UX Research in Product Design: Process, Methods, and Why It Matters

TL;DR: UX research and product design are related but distinct. Product design determines what gets built and why – balancing business goals, technical feasibility, and user needs. UX design focuses on how users experience it. UX research informs both, replacing assumptions with real user data at every stage of development. Skip research, and you're not saving time – you're moving the cost downstream.

UX research is the process of gathering real user data to inform product design decisions – and it's what separates products built on assumptions from products built on evidence. While UX design focuses on framing business goals into user journeys, product design sits one level up: fitting the entire product within business objectives, technical constraints, and user needs simultaneously. Understanding that difference is what makes research so critical.

This article covers what UX research is, how it fits into the product design process, which methods to use at each stage, and what you risk by skipping it.

UX design vs. product design: What's the difference?

Product designers focus on fitting the product within business guidelines – balancing goals, technical feasibility, and user needs. UX designers focus on framing those business goals into user journeys. Both roles are essential, but they operate at different levels of scope.

Product design owns the "what and why." UX design owns the "how it feels to use it."

"The distinction people miss is that product design is about outcomes – conversion, retention, whether the product solves a real business problem. UX design is a critical part of that, but it's not the whole picture. You can have beautiful UX and still ship the wrong product entirely."

 – Krzysztof Kaiser, Head of Product Design, Monterail

Why UX design matters

The value of UX design in developing digital products is no longer disputable, especially when we realize how good UX influences conversion rates and creates exceptional user experiences. Yet, when it comes to UX research, it is sometimes tempting to skip it and go straight to the design stage to save money which eventually becomes a trap. So, is UX research essential to your product design and development pr ocess?

In a nutshell, if you want to find the users of your product, make sure it fulfills their needs - the answer seems to be quite clear - YES. Also, numbers don't lie. Based on proper UX research and its findings, you’re able to create beautiful and intuitive User Interfaces (UI) which, according to Forrester Research: 

A well-designed UI can increase your website's conversion rate by up to 200%, and a better UX design can achieve conversion rates of up to 400%.

Isn’t it something to aim for with your product?

Project design as a part of product development 

Designing and developing products in the digital era is, in fact, a bumpy road. There is a need for constant balancing between trusting our gut instincts and taking advantage of data, especially since product development looks nothing like manufacturing physical items. While creating digital products, tasks can't be entirely repetitive, and there is no possibility to predict every activity; requirements constantly change, and so does the final product.

Product development is a trial to embrace these unpredictable factors in one unified framework (product design is a part of it) that ensures managers that their products will bring value to the potential customers.

As a crucial part of the whole product development, product design is focused on the creation but with business objectives in mind. While working on high-quality products or features, product designers have to find a compromise between business goals, technical possibilities, and users' needs. 

"Great product design is delivering solutions to specific business problems. For us, it is about outcomes and benefits more than the pixels on the screen. Results are based on metrics such as conversion, retention, and bounce rate or on aesthetic qualities like professional, friendly, quirky, energetic, or colorful."

– Krzysztof Kaiser, Head of Product Design, Monterail

Product design stages

The product design process consists of several stages (in various sources, the number and order can change regarding the approach) but is not linear. At Monterail, we have the following steps: 

1. Discovery phase

Discovery phase is the kick-off step is focused on setting the vision for your product. During Discovery Phase we try to understand the business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility, to set groundwork and project milestones. This stage is meant to unravel the truth about your business and its needs.

2. Information and planning

This stage involves creating a clear roadmap of your app. Planning the architecture and user flows will give you an organized and clear structure so that your users understand where they are and where to go next in your application. Information architecture is about organizing the ideas, knowledge showcased with the use of user journeys, site maps, user stories, navigation, and content.

3. Research and audit

Research is something like calling "checking" the vision. It relies on collecting data to determine if the concept meets the market's needs. Its ultimate goal is to find out what users think of the product's founding idea and validate the probability that they consider the product useful when it is launched. 

Later, data gathered during research are converted into valuable business insights and used to set the next actionable steps. It often involves creating data-grounded personas that could help visualize the customers' needs and creating empathy maps that help to visualize their actual thoughts. 

4. UX design & testing

Design is simply getting the job done. With data-grounded business insights, personas, and user journeys, designers should be equipped with all they need to create a product that mirrors the vision filtered by reality. 

Typically, the design stage finalizes with the prototype, which should test and validate whether the initial assumptions were right. With a prototype, natural interaction with customers is possible, during which some unexpected insights may come out and be used during the subsequent iterations. Usability testing can be done with various methods such as lab testing, session recordings, or guerilla testing. The whole idea of testing is to gather real-life insights, especially on what doesn't work with the product. 

5. UI design & branding

This stage revolves around creating beautiful and understandable interfaces to delight your users, with a new digital product or revamping an outdated app. A design should meet the industry’s standards, with a brand identity to speak your values and unique selling propositions. Here, the previous prototype will turn into a well-designed and colorful app, personalized with your brand’s concept and values. 

