You need to conduct UX research with remote teams. What are the best tools to use?

1 Choose your method

Depending on your research question, objective, and context, you might want to use different methods for remote UX research. Surveys are online questionnaires that can be sent to a large number of users or potential users to gather quantitative and qualitative data about their needs, preferences, behaviors, and feedback. Interviews are one-on-one conversations that can be had with users or potential users to explore their motivations, goals, challenges, and experiences. Usability tests are sessions where you observe how users interact with your product or prototype to evaluate its usability, functionality, and desirability. All three methods are useful for validating hypotheses, measuring satisfaction, identifying pain points, gaining deep insights, building empathy, generating ideas, testing assumptions, finding usability issues and improving design solutions.

2 Plan your research

Once you have chosen your method, you need to plan your research process. This includes recruitment, where you find and invite participants who match your target audience and criteria. To make sure you have enough participants, that they are representative of your user base, and that they are available and willing to participate in your remote research, you may need to use platforms like UserTesting, User Interviews, or Respondent. You also need to consider incentives that will motivate and show appreciation for participants' time and input. This could include money, gift cards, or free products, but be sure to make sure the incentives are fair, ethical, and aligned with your budget and goals. Finally, you need to arrange the dates and times for your remote research sessions using tools like Calendly, Doodle, or Google Calendar. Make sure the sessions are convenient, flexible, and respectful of your participants' and your team's availability and time zones.

3 Conduct your research

When conducting research, it is important to use tools that enable communication, collaboration, and data collection with remote participants and team members. Video or audio conferencing tools like Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet provide real-time conversations with participants, but it's important to make sure the quality, reliability, and security are good and that there is a backup plan in case of technical issues. Screen-sharing or recording tools such as Lookback, UserZoom, or Loom allow you to see or capture how participants interact with your product or prototype; however, it is important to have clear instructions, permissions, and consent and respect the privacy and data protection of your participants. Note-taking or transcription tools like Otter, Google Docs, or Evernote enable you to take notes or transcribe research sessions in text, audio, or video formats. To ensure accurate, organized, and accessible data is collected, involve team members in the note-taking or transcription process.

4 Analyze your data

After conducting research, it’s important to use tools that help you analyze, synthesize, and interpret data. Coding or tagging tools like Dovetail, Airtable, or Excel can help you label your data with categories or themes to identify patterns and trends. When using these tools, make sure they have easy, consistent, and collaborative coding or tagging features and use a systematic and rigorous approach to your data analysis. Additionally, visualization or presentation tools like Miro, Figma, or PowerPoint can be used to visualize data with graphs, charts, diagrams, or slides to communicate findings. Ensure these tools have engaging, clear, and compelling visualization or presentation features and tailor your message to your audience.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?