FAQs

UX research is how you find out what your customers actually need, how they behave, and why they make the choices they do. It’s usually focused on digital products, and the point of it is to make sure you’re solving a real problem, in a way people can actually use.

It splits into two halves, and most of this page is organised around them.

Discovery, or generative research. The work you do before you know what to build. You’re looking for unmet needs, real behaviour, and the context people are operating in. We call this customer research, and it covers in-depth interviews, diary studies, contextual visits and focus groups.

Evaluation, or evaluative research. The work you do once something exists, even if it only exists as a prototype. You’re looking for what breaks and why. Usability testing is the main method, and a UX audit is the faster expert-review version of it.

Most teams need both, at different moments. If you’re still arguing about what to build, you need discovery. If you have something and want to know whether it works, you need evaluation. If you’re not sure which you’re in, that’s usually a sign you need discovery.

Conducting user testing and customer research in South Africa and broader Africa requires a knowledge of the local market inside and out. The unique mix of cultural, tech and economic factors at play here can hugely influence how users interact with digital platforms. That’s where we come in. With our deep-rooted understanding of the South African market and good partners in other countries in Africa, How Might We can help you get your usability testing just right. 

We’re clued up on the unique user behaviours and preferences that shape the digital landscape in South Africa. Armed with this knowledge, we can make sure your UX really hits the mark with your target users, leading to more reliable and valuable outcomes. 

Absolutely. Remote UX research has become a valuable and often preferable method for us to gather insights, especially when working with geographically dispersed users or limited budgets.

Remote research can reduce observer bias, feel more natural to participants, and still allow for rich qualitative insight, provided it’s planned well. While in-person sessions offer more control and the ability to read body language more easily, remote sessions often lead to more authentic behaviour because participants are in familiar environments. At How Might We, we offer both in-person and remote research and can help you choose which one is best for you based on your research question and respondent group.

For a more detailed answer, read Remote vs in-person UX research.

We write a recruit brief with you, then work through a network of professional recruiters to find people who match it. You approve the criteria before anyone is contacted.

The harder question is what happens when the people you need are not on a recruiter’s list. We have interviewed teachers in lower-quintile schools and coding clubs, nurses in clinics in Delft and Nyanga, Grade R teachers in Mpumalanga, and queer youth in South Africa and Zimbabwe who had good reasons not to want to be found.

That work is less about databases and more about trust. It usually means going through an organisation the community already trusts, being honest about what taking part involves, and designing sessions so nobody is put at risk by participating. On one study, some participants were worried about evidence of the research sitting on their phones. That changes how you record, where you meet, and sometimes whether you proceed at all.

We would rather tell you a group is difficult to reach responsibly than promise a sample we cannot recruit safely.

It comes down to whether you already have something to test.

Usability testing needs an artefact. A live product, a prototype, even a rough sketch of a flow. You put it in front of someone and watch where they struggle. It answers “does this work?”

Customer research doesn’t need anything to exist yet. It answers “what should we build, and for whom?” You’re learning how people currently solve the problem, what they use instead of you, where the frustration sits, and what would need to be true for something new to be worth switching to.

The mistake we see most often is teams reaching for usability testing when the real question is a discovery one. You can test a checkout flow to perfection and still be selling something nobody wanted. Testing tells you the door is hard to open. It doesn’t tell you whether anyone wants to go through it.

A rough rule: if your team disagrees about what the customer’s problem is, do customer research. If you agree on the problem and disagree about the solution, test it.

If you’re not sure, start with a small discovery round. It’s usually cheaper than building the wrong thing well.

UX research can help increase revenue and lower expenses. It’s usually quite hard to work out the exact RIO of research, but when you have experienced products not meeting customer expectations or software projects fail to launch, it’s a very easy investment.

Improves conversion rates

Getting humans to take action is one of the most important aspects of UX research. If you want customers to convert, you need to understand every level of the behaviour change funnel. It’s not possible to do this in a boardroom; not all people are the same, and as they say, “you are not your users.” If the people in the boardroom are your users, then less research is needed.

Increases customer retention

Using best practices can only take your customer experience so far. If you want to differentiate your offering, you need to offer an experience that does not just follow what everyone else is doing.

UX research will help you understand what behaviour change techniques will work and what value needs to be created to get customers to keep coming back.

Reduce development costs

Don’t waste time building the wrong thing or building it in a way that customers can’t use, so more time is needed to fix the UX issues after launch. 

Lowers customer support expenses

One way to lower support calls is to hide the contact number from the website, but that will also mean customers will not hang around. A far more effective way to reduce service calls, it allows customers to answer questions and complete tasks on thier own.