"What is UX research in product design?

The ultimate goal of product development is to build and launch products that fit users' needs, so incorporating UX research into product development in the initial stages seems pretty evident. Products irrelevant to the user simply will not find any buyers. Good UX research will help you minimize the risk of bad investment by bridging the gap between companies and their users. 

How to proceed with UX research? Researchers can reach out for several methods of gaining insights into given customers' actual wants, needs, and motivations. Depending on chosen methods, data collected during the process can be used at every stage of product development. 

For startups and new projects, it’s crucial to concentrate on validating if the idea actually fits the users' need and it solves the problem. Methods that can help you achieve better product-market fit consist of in-depth interviews, concept testing, prototyping, and usability testing. For an established product with a strong user base we prefer to focus on a mix of qualitative methods and quantitative. No matter at which stage your product is, the research-based design can help you shift your focus to things that are really important for your users and limit your costs of development.

– Krzysztof Kaiser, Head of Product Design, Monterail

Neglecting thorough research jeopardizes the entire product, as it dooms developers, designers, and marketers to rely solely on their assumptions and intuition. It is a very risky approach. In the beginning, when it turns out that a given feature or product is irrelevant to the user, it is possible to make a smooth pivot. With time, it gets more and more time- and cost-consuming. Involving your users in the product design process ensures that you base your app on real insights.

The methods that can be used at discovery phase are:

• Stakeholder Interviews

• User Interviews 

• User Observation

• User Shadowing

• Competition Analysis

After gathering the user requirements, they need to be converted into specific business specifications and design a prototype based on them. It is crucial to work in short iterations, and not to get personally involved in defending one particular version but being able to adjust it according to users' expectations. 

The UX research methods used to validate and iterate the early designs are:

• Wireframes 

• Expert Reviews

• Comparative Benchmarking

• Participatory Design

Validating the earliest design prototypes ensures product designers didn't lose the users' requirements from their sight. Once there is a certainty that everything is on the right track, it is time to test the usability of the product. This stage of product development can prevent designers from making small-great mistakes, ie. the mistakes that are easy to fix but - neglected - cause great consequences.   

The research methods that can be reached out during the prototyping phase are:

• Usability testing

• Comparative tests

• User mapping (empathy map, experience map, user scenarios)

How to conduct UX research: methods by stage

UX research isn't a single event – it's a continuous practice woven through every phase of product design. 

The methods you use depend entirely on where you are in the process: are you still validating an idea, shaping early designs, or stress-testing a prototype? Each stage demands a different approach, and using the wrong method at the wrong time is almost as costly as skipping research altogether.

Here's how it breaks down in practice.

Phase 1: Discovery – understanding the problem before you design

Before a single wireframe gets sketched, the discovery phase answers one critical question: does this product idea actually solve a real problem for real people?

This is the stage where assumptions are most dangerous and research is most undervalued. Teams eager to start building often treat discovery as a formality – a box to check before the "real work" begins. It isn't. Discovery is where the entire direction of the product gets set, and bad data here cascades into every decision that follows.

The methods that work best at this stage are ones that get you close to users in their natural context:

Stakeholder interviews establish what the business believes to be true about its users and their problems. 

These are essential starting points – not because stakeholders are always right, but because understanding their assumptions tells you exactly what needs to be validated or challenged.

User interviews are where you start replacing assumptions with evidence. The goal of UX interviews isn't to confirm what you already think – it's to stay genuinely open to being surprised. 

Good interview questions are open-ended, non-leading, and designed to surface the contrast between what users say they do and what they actually do. 

Pairing interviews with observation almost always produces richer insights than either method alone.

User observation and shadowing take that contrast seriously. People are not always reliable narrators of their own behavior – they describe the idealized version of what they do, not the messy reality. 

Observation means watching users perform real tasks without interrupting. Shadowing goes further: the researcher joins users in their natural environment, following along as they engage in real-world activities. It's more resource-intensive, but for products embedded in complex workflows – healthcare, logistics, enterprise software – it consistently surfaces insights that interviews alone would miss. 

Competitive analysis rounds out discovery by mapping what already exists in the market. Not to copy it, but to understand what users are already accustomed to, where existing solutions fall short, and where there is genuine space to do something better.

Phase recap: By the end of discovery, you should have enough grounded insight to move from "here's what we think users need" to "here's what users have told us, shown us, and demonstrated through their behavior."

Phase 2: Early design validation – checking the vision against reality

With discovery complete, design can begin – but research doesn't stop. This phase is about catching misalignments early, while they're still cheap to fix. The further a wrong assumption travels through the design process, the more expensive it becomes to correct.

Wireframes are the workhorse of this phase. 

A wireframe is a schematic illustration of a UI – showing the placement of content and functional elements without the visual polish of a finished design. Precisely because they're rough, they're valuable: users respond to the structure and logic of the layout without getting distracted by color, typography, or branding. 

They're fast to produce, easy to iterate, and make it genuinely safe to test ideas that might not work.

