Qualitative research

Q: How many participants do you need for a qualitative study?

What counts is not the quantity, but the quality of the answers. With qualitative methods, the term is saturation. It is the point from which you stop learning anything new. For very specific interviews with professionals, 2 or 3 exchanges can be enough. For a study covering a digital service aimed at the general public, a dozen people bring what is needed. For more varied subjects with a need for statistical analysis, you can go up to around thirty participants, or well beyond.

Q: How do you analyse the data from a qualitative study?

Qualitative analysis is a discipline in its own right. In UX research, every method that collects data can draw on different approaches to make use of the answers. The first step is always to gather all the data collected. Generally, you first produce a summary analysis for each participant. Then you isolate the themes covered and carry out a thematic analysis. You usually take the time to single out the blocking points and the positive ones. One of the recipes is annotating all the collected material properly, so that it can be used as evidence for the results (for example verbatim quotes, an extract from a navigation sequence during a test, and so on).

Q: What is the difference between a qualitative study and a user test?

A user test is a qualitative method. Alongside the one-to-one interview, remote observation, participant observation and focus groups, user testing is part of the palette of qualitative collection tools. Several methods are usually combined within a single qualitative study.

Q: Can you combine qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study?

Yes, and it is often the case. You will find the term mixed methods research. Since each family of methods brings its own strengths and weaknesses, qualitative and quantitative approaches get combined. There is no ideal order: it depends on the priorities of a study, and even on the constraints that can come up on a project (access to users, the schedule of the assignment, the purpose of the project).

UX method

Qualitative research to get into the details

Qualitative research focuses on what people do. It looks at their behaviours, their decision making, the elements they take into account in a given situation. The aim is to identify their motivations and everything that comes into play in their choices. Qualitative methods give subjective results, because they are based on observations and on the feelings of the people being interviewed. Quantitative methods, for their part, are valued for the objective, numerical results they produce. The qualitative approach answers questions of the “why?” and “how?” kind rather than “how many?”.

What is qualitative research for?

Describing the real experience users go through
Capturing people's representations and imagination
Understanding the different elements that matter to your users
Identifying everything around your service that influences the way it is used
Discovering the variety of ways of doing things and the explanations that go with them

Why run qualitative research?

Capture what your users do, in order to map their journeys
Identify the sticking points they run into
Analyse the strategies they put in place
Dig into the “why” behind quantitative figures
Build personas on the basis of real behaviour
Work out what is worth measuring quantitatively

You might think that getting access to a user is enough to interview them and obtain good qualitative results. That is far from the case. Running a one-to-one interview, facilitating a focus group or carrying out observations all demand real preparation. This is the art of asking the right questions, of adopting a posture of active listening, of letting silences speak, of not steering the answers, and so on. So many small details that take several years of practice to master properly. Done well, a qualitative approach turns weak signals into solid design decisions.

Framing. You define the research question precisely. The point is not “how do we improve this or that”, but “what do users do” or “why do users do this or that”. Without clear framing, the data collected will stay vague and you will miss what matters. Once you know what you want to study, you define a guide that matches the methods you are going to use.
Collecting. You meet users, one to one or in groups, in person or remotely. It all depends on the range of methods you put in place. This stage is the most critical one, because the exchanges have to be conducted methodically, taking great care not to influence what you get from the participants. The aim is to reach thematic saturation, which you get to with around ten participants.
Analysing. The analysis phase depends entirely on what has been collected. Generally speaking, you start by gathering the data you have collected. You usually go through a phase of coding the data and bringing out themes. The point is not to count occurrences, but to look for the patterns of meaning that explain the behaviour. The main challenge is to make sure the results are not mere observations, but that they allow decisions to be made. The observations have to be translated into impacts for the service (“So what”) and turned into concrete, actionable recommendations (“Now what?”).
Sharing the results. Interesting results, collected rigorously, are worth nothing if they are badly communicated. More than a simple sharing exercise, this means passing the baton to the project team so that it can work on developing the product and/or the service and/or the way the teams deliver it. You usually present a condensed format with the points that have the most impact. Alongside that, you deliver a detailed report covering all the results and the analyses. How far these results manage to spread through the organisation is the main challenge of a qualitative approach.

How many participants do you need for a qualitative study?

How do you analyse the data from a qualitative study?

What is the difference between a qualitative study and a user test?

Can you combine qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study?

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Related methods

User interview

The user interview goes after what questionnaires don't capture. 5 types of interviews, how to choose, and the trap of social desirability.

Field observation

Field observation watches users in their real context, with a structured observation grid.

Ethnography

Ethnography observes users in the field. It captures what interviews miss: automatic behaviours, tacit practices.

Focus group

A discussion group, run by a facilitator, where users speak about a shared theme through structured debate.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research measures the scale of UX problems. It answers how many and where, alongside qualitative research, which explains why.

Atomic research

Atomic Research breaks your UX studies down into facts, insights and recommendations that can be reused from one project to the next.

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