What do user researchers do?
In this video, user researchers discuss their current roles, their day-to-day work, and their previous experience. User researchers help teams to understand their users and deliver the outcome those users …
Course: User Research in Government: Getting Started
How is user research different from other types of research?
In simple terms, research is the search for knowledge and truth. It is a structured, systematic way of investigating problems and testing hypotheses, analysing data and coming to conclusions. As …
Why is user research important?
In this video, user researchers explain why they think user research is important. User research is important because people will always do things in different ways and can do things …
What is user research?
In this video, user researchers give their definitions of user research. What is user research? User research is a research specialism. User researchers help teams to learn about users so …
What is a user?
In this video, government user researchers talk about their definition of a user. Users are the people who use a product or service to get something done. You yourself are …
Welcome to the course!
Welcome to our Introduction to User Research course! What will this course cover? This course has been created in collaboration with user researchers in different government departments, who you will …
Interviewing
In step 3.6, we introduced you to a number of different research methods. Let’s explore one in more detail – interviews. Interviewing is a very common research method, but it’s …
User research in government – the career pathway
In this video, our Head of User Research, Louise Petre, explains why you should consider a user research career in government. The career pathway This is the Government Digital and …
Course review
We hope you have enjoyed this Introduction to User Research course. If you have premium or unlimited access to FutureLearn, you will receive a signed certificate to show you have …
Interview analysis – good practice
In this video, our user researchers demonstrate good interview practice. Task Watch the video and try to identify the potential problems that could have occurred and how the researcher manages …
Interview analysis – bad practice
In this video, user researchers conduct ‘interviews’ but do not demonstrate good practice. Task Watch the video and try to identify the problems with these interviews. These are fictional (and …
Safeguarding yourself and your team
In this video, user researchers discuss the importance of safeguarding yourself and your team during research. Research can be challenging. We sometimes have to research distressing or sensitive topics, share …
Minimising harm
In this video, user researchers discuss the importance of safeguarding participants in user research. What is harm? In any kind of research, the most important thing is to minimise harm. …
Research methods
In this video, user researchers talk about different research methods and how they choose them. There are a number of research methods available to user researchers that give different types …
Basic data analysis – qualitative data
Qualitative data can be a little trickier to analyse, as you are dealing with words and not numbers. For example, one of the most common types of qualitative data comes …