Expert reviews bring in experienced designers or domain specialists to evaluate early designs against established usability principles. 

These reviews are not a substitute for user feedback, but are an efficient way to catch obvious problems before involving real users – fixing issues that any trained eye would spot before spending time and budget on formal testing.

Comparative benchmarking evaluates your early designs against competitors or industry standards. 

Benchmarking is useful for identifying where your product might create unnecessary friction by deviating from patterns users already understand – and equally useful for spotting where convention is worth breaking.

Participatory design goes further by directly involving users in the design process. 

Rather than presenting users with something to react to, participatory design invites them to co-create – sketching, sorting, arranging. It can feel uncomfortable for teams attached to their ideas, but it consistently surfaces needs and mental models that observation and interviews alone don't reveal.

Phase recap: The goal of this phase isn't perfection – it's alignment. You're making sure the design that's taking shape still reflects what users actually need, not what the team has gradually convinced itself they need.

Phase 3: Prototyping and usability testing – finding what doesn't work

By the prototyping phase, the product is close enough to real that users can interact with it naturally. This is where research shifts from exploratory to evaluative: you're no longer asking "what do users need?" but "does this design actually work for them?"

Usability testing is the cornerstone of this phase. 

Real users are given specific tasks to complete using the prototype, while researchers observe where they succeed, hesitate, or fail entirely. The goal isn't to validate that the design is good – it's to find out what's broken before it reaches production. 

Small usability problems that feel easy to dismiss during testing tend to cause a significant drop-off in live products.

Remote usability testing extends this practice to users' natural environments – at home, in the office, and between meetings on mobile. 

An online platform records the screen and captures how users actually experience the product outside a controlled setting. This matters because behavior in a lab and behavior in real life aren't always the same thing.

UX mapping – including empathy maps, experience maps, and user scenario mapping – uses visuals and storytelling to illustrate the full arc of a user's interaction with the product. 

It's particularly useful at this stage for identifying points of friction that don't show up in individual task-based tests but emerge when you look at the end-to-end journey. Where does the experience break down? Where does it create unnecessary cognitive load? Where does it lose users who were otherwise engaged?

Comparative testing puts two or more design variations in front of users to determine which performs better on specific criteria. 

This test is not about picking a winner by preference – it's about understanding which design helps users achieve their goals more reliably and with less effort.

Phase recap: By the end of this phase, the prototype should have been challenged enough that the team has genuine confidence in what they're building – not because they believe in it, but because users have validated it.

Research doesn't end at launch, either. Once a product is live, the same discipline applies: measuring market success, analyzing real usage patterns, and identifying where the product is starting to drift from the needs it was built to serve. 

The methods change – analytics, ongoing user interviews, post-launch usability studies – but the principle stays the same. 

Products that stop listening to users eventually become irrelevant to them.

Benefits of UX research for your business

User research will help you create an optimal product for users, and should be done at all stages of the development process. Before designing starts, research helps to understand the target group, find out a bit about their problems and validate the initial vision; while carrying out iterative tests during development, it makes sure that the users' needs are still in the center of the designer’s interests; then, after launch, research enables to measure the market success and analyze the ROI.

"The ROI conversation around UX research is actually straightforward. Every round of usability testing you do before development is a problem you're not paying developers to fix after launch. We've seen research save multiples of its own cost in avoided rework – consistently."

 – Krzysztof Kaiser, Head of Product Design, Monterail

It would be no overstatement to say, it is an essential foundation for design strategy. Long story short, that brings numerous business benefits, such as:

• Validating the potential market value of the product

There is no other way to check if what we think the customers need aligns with what the customers actually need than asking them. Users have no biases, they are not personally involved in the creation process, and the only thing they care about is the excellent product. Thus, UX research allows us to build something that matters and solve a relevant problem that people are struggling with. 

• Eliminating the wrong ideas and correcting the course 

The sooner we exclude the ideas that don't work, the more money we can save. UX research allows us to detect and ditch underperforming ideas before they spoil the good ones and - eventually - ruin the product. 

• Reducing development costs 

Upfront conducted user research enables software houses to significantly reduce the need for extensive redesign and redevelopment that may be necessary to fix a product when it turns out to miss the customers' expectations. 

• Adding features that nobody thinks of but everybody needs them

While talking to or observing users, UX researchers can spot the blank spaces that need to be fulfilled with specific features to enhance the product. Users can be very creative and unpredictable. Simply said, you cannot afford to skip UX research, when you want to make money, instead of wasting them. 

Let’s…research!

Imagine what cars would look like if Henry Ford simply had asked potential users what they wanted - there’s a chance we wouldn’t be driving cars right now (at least such advanced machines). Steve Jobs, whose products were a real game-changer in the modern era showed a similar approach to product design and development:

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want," But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.

And - as following Jobs's footsteps is typically the dream of every entrepreneur - it is tempting to take it literally... and be crushed by the market. Jobs was simply a few steps ahead. Full of his quote is nothing less than the praise of UX research and establishing the customer expectations even before their "official" establishment.