User research is the practice of studying real people to learn what they need, what confuses them, and how they actually behave, so product and design decisions rest on evidence instead of opinion. It sits at the start of the product lifecycle, feeding UX design, product management, and service design with grounded input before a single pixel or line of code gets committed. Practitioners lean on a toolkit of interviews, field observation, surveys, and framing exercises to turn raw human behavior into personas, journeys, and problem statements a team can actually act on. The most important mental model to keep in mind: what people say and what people do are often different things — the strongest research plans triangulate attitudinal methods (interviews, surveys) against behavioral ones (field observation, analytics) rather than trusting either alone.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 14 focused tables and 109 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
A jump-to index of every table row in this cheat sheet.
An interactive map of every table and concept in this topic.
Table 1: Research Planning & Method Selection
Before recruiting a single participant, a researcher has to decide which method actually answers the question at hand — the same research goal can call for wildly different techniques depending on timing, and picking the wrong one wastes both budget and trust.
| Approach | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
Interview: "I always double-check prices" (attitude) vs. session recording showing they didn't (behavior) | • Attitudinal methods capture what people say or believe (interviews, surveys) • Behavioral methods capture what people actually do (field studies, analytics); the two frequently diverge. | |
Qual: "why do users abandon checkout?" · Quant: "what % abandon at step 3?" | Qualitative methods generate rich why/how insight from direct observation; quantitative methods generate how-many/how-much numbers from instrumented data. | |
Generative: field study before any design exists · Evaluative: usability test on a prototype | Generative research finds new problems and opportunities early; evaluative research checks whether an existing design or solution actually works. | |
Goals → questions → method → participants → timeline → analysis plan | A short document stating research goals, questions, chosen method, and success criteria before fieldwork starts, so the study stays scoped and defensible. |