Best UX Research Tools for UX Researchers
20 July 2024 - By N. Hoeberichts
In the past couple of years, UX research has been gaining in importance, especially in the tech world but also in other industries. Consequently, there have been a range of new tools and services that have been developed to help UX researcher do their job and make their work more productive and easy.
With the right tools and resources, UX researchers can streamline their workflow, make better data analysis and therefore improved recommendations, as well as better communicate and share research outcomes with their audience.
In this blog post, we’ll list some tools that will make your life as a UX researcher much easier and can support you in your work.
Tools for UX Research planning and organisation
There are a bunch of planning and organisation tools out there that help with planning and organising UX research projects.
Miro and Mural - Virtual whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural are great for planning out a research project, as they’ve got templates to help you do the planning, such as the Miro UX Research Plan Template.
Asana - This is not specifically for UX research projects, but Asana is a popular project planning tool that can also be used by UX researchers. You can easily add projects plans, add multiple collaborators, track tasks and make use of various templates that are available for project planning and management. Asana is probably one of the most popular and famous planning tools out there and for good reasons!
Tools for user interviews and usability tests
Here are a few super helpful tools that can help you with user interviews and usability tests:
Lyssna - This platform lets you conduct moderated and unmoderated usability tests in a convenient way. They’ve even got templates for different kinds of usability studies, such as “Improve Information Architecture” and “Assess early prototypes”. Lyssna also helps with user recruitment as well as scheduling and tracking user interviews all in one tool.
Lookback - This is a tool that helps you with conducting both moderated and unmoderated user interviews and tests. You can get timestamped notes from the sessions, as well as ‘highlight reels’ that you can share with your team and organisation. You can even invite your stakeholders and people within your company to be in a ‘virtual observation room’ so that they can watch the interviews or usability tests.
Tools for UX research analysis
Here are a few tools are are helpful when conducting research analysis of qualitative research data. This is an area that has been getting a lot of innovation since AI models became mainstream, as machine learning models can be of tremendous help when looking at unstructured, qualitative data and insights.
Looppanel - This is an AI-powered platform that can help with transcribing your interviews (also support 8 different languages), time stamped note taking, creating sharable video transcripts and much more. After doing the interviews, you can then search the notes by tag or question, which can be an enormous help when you’re doing the research analysis.
Reframer - A tool that helps with qualitative research analysis. It supports your analysis using a theme builder that helps you allocated tags to your research insights. It also visualises your findings in a helpful way, for you to easily find patterns in your research.
Tools for UX Research Analytics
Hotjar - Probably the most famous tool out there for UX research analytics, Hotjar is a platform that let’s you see how your users behave on your website or app. You can see heatmaps of where you users click or navigate to on your website or app, get screen recordings on how users interact with your website and they also offer in-app survey features.
UserTesting- This tool let’s you talk to your users while they are using your website or app, so that you can better understand why they are doing certain interactions with your product. They also accommodate a lot of different types of research methods, such as usability tests, card sorting, surveys and many more. Utilising all of the functionalities they offer will lead to quick and insightful findings about your users.
Tools for Research Repositories
Dovetail - This is a platform where you can collect all your user and customer insights in a very structured way, that makes it super easy to find insights. Once you have added your insights, Dovetail makes it extremely easy to search for specific insight via keywords and questions. It’s a powerful platform, because it also has many AI options for research analysis, like thematic clustering of research insights, AI suggestions for key moments in video interviews and summarising transcripts, among other features.
The tools listed above are just a few UX research platforms out there that can make your work as a researcher easier. It also depends on your budget what tool makes sense to use, as some of them carry a high price tag.