![]() Since its inception nearly five decades ago by two sociologists Glaser and Strauss, GT has spread from sociology to other social sciences and fields of study, such as public health, education, business management, and now user experience research. When attempting to generate theories from your qualitative research data, GT is widely seen as the “go-to” methodology. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve most likely used Grounded theory methodology and methods in your day-to-day UX practices. Grounded theory provides a framework for surfacing insights from a large range of data sources. Hopefully, in this article, you’ll see how Grounded Theory can help you build data-driven theories about your users, their environment, and the phenomena (an observable fact or event) as a whole to inform your customer understandings and design decisions moving forward. I figured GT, with its simple bottom-up approach to data-driven theory generation, would be the perfect methodology for the project. I stumbled across GT nearly four years ago when I was running a research discovery effort for a large fortune 100 client that needed to “start over.” Their previous research had gone stale and they were losing touch with their users and what problems to solve. With UX, there are dozens of research methods for discovery, testing, and validation-but what’s the right methodology (i.e., evaluative, generative, explorative, quantitative, qualitative, etc.) to drive our research method selection? In our case, when you’re in a new domain building out foundational research or looking to gather large amounts of raw data from several data sources, one methodology always sticks out -Grounded Theory. With this, every great product starts with excellent research. In this case, UX Research is our axe and the tree is our user experience-the better we understand our users and their problems, the easier it will be to address and anticipate their needs. If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe. But how do we do that when we’re starting from scratch and know very little about the domain we’re entering? Who are our users? What are their problems? What are their goals? As UX designers, our job is to bridge the needs of our users and the business to create the best experience for both. Oh, and by the way, we have more than 20 engineers waiting for your designs for this upcoming sprint, but no rush."Ĭhances are if you’re reading this you’ve experienced a similar situation before. ![]() Let me know if you have any questions before we get started. "Welcome aboard," says the friendly product manager, "Hope you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and disrupt the industry. You have your shiny new computer, your LinkedIn is updated, and you’re ready to shake things up. Imagine with me-it’s your first day on the job as a UX designer in a completely new industry. ![]()
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