Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative Research and the Best Tools to Use for it
UX research is a crucial part of the UX design process that helps designers understand their audience’s needs, behaviors, attitudes, and pain points. One of the most common questions about UX research is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research.
Qualitative research helps designers understand the target audience’s beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors. The data is usually gathered from interviews, focus groups, and surveys with open-ended questions. Qualitative research can be thought of as answering the question why? Quantitative research, on the other hand, involves collecting numerical data that describes some aspect of the user experience. It can be thought of as answering the questions how many? and how much?
Qualitative research aims to describe user insights, attitudes and behaviours concerning certain aspects of the user experience design. It is typically tested on a small number of people and generalized to the entire audience. Qualitative research discovers problems or opportunities in user experience and finds the best ways to approach them.
Qualitative Research Methods
The most common qualitative research methods are interviews, focus groups, ethnographic research, and diary studies.
One-on-one interview: This is a structured conversation between the researcher and a participant where the UX researcher aims to get meaningful data on the interviewees thoughts. Interviews provide more extensive details compared to surveys.
Focus groups: These are moderated discussions with a small group of users (usually 5–8) to explore specific UI features.
Ethnographic research: This involves studying users in their natural environment to observe their behavior and understand their context.
Diary studies: They involve asking users to record their thoughts, feelings, and activities over some time to gain insights into their daily lives.
The Best Qualitative Research Tools
In general, qualitative research methods, such as interviews, require a lot of organization around scheduling interviews with users and user groups and ending reminders. These tasks can be time-consuming and limit a researcher’s focus on core research tasks. Calendly is a flexible scheduling app that links to Google calendar and allows interviewees to book sessions of different lengths from available time slots.
To draw the most accurate insights from qualitative research, you need to take structured notes. Reframer allows note-taking in a simple UI interface, tagging and organizing notes in different themes.
Quantitative research involves collecting numerical data on large samples, making objective measurements, and performing numerical and statistical analyses to draw meaningful conclusions. The numerical data (called UX metrics) are meant to describe some aspect of the user experience. Examples are churn rates and click-through rates.
The collected samples are usually representative of the entire population, and if no bias is involved in their analysis, results can be generalized to the whole population. Structured data collection methods, such as questionnaires with close-ended questions, are often used. The collected numerical data can be represented graphically to show trends.
Quantitative research provides insights into the performance of different UI features, what users click, and how users find the site. It can also be used to test hypotheses formed from exploratory qualitative research processes.
Quantitative Research Methods
There are numerous quantitative research methods. However, I found the following to be the most effective:
Surveys: They are one of the most popular quantitative research methods and help designers collect massive amounts of user opinions. However, surveys may be misleading because you get what users say they do which may not be what they actually do.
A/B Testing: This involves creating and testing two versions of a design to identify the most effective. It’s often surprising to most designers just how much of a difference small modifications can create in user engagement and conversion rates.
Analytics: Analytics tools measure and provide helpful metrics like click-through rates, page views, and sometimes even churn rates.
Quantitative usability testing: This involves getting participants to interact with designs, competitor sites, or design prototypes and then measuring their success rate as well as other helpful metrics.
The Best Quantitative Research Tools
The following are some of the most commonly used quantitative research tools.
Typeform is a form-building software as a service (SaaS) solution that simplifies the creation of questionnaires and surveys to collect user data. It has a freemium payment model where one can sign up and use the free version with the option to upgrade to the paid version with additional functionalities. Most people, especially when starting, can effectively perform surveys using the free version.
One of Typeform’s key differences is that it displays a single question at a time to the user, which makes it feel like a conversation, and hence can collect qualitative user data, such as opinions on new services, in addition to quantitative data.
Lyssna, formerly UsabilityHub, is a user research platform that allows you to manage interviews, perform usability testing, and launch and manage surveys. All you need to do is upload design mock-ups and with simple clicks, get feedback from the Lyssna panel with over 530,000 panelists or from your own list of survey participants.
Google Sheets and Google Slides
Once you’ve collected numerical data, you often need to organize it, analyze it, and visualize it to draw actionable insights. Google Sheets enables you to organize the data neatly in tables, share it with your team, and perform data analysis and visualization with in-built functions and visualization structures.
Chances are managers and members of other departments wouldn’t want to look at raw data in Google Sheets. Google Slides enables you to display appealing graphs of the data, its statistical trends, and actionable insights drawn from them.
Which Approach Should You Take?
Qualitative and quantitative research should ideally be used together. In the mixed-approach case, you can access data that pinpoints a problem using quantitative research, such as a low percentage of repeat customers. However, to understand why that is happening, it would be best to recruit a small number of interviewees (typically not more than 10) to understand why they don’t purchase again and what they would prefer or require to become repeat customers.
Qualitative research can also be used as an exploratory tool to discover problems. Then quantitative research would come in to quantify the extent of the problem.
