30 Oct UX Research Without the Guesswork — and How Bias Sneaks In
Part 6 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series on the UX principles I use in client work.
The most expensive sentence in web design is “I think people will like it.”
I’ve said it. Clients have said it to me. Sometimes we’ve even been right. But a website built on what the people in the room think is a coin flip with your money, and the alternative isn’t a research department with a six-figure budget. It’s asking real users, the right way — and being honest about the traps in our own heads while we do it.
Research has two seasons
In my work, learning about users happens at two different times, for two different reasons.
Before and during a build, the job is understanding: Who are these people? What errand brought them here? Where does their current experience break down? That learning shapes the design before money gets spent making the wrong thing beautifully.
After something exists, the job is checking: Can real people actually complete the task on this design? Where do they hesitate, misclick, or give up? A rough draft can be checked just as well as a finished site — better, actually, because fixes are still cheap.
Mixing those two up is a common mistake. Asking people “would you use this?” during the checking stage gets you polite opinions. Watching them silently try to register for an event on the draft site gets you the truth.
Four practical ways a small business can learn
You don’t need all of these. You need one, done honestly:
- Conversations with real users. Not a pitch, not a survey read aloud — a chat where you mostly listen. “Walk me through the last time you tried to sign up / donate / book with us. Where did it get annoying?” The gold is in the stories you didn’t expect.
- Short surveys, asked carefully. Good for breadth once you know what questions matter. Bad questions in a survey just industrialize your assumptions — more on that below.
- Watching someone use the site. My favorite, and the cheapest. Five people attempting your three most important tasks will surface problems no committee meeting ever found. (I described the kitchen-table version of this back in Post 1: hand someone your phone and watch, quietly.)
- The numbers you already have. Which pages do people leave immediately? What do they search for on your site and not find? What do they tap that isn’t a button? Analytics won’t tell you why, but they’re excellent at telling you where to look.
Now the hard part: the researcher is biased, too
Studying how research goes wrong was one of the most useful parts of my UX foundations training, because the failure mode is sneaky: the research happens, everybody feels data-driven, and the results are still crooked. A few traps I now watch for by name:
- Hearing what you came to hear. If I love a design, my brain collects compliments and files criticism under “that one user didn’t get it.” The fix is deciding before a session what result would change my mind — and writing it down.
- Asking the question that answers itself. “Don’t you think this button is easier to find now?” is not research; it’s a leading question wearing a lab coat. Ask “show me how you’d…” and then be quiet, even when the silence is uncomfortable.
- Only asking people like you. Friends, family, staff, and your happiest customers will protect your feelings and share your blind spots. The first-time visitor, the frustrated one, the one who left — their answers are worth more, precisely because they’re harder to hear.
- Letting the loudest voice become “the data.” One passionate board member, one angry review, one sponsor with strong opinions about the homepage. Volume is not a sample size. I log strong opinions, then I go check them against what several ordinary users actually do.
- Mistaking what people say for what people do. Everybody says they’d read the detailed program page. Watch five people, and four of them go straight for the schedule and the photos. Believe behavior first; use words to explain it.
None of this makes you a bad researcher. It makes you a human one. Brains take shortcuts — that’s how they work — and the only research method I’ve found that beats a shortcut is a process that expects them.
What this looks like in my studio
Before a redesign, I ask who the site serves (Post 2 in this series) and test those assumptions against real conversations and real numbers. During a build, I put drafts in front of actual users from the client’s world — a first-time guest for a church site, a busy parent for an event site, a volunteer coordinator for a non-profit — and I watch more than I talk.
It’s not glamorous. It’s also the entire difference between a website that reflects the organization and a website that works for the people the organization is trying to reach.
Don’t ask your family if your website is good. They love you, and that’s exactly the problem.
A second set of eyes — from outside your building — is often the research. I start client projects with user-focused discovery, not decoration. Get a free quote or grab my 2026 rate sheet from the slide-in on this page.
Previous in this series: Your Website Has to Work Everywhere · Next: Design Thinking, Explained With a Real Project
This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work — informed in part by completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.