Article · About 12 minute read

When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

Christian Rohrer · Nielsen Norman Group Free Intermediate

This piece sorts research methods along attitudinal versus behavioral and qualitative versus quantitative, so you can see exactly where interviews and surveys each sit. The line that matters for you: qualitative methods (interviews) answer why and how to fix, while quantitative methods (surveys) answer how many and how much. That framing tells you a survey is not good enough at the start because the start is a why question.

• Interviews are qualitative and attitudinal, best for understanding why people behave a certain way and uncovering problems you did not know to ask about.
• Surveys are quantitative and attitudinal, best once you already know the questions and want to measure how common an answer is across many people.
• Early on you usually do interviews first to find the real questions, then use surveys later to size and confirm what you learned.