quickly and easily. 

The first tip is to speed up the video playback so you can skim through the discussions taking place. Once you come across a section with useful feedback, you can bring it back down to normal speed and take notes. A transcript can also help you pinpoint useful moments to review and save you from watching the entire video.

Making use of keyboard shortcuts, such as using the space bar to play/pause a video or arrow keys to skip back or ahead a couple of seconds can also save you time. Be sure to make a note or tag sections with key insights, so you can come back to them later. You can also save clips to create a highlight reel to share with the rest of your team.

Use data visualization tools to share metrics

You’ve run the test and gathered plenty of useful feedback—now it’s time to make sense of it all. Data visualizations are a fantastic tool to share your findings with key stakeholders, making it easy to identify patterns, connections, and trends. 

Machine-learning models can save hours of manual data analysis by pinpointing key moments and insights in the customer journey. The data visualizations generated can help bridge qualitative and quantitative insights, letting you see data from multiple participant sessions, display positive and negative sentiments, and identify intents and behaviors. 

There are so many great insights that can be gained from UX research and analysis, but you don’t need to spend endless hours to find the information you need. By using expert tools and templates, you can save time and get more out of your user testing, with targeted insights that help you create better experiences for your customers—sooner.