Effective UX research reveals the finer points of how users interact with products, helping to create solutions that genuinely resonate with the target audience, leading to a harmonious user experience. 

If you consider development to be releasing features and stop timing after launch, then yes, it could slow down the development process. But if you consider development to be releasing customer value and include the time needed to fix issues after launch, then no, it definitely does not slow down your development time; in fact, it speeds it up.

Customer research helps to ensure you are building the right thing, but also building it right. If a team is releasing features without customer research, there is a high risk that changes will need to be made after launch or, even worse, that no one will see the value in the feature at all.

Another way to look at customer research is as a risk mitigation process. Generative research helps to ensure you understand the real job that customers are hiring your product to solve, and evaluative research helps uncover any potential issues customers might face using the product. It moves the time spent from the end of the development process (fixing issues) to the beginning.

Smaller, almost always.

We usually recommend starting with a small qualitative study and expanding only where the findings show that more digging will add value. Each phase stands on its own, so you get something usable at the end of the first round rather than waiting months for one large delivery.

The reason is not cost. It is that large upfront studies commit you to a set of questions before you know which ones matter. First rounds routinely change what the second round should ask. If you have scoped the whole programme in advance, you either follow a plan you no longer believe in, or you renegotiate.

There is a point where this flips. If you are making one large irreversible decision and you need to cover several distinct audiences properly, a bigger single study is the right call. That is rarer than it looks.

Quite a lot, and it’s really important to know the strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research.

It cannot predict what people will actually buy once a product is in market. What it can do is explain why customers make the choices they do, what changes those choices, and which of your assumptions carry the most risk. It’s also pretty good at predicting why customers might not buy the product at all.

It cannot give you a statistically reliable price point. It will tell you how price changes perceived value, and where a number stops feeling reasonable. If you need a precise threshold, that is a quantitative study and we will say so.

It cannot tell you how many or how large something is or will be. Qualitative work explains the why behind a behaviour. It does not size it.

And it cannot make the decision for you. Research narrows the range of sensible options and shows you what you would be betting on. Someone still has to place the bet.

We are wary of research that promises certainty. The useful output is a smaller set of better-understood risks, not a guarantee.

This is the question we ask ourselves about every project, and it is the reason we work the way we do.

We do not hand over a list of observations and leave you to work out what to do with them. Every finding is prioritised by severity, and recommendations are grouped into what to fix now, what to experiment with, and what to stop investing in for the moment. That last one matters more than people expect. Knowing what to drop frees up as much budget as knowing what to build.

We also present findings to your team in a working session rather than emailing a file over. Research that gets discussed gets used. Research that arrives as an attachment gets filed.

The other thing that changes outcomes is having your team in the room during sessions. We recommend you join at least the first one. Watching a customer struggle with something you designed does more in twenty minutes than any report will, and teams that observe move faster afterwards because they are not arguing about whether the finding is real.

Test the assumption before you build on it.

Most wasted development spend does not come from bad code. It comes from building something well that nobody needed, or building the right thing in a shape people cannot use. Both are visible before development starts, and both get expensive the moment they are not.

The practical version is unglamorous. Write down what you are assuming about your customers. Rank those assumptions by how much you are betting on each one against how confident you actually are. Test the top two or three with real people, using a prototype rather than a description, before anyone commits a sprint to it.

We do this most often as a round of usability testing on a prototype ahead of development, or a short discovery study when the problem itself is still fuzzy. Both are small. Both routinely surface issues that would otherwise only appear after launch, when fixing them costs a release cycle instead of an afternoon.

We would not claim research guarantees you build the right thing. It shortens the odds, and it makes the bet explicit.

Yes, for the thing it is good at.

Five participants will give you a strong view of the core usability problems in a flow. Jakob Nielsen’s work is the usual citation, and our own experience across hundreds of sessions a year matches it. The same three or four serious problems turn up again and again, and by the fifth session you are mostly confirming what you already saw.

Where five is not enough is when your customers split into genuinely different segments with different needs. If that is the case we will usually recommend ten, and we would rather work that out with you in the kickoff workshop than discover it halfway through fieldwork.

What five people cannot tell you is how many of your customers have the problem. That is a quantitative question. Qualitative research tells you what is broken and why. Your analytics tell you how often.

The methodology is what validates the data, not the headcount. Five people recruited badly will tell you less than nothing.

No, but it has changed how research gets done, and researchers who ignore it will be replaced by researchers who don’t.

AI is good at analysis. Give it a pile of transcripts and it will find the patterns quickly. It is much weaker at synthesis, which is the part that matters. Analysis is finding the pattern in the facts. Synthesis is knowing what the pattern means for your business, and that needs an understanding of your goals, your constraints and your customers’ context.

