Ditch the Expensive Tools With This Guide on Conducting UX Research on Zero Budget

Marketing teams often enjoy experimenting with new homepage designs or implementing completely revamped, high-cost layouts, frequently tweaking user flows along the way. As we know, any of these changes require both qualitative and quantitative reviews to optimize your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) effectively.

Let’s assume you’ve just launched a new homepage with updated messaging, visuals, and navigation. While A/B tests, metrics, and surveys are running, the results lack clarity and fail to reveal the deeper reasons behind user choices and patterns. After analyzing data like scroll and heat maps, you’ve identified weak spots to investigate. Engaging your target audience through in-depth interviews could provide the answers you need.

If you don’t have the budget to hire professional UX help or to pay for UX instruments, and your only tool is Excel empowered by your expertise, this guide is designed to help you!

• In this article you will find a straightforward, step-by-step approach to preparing, conducting, and analyzing offline or online user experience research for digital interfaces or web flows.

• By following these simple instructions, any marketing manager can complete UX research for digital interfaces or web flows with minimal investment of both time and money.

STAGE ONE: PREPARATION

1.1 Define the Area

Start by identifying the specific focus of your UX research. Here are some examples of what you can test:

Messaging and Content: assess the clarity and comprehensiveness of the text; determine if the messaging resonates with your target audience; evaluate whether the purpose and value of your content are communicated effectively.

UX and UI: test how intuitive and straightforward the interface is for achieving conversions; identify if the page has an excessive number of elements, such as too many buttons, overly long pages, or irrelevant components.

• Behavioral Patterns: analyze which conversion paths are most frequently used and understand why users prefer them.
• Specific Tasks and Questions: assign tasks like logging into an account, downloading a trial version of a product, or registering for an event. Observe how users complete these tasks and identify any challenges they encounter.

Combination of the Above: you can mix and match the areas to address multiple objectives in a single test.

1.2 List Your Tasks and Questions

Based on the research area you’ve identified, you can now proceed to list specific questions. I prefer to

• either ask open-ended questions — allowing users to express their thoughts freely, provide detailed reasoning behind their choices, and avoid limiting them to predefined options,
• or assign specific tasks for participants to complete, which makes the interview process more straightforward for the user.

For example, if you’re analyzing Canva’s website, your table of questions might look like this (here is the template in Google Sheets for your convenience):

I usually prepare a dedicated space in the table to leave notes for each separate interview. Let’s say you are preparing research for two versions of the website homepage. It’s better to separate them with different tabs, allowing space to add comments for each participant you interviewing.

Hint #1: Try asking the same question in a few different ways — it might yield different results. For example, imagine a website where product features are listed both in the top menu and on the homepage within specific tabs on the first screen. Asking users to “find information about product features” prompted them to click the top menu immediately. However, rephrasing the question to “find information about a specific feature” encouraged users to explore the tabs on the homepage, bypassing the top menu altogether.

1.3 Set Up Yourself a Target

Based on the research area you’re focusing on and the questions you’ve outlined, determine the minimum number of interviews you target to complete. This target will help you plan additional activities, such as recruiting participants (which may involve creating a separate process, like sending invitation emails or running a social media campaign) or securing help from additional interviewers and recruiters, if needed.

But how many interviews are enough?

I believe in a common-sense approach: you can start small, analyze as you go, and stop once you’re no longer uncovering new insights. While five interviews might be too few for most purposes, hundreds for a single interface would likely be overkill. This article provides guidance on how many participants to target, emphasizing the diminishing returns of insights as more participants are added to a study.

Here are a couple of examples from my experience:

• When analyzing two different company portals during a conference (a partner-facing portal and the company’s main website), our team of three interviewers and a few recruiters completed about 120 interviews over three days (70 for the main website and 50 for the partner-facing one). Some interviews were scheduled in advance via email, but about 60% of participants were recruited onsite.
• At another partner event, we analyzed four different homepage versions. Since the content across versions was fairly similar, we conducted 20 interviews in total (five per version) and decided to stop as we had already gathered enough insights to draw meaningful conclusions. It was carried out by a single person, who conducted both the interviews and recruitment on-site.

