What it is
User research is the discovery work that goes into a UX engagement before any testing or redesign happens. We talk to your customers (and where useful, your stakeholders), run surveys, map journeys, and produce the artefacts a design team needs to make defensible decisions. It's the right intervention when you don't yet know what's wrong, when the audience is shifting, or when you're scoping a major redesign.
What you get
- Stakeholder interviews — typically 4-6 conversations with your team to surface internal assumptions, business goals, constraints, and existing knowledge.
- Customer interviews — typically 8-12 conversations with target users. Recorded, transcribed, themed. Where appropriate we recruit non-customers (the people you're failing to convert) too.
- Survey work where the audience is large enough to produce useful quantitative signal — we design, run, and analyse the survey.
- Journey maps for the key user flows — what the user is trying to do, what they think, feel, encounter, decide.
- Persona artefacts where they're useful. We make a deliberate distinction between research-grounded personas (built from the interview data) and marketing-fluff personas (invented). We only do the first.
- Themes & insights report — what we heard, what surprised us, what didn't, what it means for your product or site.
- Prioritised opportunities — concrete recommendations the design team can act on.
When to commission this
- You're scoping a major redesign or a new product launch and want the brief to be evidence-led.
- You've had a conversion drop or a customer-feedback shift and don't yet know why.
- You're entering a new market segment and need to understand the new audience.
- You're refreshing personas that were last updated more than three years ago, or that you suspect were invented rather than researched.
When this isn't the right intervention
- You already know the problem is UX-pattern-level (broken form, confusing nav) — go to heuristic audit instead.
- You have a specific, narrow validation question ("does this flow work for our users?") — go to usability testing.
- The problem is regulatory rather than experiential — go to accessibility audit.
Engagement shape
Typically 6-8 weeks end-to-end. Stakeholder interviews and recruitment criteria week 1; recruitment weeks 2-3; customer interviews weeks 3-5; analysis weeks 5-6; reporting and findings session weeks 7-8. Larger projects (e.g. mixed-methods with a survey component) extend to 10-12 weeks.
What happens after
The research feeds the next thing — usually a redesign brief that goes to digitaldesign.ie, or further validation work via usability testing on initial design directions.
Read next
Ready to scope it?
Free 30-minute brief call. No pitch deck. We tell you whether the project's a fit, which service shape suits, and a price band — within one working day.