There are specific things it still misses. It works from text, so it over-interprets what people say and loses how they said it. Tone, hesitation, body language and the long pause before someone answers honestly all disappear. It over-indexes on whatever comes up most often, which is not the same as what matters most. Smaller insights that do not fit a large theme get lost. And it will not tell you when it is wrong.

We use it daily. We just do not let it do the thinking.

We use AI openly, but with strict bounties.

We use it for transcription on most projects, and transcripts are part of what you get. One honest caveat: recordings made in the field are messier than remote interviews, so on contextual work we use a mix of transcripts and researcher notes taken in the moment rather than relying on transcription alone.

We use it to draft discussion guides and screeners, then rewrite them. First drafts come back too broad and produce polite, unhelpful answers. It is a starting point, not an output.

We use it to check our own interpretation, by asking what we might have missed in a set of findings. That catches blind spots.

On UX audits we actually recommend running the AI pass first, to clear the obvious accessibility and best-practice issues quickly, then applying human judgement to what is left.

Where we do not use it is in the room with participants, particularly on sensitive work. A neutral presence is not the same as a safe one, and knowing when to stop asking is not something we would delegate.

We also check how any tool we use handles what we put into it. Your recordings are your customers’ words.

Yes and no. AI tools are excellent for spotting accessibility issues or comparing UI elements against documented best practices extremely quickly. We actually recommend running an AI UX audit before adding the human element to pick up any big, obvious issues. At the moment, however, AI tools lack the contextual judgment and empathy that a human brings. It’s very hard for an AI to imagine how a human will interpret what the digital product is saying or asking for.

Strategic UX insight requires understanding business goals, interpreting user behaviour, and knowing when to break or bend “best practices.” That’s where experienced researchers still make all the difference.

Customer research is the discovery half of UX research: the work you do to understand people before you have anything to test.

In practice it’s four main methods, and which one you use depends on what you need to see.

In-depth interviews: One-on-one conversations, usually an hour. The workhorse. Best for understanding motivations, decisions, and how someone thinks about a problem in their own words.

Contextual visits: We go to where people actually use the thing: a home, a shop floor, a clinic, a classroom. Probably the most data-rich sessions available, because you see the interruptions, workarounds and constraints nobody thinks to mention in an interview.

Diary studies: Participants record their own experience over days or weeks. Best when the behaviour is spread out over time, or happens somewhere we can’t be.

Focus groups: We’re usually sceptical, because people perform for each other. But with the right question, the right people and tight facilitation, they earn their place.

Most projects use one or two of these, not all four. The choice comes from what you’re trying to learn, not from what sounds most thorough.

Customer research allows businesses to tailor their customer service offerings to better meet their clients’ needs. By understanding the pain points and challenges that customers face, businesses can develop solutions that address these issues and improve the overall customer experience. Customer service research can also identify areas where businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors and establish themselves as leaders in their field.

But the most important reason for customer research is that customers are human. They don’t always act logically or in the way a business would like them to, even if customers want what the business is offering. We know that being healthy is better for people, but many people don’t always look after their health in the best way possible. It’s not because people don’t want to be healthier or feel that being healthy is a lie; it’s because of a host of human factors that sway behaviour. Customer research focuses on why customers behave a certain way and what motivates them to ensure that the business iterates its offering to best serve these human factors.

Focus groups have their place in market research and can be extremely valuable, but we have found that we gain a far deeper understanding of customers when we interview them individually. This is mainly because of the types of questions we need to answer. We are not asking which design they like more or what their opinion is on a certain subject. We need to discover the nuances of a customer’s decision-making process and dive deep into potentially sensitive topics that take time to uncover.

We also need a customer’s story to be unaffected by other people’s opinions or even silenced by someone with a louder personality. For these reasons, we specialise in one-on-one, in-depth UX research sessions.

Usability testing is a lot like giving your digital product a trial run. It’s an essential part of UX (User Experience) research that ensures your website or app isn’t just good on paper – it’s user-friendly in real life, too.  

It’s all about letting actual users take your product for a spin and seeing how they find the experience. But it’s not just about finding issues – it’s about finding solutions. We’re here to turn those insights into action, making your customers’ user experience even better.  

With so much competition in the modern market, usability testing isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a must. It’s the secret sauce that allows you to really get to grips with your users’ needs and preferences, helping you create digital solutions that are functional, intuitive, and enjoyable.  

Without usability testing, it’s like designing in the dark. You could create a product that looks great in theory but falls flat in practice due to poor usability. Usability testing is the torch that lights the way, helping you design with confidence and making sure your product is in tune with your users’ needs.