1.4 Conduct a “Test-Drive” Interview using a friend or colleague as your participant.

1.5 And during this test-drive, Time the Entire Session to ensure it stays within a manageable duration. I would suggest to allocate 20 minutes for the core question segment. And please keep in mind that you’ll need an additional 10 minutes for the introduction and closing, bringing the total interview time to 30 minutes maximum. Anything longer might be too tiring for participants, so it’s best to avoid exceeding this limit. If your session runs over 30 minutes, consider reducing the number of questions or rephrasing them to be more concise.

1.6 Plan Your Equipment and Prepare a Comfortable Space

Depending on the location and method of your interview, it’s essential to plan for the necessary equipment and create an appropriate space for conducting the session.

For interviews at conferences or exhibition venues:

• ensure there is a comfortable area that can accommodate two people and a couple of laptops for the interview;
• prepare a spare laptop for the participant to use, and have one for yourself to take notes.

If you do have some budget though, and want more detailed maps of your interfaces, you can use advanced tools like the Tobii Eye Tracker. Among other things, it provides time-based heatmaps, which can enhance the outcomes of your research. For large and important studies, it can provide valuable insights and a large amount of data for post-analysis (see a picture below as an example). However, I wouldn’t say it’s necessary for smaller research with fewer questions to explore.

1.7 Decide on the Recruitment Process

Depending on your research goals and the method of conducting the interviews, you may need assistance with participant recruitment.

For online interviews — use email campaigns to invite participants; or collaborate with your sales team to find volunteers among existing customers or partners.

For offline research — if conducting interviews at a conference or physical event, you’ll have to recruit participants onsite. Consider separating the recruitment role from the interviewing one to streamline the process. Assigning a dedicated person or team solely for recruitment purposes might be really beneficial.

RESULTS OF STAGE ONE:

At this point, you should have:

• A complete table listing all your questions;
• The interview flow clearly defined;
• The required time measured;
• Space and equipment planned, with participant recruitment support in place;
• Minimum targets for interviews established.

You are now ready to conduct the interview with your target audience.

STAGE TWO: CONDUCTING THE RESEARCH

Whether you’re conducting your research as a face-to-face interview at a conference or event where you can meet customers and partners, or through a virtual call, certain essential steps must be included.

2.1 Introduction

The introduction is a critical part of the interview process and should be structured to include the following elements:

• Explain Your Purpose: share the reasons for conducting the research. For example: “Our company is committed to improving your experience with us every day. We’d love to get your input on our digital properties, specifically the homepage of our main website, COMPANY.COM. Our goal is to make COMPANY’s digital resources as convenient as possible. That’s why we’d like to ask for your insights as a valued partner — what can we improve, add, or do better on our main user-facing page?”
• Set Time and Process Expectations: clearly outline what participants can expect: “We invite you to participate in a 20-minute user experience research session for the COMPANY website. During this time, we’ll ask a few questions about the new homepage design and usability. We’ll also include small tasks, such as finding specific items or performing certain actions.”
• Reassure Participants: emphasize that there are no “wrong answers” and encourage open feedback: “There are no ‘wrong answers’ here. Please share any thoughts or feedback you have along the way. When we ask you to find or do something on the page, just go with your first instinct. We also encourage you to be as vocal as possible while completing tasks, as we’d love to understand the reasoning behind your choices.”
• Obtain Consent: if you plan to record the session (audio or video), make sure to get the participant’s consent. Also, confirm their willingness to participate in the survey. Allow them the option to decline if they’re not comfortable: “Before we begin, we’d like to get your consent to record this session for analysis purposes. If you’d prefer not to participate, that’s perfectly fine too.”
• Collect Basic Participant Information: if relevant, ask a few background questions, such as: Have they interacted with your company or website before? What was the purpose of their visit? What country are they from (if location is important)? Any other demographic or contextual information necessary for the study.

