📖 Notes
LESSON 14 OF 26
User Research — Interviews, Surveys & Empathy Maps
Design Starts With Understanding, Not Screens
How to understand users before designing. User interviews, surveys, empathy maps, and user personas.
Research Methods
Interviews, Surveys, Empathy Maps
🎙️
User Interviews
One-on-one conversations gathering qualitative insight directly from real users.
📋
Surveys
Structured questions at scale — good for quantitative patterns across many users.
🗺️
Empathy Maps
Organize what a user thinks, feels, says, and does into one visual reference.
👤
User Personas
A fictional but research-based profile representing a key user segment.
Interviews vs Surveys
- Interviews uncover the "why" behind behavior — deep, qualitative, time-intensive.
- Surveys confirm how common a pattern is — broad, quantitative, faster to scale.
- Strong research usually combines both — interviews to generate hypotheses, surveys to validate them at scale.
💡
Research comes first
Skipping straight to wireframes without research risks designing a solution to a problem users don't actually have.