Each round will be different depending on what the main challenge is that we are testing, but usually, there are four main phases to a 60-minute usability test

Warmup and background 

First, we will ask general questions about the respondent. This is not only an icebreaker but also to confirm which personas they might belong to as well as confirm some of the items they answered on the screener.

In-depth customer interview

We don’t just test the interface in a usability test. In the beginning, we spend time understanding your customers’ behaviours, motivations and feelings. We can delve into the nuances of why they chose a certain product or how they feel about a brand.

Task-based scenarios 

We will ask them to complete certain tasks we have decided on in the testing plan. While they complete these tasks, we’re keenly observing, taking note of any problem areas or places where users get stuck. For example, test users might struggle to find the CHECKOUT button. In these instances, our team members ask guiding questions such as “What’s going on now?” or “Where to next?” to elicit more information about the user’s experience. These questions are not designed to frustrate the test user but rather to investigate tricky spots which may have been overlooked.

Wrap-up

We will ask for final thoughts about the overall experience. Usability tests can’t prove if customers will definitely use something outside of the test, but it’s sometimes rather interesting to ask them to imagine themselves using it tomorrow to see what they come up with.

Depending on what we want to learn and the fidelity of the designs we are testing, there are a few techniques we can use within usability testing.

Concept test

We use this when we want to test a concept of a solution, rather than the interface itself. The concept test is the closest to generative research we have in usability testing. It does not require a fully designed prototype, and arguably it should not be too ‘designed’. We just need something to help explain the general idea of the solution. This could be a video, an advert, a simple drawing or a storyboard.

Prototype test

This is the most common type of usability test and usually includes some of the concept areas as well as larger interactions on the interface. With a prototype test, we focus on comprehension, learnability, information hierarchy, choice architecture, and value proposition. Even within prototype testing, we can have different fidelity levels of prototypes depending on what we learn. The more conceptual we need to test, the lower the fidelity needs to be, but the more detailed and interaction-based the test is, the higher the fidelity needs to be.

Live site test

This is the most statistically driven test with detailed task analysis. We look at the time it takes to complete specific actions and the success vs failure rate. This is the most accurate representation of what your customers will actually be experiencing with load times, real data, and a fully functional front end.

Usability tests are great at finding out problems in a design or customer journey. What it can’t do is prove that a customer will definitely use it or how much they will pay for it, outside of the test.

Usability testing will ensure that you don’t have obstacles in the way of a customer completing their transaction. It will help you understand why customers are behaving a certain way, or why they are dropping off at a certain point of your journey.  It’s possible to deduce how customers, similar to the ones we tested, will behave in these scenarios, but because we don’t know how large the target market is, we can’t guarantee that behaviour will happen in your entire customer base.

Usability testing, like all qualitative research, pairs very nicely with quantitative data. Your analytics can tell you what customers are doing and usability tests will tell you why, as well as give suggestions to improve their behaviour. Your analytics will then validate if your iterations are successful.

No. You don’t need to usability test every screen or feature. Instead, usability testing is most valuable when used intentionally. On areas where the stakes are high, where users are likely to get stuck, or where your team is uncertain about a design decision. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s to reduce the risk of poor user experiences where they matter most. At How Might We, we help teams figure out what to test, when, and why, so you’re investing research effort where it delivers the most value.

For a more detailed answer, read our post Should I usability test everything?

A UX audit is a systematic expert evaluation of a digital product, such as a website, app, or prototype. It’s designed to uncover usability problems, possible friction points, and areas where the experience might not align with user expectations.

For our UX audit, we analyse each page of a flow, looking for basic UX and accessibility issues, such as “do clickable elements look clickable?” but also comprehension and value proposition issues, such as “what is this page telling its customers?” and “what is the motivation to a user to take action?”

The goal is to provide actionable recommendations that help teams improve usability, increase conversion, and reduce frustration. At How Might We, we use UX audits as a strategic tool to guide better design decisions and prioritise fixes that will have the biggest impact on users.

A UX audit is most helpful when you need quick feedback on which big issues might be holding back your product’s user experience, but don’t yet have the time or budget for in-depth user research. It’s particularly useful before a redesign (to avoid carrying over problems), after launch (to identify quick wins), or when user feedback or analytics point to issues with task completion or conversion.

Whether your product is live or still in development, a UX audit can provide targeted insight into what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus design improvements for maximum value.

We have developed 50 heuristics covering Learnability and affordance, Accessibility and inclusion, UI design, Responsiveness, Navigation and feedback, Value proposition, Comprehension and trust. These heuristics result from combining Nielsen’s 10 usability principles, Baymard’s e-commerce guidelines, Google’s mobile e-commerce heuristics, and hundreds of hours of one-on-one usability tests with real customers.

We will happy share our heuristics list with you if you want more detail. Contact us