UX & UI
UX Research Bootcamp
A five-day intensive for designers, researchers, and product teams who run user research as part of their work but want to operate at a senior research-practitioner level. The full research arc — study design, qualitative interviewing, usability testing, survey design, quantitative analysis, synthesis, and stakeholder communication — plus the ethics, recruiting, and ResearchOps practices that separate a career researcher from an enthusiastic generalist.
- Format
- Live virtual, in-person, or private on-site
- Duration
- 1 week
- Level
- Practitioner
- From
- $3495.00
About this course
Course overview
Five days that compress two years of on-the-job research practice.
UX research is a craft most product teams underuse and overgeneralize — a Slack thread of "let's just do some user testing" usually produces what it deserves. This bootcamp is for the practitioner who wants to stop being the team's enthusiastic generalist and start being the team's actual researcher. Curriculum-aligned to Nielsen Norman Group, the Interaction Design Foundation, and the working-researcher literature; workshops use real artifacts (research plans, screeners, interview guides, usability scripts, survey instruments, readout decks) that map directly to your next study.
Day 1 establishes study design and ethics. Days 2–4 go deep on the three method families: qualitative interviewing, usability testing, and surveys/quantitative methods. Day 5 covers synthesis, stakeholder readouts, and the ResearchOps practices that make research repeatable across a team. Every learner leaves with a fully-built study from one of the workshop sessions.
Learning outcomes
What you'll learn
Every module is tied to an outcome you can bring back to your team the next day.
- Frame a research question, choose between formative and evaluative research, and pick the right method (interviews, diary studies, usability testing, surveys, card sorts, tree tests) for the decision in front of you
- Distinguish between qualitative and quantitative methods, attitudinal vs behavioral data, and the trade-offs that decide when each one fits
- Run qualitative interviews using techniques (laddering, the five whys, episodic probing) that get past 'what users say they do' to what they actually do
- Plan and run moderated and unmoderated usability tests — task design, think-aloud protocol, severity rating, and the readouts product teams act on
- Design surveys that don't lead participants — Likert scales, NPS / CES / CSAT framing, sample-size planning, and survey-fatigue management
- Run quantitative usability studies (SUS, UMUX-Lite, time-on-task) and read the analytics-and-research overlap fluently
- Synthesize qualitative findings into themes, opportunity statements, and decision-ready insights using affinity mapping and journey mapping
- Run ethical research (consent, compensation, GDPR/CCPA awareness), build a participant repository, and design ResearchOps practices that make research repeatable across teams
Audience
Who it's for
- Designers, product designers, and UX practitioners with 1–3 years of experience moving toward dedicated research roles
- Researchers transitioning from academic / market research into product UX research
- Product managers who run their own research and want it to be defensible to senior stakeholders
- Service designers, content strategists, and design ops practitioners adjacent to research
- Career-transitioners (academia, behavioral science, consulting) preparing for their first UX research role
Course structure
Syllabus
A structured path from core concepts to applied practice.
Day 1 — Research Foundations and Study Design
- Formative vs evaluative, generative vs validation, attitudinal vs behavioral — the framing every senior researcher operates from
- Working with product, design, and engineering — the research stakeholder map
- Research ethics 101: consent, compensation, withdrawal, GDPR/CCPA, sensitive populations
- Study design: framing the research question, method selection, recruiting and screeners
- Workshop: write a research plan and screener for a target study
Day 2 — Qualitative Interviewing
- Interview formats: structured, semi-structured, contextual, ethnographic — when each one fits
- Question design: open vs closed, hypothetical vs episodic, and the questions that produce signal
- Advanced techniques: laddering, the five whys, critical incident technique, projective methods
- Listening skills, silence, follow-up, and managing the conversation in real time
- Practice Lab: peer interview rotation with full debrief and coaching
Day 3 — Usability Testing
- Moderated vs unmoderated, in-person vs remote; tool selection (UserTesting, Maze, Lookback, Useberry, Optimal Workshop)
- Task design — scenario-based tasks, success criteria, severity ratings
- Think-aloud protocol: concurrent vs retrospective, when each fits
- Quantitative usability metrics: SUS, UMUX-Lite, time-on-task, completion rates
- Workshop: design and run a moderated usability test on a target product
Day 4 — Surveys and Quantitative Methods
- Survey purpose framing — what surveys are good for and where they break
- Question types: Likert scales, semantic differential, ranking, NPS / CES / CSAT, open-ended
- Bias: leading questions, ordering effects, response-set effects, social desirability
- Sample-size planning, response rates, recruitment for quantitative validity
- Descriptive stats, confidence intervals, and statistical significance for non-statisticians
Day 5 — Synthesis, ResearchOps, and Career
- Affinity mapping, thematic analysis, and the move from raw findings to decision-ready insights
- Journey mapping, service blueprints, and the deliverables senior stakeholders use
- Stakeholder readouts — the 5-slide format, executive-summary writing, the readout that gets acted on
- ResearchOps: participant repositories, knowledge management, atomic research, democratization patterns
- Senior, lead, and principal-researcher behaviors hiring managers screen for; final readout deck workshop
Public cohorts
Upcoming sessions
Secure your seat in a live, instructor-led cohort. Private team deliveries available on request.
No public cohorts on the calendar yet.
We run this course as a private team cohort on demand, or you can be the first to know when the next public date drops.
Frequently asked questions
Still have questions?
How is this different from UX Foundations?
What if I'm not currently doing UX research?
Is there an exam or certification at the end?
What tools and frameworks does the course use?
Can this be delivered as a private cohort?
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Bring this training to your team
We deliver private cohorts in-person and online, tailored to your operating context.