Be it recruiting participants for your UX research or creating surveys for the same, a lot of work goes on in this stage of designing. What if there were tools that could help save your time, make work more effective and automate research tasks? In the last few years, a bunch of such tools has popped up in the industry. From helping you conduct user testing to conducting user interviews, these tools can help speed up your entire process. Here’s a list of 11 tools you can use for your UX research requirements.
User Testing
This lies at the center of UX research. The following three tools will streamline your testing process and help you get valuable insights.
Optimal workshop
Optimal workshop is a popular name when it comes to user testing. It has five powerful tools for your UX research: card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, online surveys, and qualitative research. There are also inbuilt tools for analysis and recruitment. Many users find this tool for planning information architecture.
Google Optimize
Confused between two different options of your website? Or your application? Google Optimize lets you run A/B tests to decide between the two. They also have a range of tools that help you in identifying areas of your site that can be improved, advanced targeting to deploy the right experience to your customers and make use of advanced statistical methods to give you accurate results. Their free plan provides many of these features so you may want to try that out.
Maze
Maze is one of the few tools that help you conduct user testing for prototypes, UX copy, concept, and content. It also helps you create custom tests for your users with the help of their different features like conditions, missions, open questions, 5-second tests, and so on. You can also create multiple user tests for every step of the way.
Recruiting
Where do you find the right kind of research participants for your study? The following tools will help make this process easier for you.
UXtweak
With UXtweak, you can recruit testers from both your country as well as abroad. They also have more than 155 million panelists with over 2000 profile attributes so you can easily find participants with your detailed requirements. If you do not want to recruit participants from their selection, you can make use of their “recruiting widget”. With it, you can stick this widget onto your website or the sites that your target audience uses and recruit participants for multiple studies.
Ethnio
Ethnio is a recruitment-only platform that allows you to find, screen, incentivize, and manage participants. It also comes with an automated scheduling system that helps you manage different scenarios and participant touchpoints throughout the entire user experience. Their intercepts feature also lets you gather participants right from your product.
Surveys and forms
Instead of manually putting in all the efforts, these two tools could help your quicken the process and also make it visually pleasing and functional for your users.
Google Forms
Google Forms is a free tool where you can select from multiple question types, and add custom logic that shows questions based on answers that helps provide a seamless experience. You can also embed this survey into different apps like Zapier
Typeform
Typeform lets you create people-friendly forms. You can create forms where the next question pops up only after a user answers the first one, making it feel like a conversation as opposed to a grueling round of questions.
User interviews
Conducting user interviews can take up a lot of your time. Here’s a list of tools that will help you pull out relevant data from your interviews.
Respondent.io
With Respondent.io, you can recruit research participants and easily schedule an interview with the tool. You can also refer to these interviews at a later date and pick out relevant information from them with the help of its multiple features.
Grain
What if you want to clip important moments from user interviews to keep as a reference? Grain allows you to not just record Zoom meetings but clip those moments and share those clips with multiple integrations. The tool also has a feature where you can create video transcripts, summaries, add highlights, and organize clips in groups.
Session tracking, analytics, and documentation
Sometimes, just interviews don’t cut it. You may want to see what users are doing while they’re on a website or app. And what about making sense of all this important information and storing them? Here are two tools that will help in the same.
Hotjar
Hotjar lets you watch how users are using your product and visualize user behavior. This could help uncover issues you couldn’t predict and features that users are making the most use of. They also provide advanced analytics and tracking for your product in the form of session recordings and heatmaps. You could also set up in-app micro surveys with this tool.
Dovetail
Instead of letting these insights stay fragmented, compile them on one platform – Dovetail. You can manage information, and highlight user interviews on this platform. You can even search for specific insights which make this tool a great one for your UX research process.
Why feedback is important in UX research?
There may be a lot of changes required while conducting this entire process. You may need to develop different versions of your website, update some content here and there, and make suggestions on the feedback you received. Instead of having all this communication stay fragmented and have multiple rounds of emails where important communication may get lost or worse yet, unseen, our in house tool ruttl helps you make edits to live websites, collaborate with your team, and share contextual and visual feedback for your designers to work on.
To discover all the ways we can help you in your UX process, get in touch with us here.
