How many users do you need to interview?

For qualitative insight, five to eight per distinct segment usually reaches saturation — the point where new interviews repeat what you've heard. Quantity matters less than recruiting people who actually match your target users.

When should you use qualitative vs quantitative research?

Quantitative (analytics, surveys) tells you what is happening and how much; qualitative (interviews, observation) tells you why. Diagnose direction with numbers, then explain the cause with conversations — most good studies chain the two.

User Research

The systematic study of users' needs, behaviors, and pain points — through interviews, surveys, and observation — to ground design in evidence.

Process & Methods

User research is how a team replaces opinion with evidence. It spans qualitative methods (interviews, contextual observation, usability tests) and quantitative ones (surveys, analytics, funnels), each answering a different kind of question — why people behave a certain way versus how many do.

Research feeds nearly every other artifact: personas, journey maps, and prioritized problem lists all come from it. Skipping it doesn't remove the assumptions — it just leaves them untested until they surface as expensive mistakes in production.

In practice

A team assumes users churn because the product lacks integrations. Six churned-customer interviews later, a different story: people left because the weekly report they showed their boss broke when data sources changed — trust, not features. Analytics alone couldn't reveal that (the events looked normal), and interviews alone couldn't size it (analytics showed 30% of accounts hit the breakage). Pairing the two methods is what turned a roadmap guess into a confident fix.

User Research

In practice

Frequently Asked Questions