Choosing a UX Research Method

A simple flowchart as an exercise in understanding

Early in my time as a UX Researcher at Autodesk, there were only two of us on the team (there are 10 at the moment I’m writing this), and we needed ways to engage folks in research and help our stakeholders understand it better. I was teaching myself Figma at the time, so I deciding that creating a (admittedly incomplete and oversimplified) flowchart might be a good way to ‘get the word out’ that our research practice was expanding and we could help guide your research efforts — even if we didn’t always have the bandwidth to lead the research ourselves.

I started with some research — of course. How had others visualized this? What frameworks or methodologies could I leverage to organize the information? Most of you will of course notice the double diamond below. Which techniques and research methods should I include? I created a messy mood board in Figma to help organize my thoughts, and began connecting pieces together.

After some iteration and critique, I had my final version, shared below. In the internal version at Autodesk, each of the methods are hot-linked to example and explanation of that particular method.

If you’d like a copy or to use it in your organization, here’s a PDF link – my only ask is that you leave me a comment below to let me know a bit about your use case – I’m a researcher, after all!