Persona Creation

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types.
Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you recognize that different people have different needs and expectations.

Context Interviews

Is a research method specifically designed to provide insight into the environment or context in which a design will be used. A contextual interview session typically consists of a mix between a traditional user interview and observations of how the research participants use a product or service in the relevant context.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is one of the most popular testing methods for researchers, is the practice of testing how easy a design is to use with a group of representative users. It usually involves observing users as they attempt to complete tasks and can be done for different types of designs. It is often conducted repeatedly, from early development until a product’s release.
Check out this project for an example of Usability testing.

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a participatory, user-centered technique used to understand the attitudes, values, preferences and behaviors of participants as they relate to the domain under study. It is used when we need to develop a deep understanding of the audience’s mental models or conditioning. Card sorting also gives insight into how participants make sense of the subject under consideration.
Use card sorting as a method if you want to invite more than one participant and discover if there are alternative ways of grouping information and open up those possibilities for synthesis.

Journey Maps

Customer-journey maps visualize the steps that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. To be convincing and compelling, journey maps must be based in truth, rather than a fairy-tale–like depiction of how we would like users to interact with our products. Is always recommended to collect qualitative data as field studies and user testing, and after conduct a competitive analysis in order to define Journey maps.

Field Studies

Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context rather than in your office or lab. Field research is usually done with one of the following goals in mind: Gather task information, Understand people’s needs, obtain data for journey maps or personas, Test systems under realistic conditions.

A/B testing

Creating 2 versions of a digital asset to see which one users respond to better. Examples of assets include landing pages, display ads, marketing emails, and social posts. In an A/B test, half of your audience automatically receives “version A” and half receives “version B.” 
For more information visit A/B testing page on my site to get some insight and examples.

Shadowing

Shadowing is a qualitative research technique conducted on a small scale where the researcher acts as an observer. In shadowing, researchers observe real-life situations of a research subject or participant for a set period of time. 

There are three types of shadowing: natural (no-interference) – where the design researcher only observes the research subject for a set period without interference; controlled – where the researcher designs a task and observes it being carried out; and participatory – where the researcher performs the activity being observed to gain a firsthand perspective.