Understanding your customers has always been an essential part of product design. It gives you insights into the users’ wants, needs, and expectations, allowing you to make data-driven decisions for future product enhancements. While user research itself is a complex process, many businesses struggle with finding the right research methods to get the data they need. That’s why, in this article, we’ll elaborate on what is mixed methods research and how you can implement it within your next research session.
By explaining what this research methodology focuses on and how it’s conducted, you’ll get a better understanding of its importance. Furthermore, we’ll elaborate on its key components and how it can benefit your business. After highlighting its key components, we’ll also give you a detailed overview of how to conduct such research and the challenges you may face.
Continue reading to discover when to use mixed methods research and how it can improve your UX!
So, what is mixed methods research? As the name implies, this research approach combines qualitative research and quantitative research in one single user study. By gathering two different types of data, you can get a more comprehensive understanding of your research goals. Since mixed method research is popular for its versatility, it has multiple applications, including behavioral and health research, social sciences, and user research.
By utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data, you can get answers to more complex questions that can’t be solved by simply relying on one data source. To better understand why use mixed methods research, we’ll take a look at what both qualitative and quantitative data offer.
While quantitative research revolves around numerical data, qualitative research focuses on descriptive information. Since the first option uses surveys and questionnaires, the latter utilizes user interviews and focus groups to encourage participants to give more elaborate answers. By combining the numerical and non-numerical data you’ll get comprehensive insights about the users’ experience, leading to a more balanced analysis and more informed conclusions.
Now that you’ve grasped the basics behind mixed methods research, we want to highlight its key components. To successfully implement this research methodology, you must be mindful of the following elements:
So, when is the best time to use mixed method research, and why? In most cases, this research methodology is used when researchers can’t answer a certain question by only utilizing quantitative or qualitative methods. For example, if you’re dealing with a complex research question, utilizing mixed methods gives you access to richer data that can help add context to the overall study.
Furthermore, the different types of data can help you cross-check and validate your research findings, leading to more precise recommendations. If you want to further enhance the credibility of your study, mixed methods research utilizes a process known as triangulation to determine if the qualitative and quantitative data converge.
However, when using this research method, remember that you must pay close attention to the data analysis process. While many researchers focus solely on gathering the necessary qualitative and quantitative data, you must always stay vigilant of the relationship between these two types of data and how they correspond.
After explaining what is mixed methods research, we want to focus on how to conduct such research and the process behind it. To better understand how to utilize this methodology yourself, here’s a step-by-step guide you can follow:
The first step in any user research process is defining your research objectives. During this stage, you must outline the questions you want answered during the research and what is the best way to do so. If you’re having trouble defining your research goals, you can rely on the SMART framework, which stands for:
Once you’ve defined your research goals, the next step is to choose a mixed method research design. This includes a framework based on which you’ll conduct your research so you can successfully gather both qualitative and quantitative data in one single study. Since there are different types of mixed method research designs available, always choose the one that fits your research needs best. Planning your approach beforehand allows you to better organize the study and extract as much information as possible.
One of the most time-consuming steps of the process is the data collection phase. During this stage, you will be tasked to conduct thorough user testing to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Depending on your research goals, this may involve surveys, questionnaires, user interviews, focus groups, or observations.
Regardless of the data collection methods you choose, remember that you should remain mindful of when the data has been collected and how it can be used to enrich your research findings. In today’s modern age, there are numerous online tools that can help you quickly and efficiently gather the needed information. For example, our User Evaluation platform allows you to instantly transcribe your user interviews and collect them for future analysis.
After you’ve gathered the necessary information, you begin the most complex step of the process, known as data analysis. During this phase, you’re supposed to identify key insights, patterns, and discrepancies that will allow you to make future data-driven decisions and recommendations. The tricky part of this stage is that manually analyzing the gathered data has to be individually conducted for qualitative and quantitative research.
To optimize this process, User Evaluation is capable of extracting actionable insights, pain points, and areas of improvement in a matter of seconds. It’s able to quickly summarize key research findings across multiple files for easy interpretation and comparison. You can also appoint tags and collect valuable data into collections to never miss important findings.
The last step in mixed methods research is reporting your research findings through thorough reports or presentations. Since you’ll have access to qualitative and quantitative information, you can offer valuable recommendations backed up by both numerical and non-numerical data. Not only will this make your recommendations more trustworthy and credible, but it can also help your entire team make better product decisions and optimizations.
Since conveying the right message is essential during reporting, our User Evaluation platform can help you craft detailed reports and presentations based on your insights in just one click. You’ll also be able to enrich them with necessary data visualizations to simplify the research findings and make them easily digestible for the entire team and inexperienced stakeholders.
One key component of conducting efficient mixed methods research is choosing the appropriate mixed method research designs. As mentioned, there are various types of mixed method research designs that allow you to successfully gather both qualitative and quantitative data within a single study. To better understand how they impact your overall research process, we’ll highlight their differences and unique characteristics.
That being said, here are the most popular types of mixed method research designs and their use:
The first type of mixed method research design you can implement is the convergent parallel design. This option allows you to collect both quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously by utilizing different data collection methods and then analyze them separately.
For example, you can conduct user interviews to gain descriptive information about your product, while also deploying surveys to the same group to get numerical data about their overall satisfaction. Once this data has been analyzed, you compare the results during data interpretation to gain a deeper understanding of the research problem.
The second type of mixed method research design is the explanatory sequential design. As the name implies, this option focuses on collecting and analyzing quantitative data first.
Once you’ve gathered the necessary information from the quantitative data analysis, you start collecting qualitative data that can help you gain a better understanding of the results. Thus, this design is most commonly used as a way to contextualize quantitative findings. For example, you can conduct survey testing for your product's usability and then follow up with an interview to better understand the pain points and areas of improvement.
Similar to the previous design type, the exploratory sequential design focuses on collecting and analyzing qualitative data first, followed by collecting and analyzing quantitative data. Since this option requires you to first explore the initial questions before you gather numerical data to support them, it’s often considered more complex than explanatory sequential designs. Furthermore, you’ll need to first develop a hypothesis based on which you’ll test the qualitative data with the quantitative.
The last popular type of mixed methods research design is known as the embedded design. During this data collection process, both the qualitative and quantitative data are gathered simultaneously. However, what differentiates this design type is that one of the data types is primary and the other is embedded within it. In most cases, it’s the qualitative data that’s embedded within the quantitative to strengthen its conclusion.
Lastly, we want to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of mixed methods research so you can decide whether it’s the right option for your research goals. To gain a better understanding, we’ll explain both separately.
The benefits of implementing mixed methods research are the following:
On the other hand, the challenges of mixed methods research are as follows:
After discovering what is mixed methods research and how it can be beneficial for your entire research process, remember that you should always choose the appropriate methodologies based on your unique research goals and needs. Even though this research method can help you uncover findings you may otherwise miss by only including qualitative or quantitative data, it’s essential to plan it beforehand to yield satisfying results.
Lastly, if you ever need help gathering, organizing, and interpreting research data, check out what we at User Evaluation have to offer. Our platform is designed to aid in your research process by implementing state-of-the-art AI technology to automate complex and time-consuming tasks. Whether you need help transcribing your user interviews or creating mesmerizing research reports and presentations, User Evaluation can accelerate the process and let you focus on more important tasks.