Once these steps are completed, you’ll be ready to move on to the main interview questions and tasks.

2.2 Core of the Interview

Now it’s time to begin the main portion of the interview. Follow your planned questions but stay adaptable. If the participant provides unexpected yet valuable feedback, allow the discussion to deviate from the script to explore these new insights further.

Hint #2: Take Real-Time Notes! Especially if your team is small and lacks dedicated UX professionals making time for post-interview analysis limited. Take notes during the interview for every participant and each answer. Mark key discussion points, conclusions, and specific quotes or observations for yourself. It will be easier to recall and reference later. Even if the interview is being recorded don’t over-rely on it; notes will make the analysis process much smoother, helping you quickly locate specific segments in the recording if you need to review or share parts of the interview.

2.3 Closure

End the interview with a sincere thank-you to the participants for their time and input. As a gesture of appreciation, consider offering a small token of gratitude, such as a discount on their next purchase, or a branded swag item (e.g., pens, tote bags, or notebooks).

RESULTS OF STAGE TWO:

At this point, you should have:

• Completed the targeted number of interviews;
• Collected recordings and detailed notes from each session.

You’re now ready to move on to the analysis stage!

STAGE THREE: RESULTS ANALYSES

The most crucial part of the process lies ahead: grouping feedback and turning it into actionable insights. This step is likely the most time-consuming yet rewarding phase of your survey.

• Identify what’s important.
• Uncover areas for optimization.
• Present insightful data to your team, and propose items for the to-do backlog.

3.1 How to analyze data

To keep things simple, instead of tagging and coding your findings (whether manually or using tools like Dovetail or Optimal Workshop), I recommend using the notes you took during your interviews. These notes are already organized by questions and versions. By keeping the exact questions you created at the start of the process in mind, you can easily summarize your findings using a table.

If you’d like to learn how to code and tag qualitative data, you can explore more about it here, here, or here. It can be a valuable skill. However, if I created the interview flow myself and am familiar with the study areas — even if I wasn’t the interviewer — it’s fairly straightforward to analyze the data and find insights using the completed Excel spreadsheet.

Hint #3: Stay objective. Avoid letting personal preferences influence your interpretation of the data. Focus on what the feedback reveals, not what you hoped to hear.

3.2 Format of the findings presentation

I prefer to compile the results into a presentation focused primarily on findings and categorized results, with links to the raw data included. This approach ensures your team has visibility and the ability to dive deeper if needed.

Depending on the initial interview flow setup, your final presentation to the team might include:

• User quotes

• First impression data

• Messaging-related specifics

• Call-to-action specifics

• Flow-related specifics

• Key insights

• Your recommendations

Collaborating with your team, you can prioritize actionable, meaningful insights and plan future improvements accordingly.

My final recommendation is to present the full picture to the team: highlight positive findings to validate what’s working, address negative feedback to identify areas for improvement, and note any surprising observations that could reveal new opportunities. Hiding information benefits no one — transparency is key.

RESULTS OF STAGE THREE:

By now, you should have prepared a presentation summarizing your findings, which you will share with the broader team, along with a prioritized list of recommended improvements.

FINAL NOTES

As a digital marketing expert specializing in web and IT-specific project management, with over 15 years of experience delivering complex technical products and managing web production, I’ve conducted this type of research many times across various companies, primarily enterprise-level software companies focused on data protection and cybersecurity. Most of the time, we used physical events as an opportunity to connect with our customers and partners. The engagement was always high, and people were eager to participate and share their feedback.

This feedback was incredibly valuable — it gave our web development teams long lists of suggestions that we used to plan and optimize our websites for the year ahead. I’m a strong believer that talking to your audience and truly listening to their needs is the key to doing great work.

I hope this guide makes it easier for even the smallest teams with limited budgets to run UX research with minimal effort. If you need additional advice or help, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Good luck with your research!

Note: images and screenshots was publicly shared during iMetrix conference