Qualitative vs. quantitative user research

How much research did you conduct before launching your last marketing campaign? Or running your last A/B test? Who had the final say on your website redesign?

If you want to make better—more profitable—marketing decisions, you need research to back them. Qualitative and quantitative research both have a role to play: together, they give you a rich portrait of what your customers want and need.

In this guide, we break down how to combine quantitative and qualitative user research to get the full picture of your users’ experience. You’ll learn how to:

• Leverage 3+ use cases for blending quantitative and qualitative research

• Apply 4 key quantitative methods and uncover what each reveals

• Use 3 qualitative research methods to dig deeper into user behavior

• Get buy-in for user research (no matter the type)

Why quantitative and qualitative user research is important: 3 use cases

Research is the backbone of testing. That backbone supports 6- and 7-figure business decisions like UX choices for major site relaunches and copy choices for million-dollar ad campaigns. There are 3 primary use cases:

1. Conversion optimization

On the surface, conversion optimization may seem simple: tweak a button color, change a call to action, and reap profits—but that’s not how it works.

Conversion optimization is about much more than random site changes. It’s about doing the research to understand what your customers need, what makes them hesitate, and what they think about your product and site experience.

Once you know those answers, you’ll have a better idea of what to test and what to test first. It means more tests will deliver money-making improvements, and you’ll make the highest value changes first.

Editor’s note: at Contentsquare, use our Conversion Optimization Action Plan as a template to give your optimization efforts more structure. Take a look at the full guide on how to fill it in and increase conversion rate using qualitative and quantitative sources.

2. Site redesigns

Site redesigns are a huge risk. Too often, the decisions around a redesign are made by the highest-paid person. If you’ve spent years making minor, data-backed changes to your site, you can quickly throw them away with a big redesign.

The difference between a major redesign and those small changes is known as a ‘radical’ versus ‘iterative’ redesign. If you can stick to iterative redesigns, you’re less likely to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a website that performs worse—maybe way worse.

Still, there are some situations when a major redesign is necessary:

• Your company makes a major shift in product or brand

• You hit the 'local maxima' for your site—the point at which you’ve exhausted all iterative opportunities

• You don’t have enough traffic to get the data necessary to run A/B tests

Research is essential to both approaches. It’s also the best way to protect your site during a radical redesign. Quantitative and qualitative data help justify the design and copy choices that are most likely to make users happy (and earn your company more money).

3. Everything else

Great user research does more than just organize your tests or guide a site redesign. That same research helps you understand how to segment your email subscribers, which blog topics you should write about, which product features to highlight, or the copy that’s most likely to earn clicks on Google Ads.

So how do you gather all this data?

4 quantitative methods for research and what you’ll learn

Method 1: technical analysis

If you’re an SEO person, you may be most familiar with the technical analysis of a site. The goal of technical analysis is to identify behind-the-scenes site issues that negatively impact the user experience.

A view of a typical Contentsquare dashboard of important metrics

For example, during a technical analysis, you may notice that product pages are exceptionally slow because of recurring errors or image sizes may be too large. You may see that Android users have a much higher bounce rate than users of Apple products. Use a platform like Contentsquare to

• Detect device-specific friction by using the Contentsquare dashboard to compare user behavior across Android and Apple devices, pinpointing where engagement drops and improving those touchpoints

• Identify and resolve errors efficiently: track and understand different types of errors, such as broken links and failed page interactions with the Error Analysis tool. By analyzing metrics like ‘Sessions with error’ and ‘Sessions with error after click,’ you can pinpoint areas that need immediate attention to enhance user experience and minimize disruptions.

• Analyze and optimize page speed by identifying slow-loading elements using the Speed Analysis tool, helping you fix performance bottlenecks and enhance user experience

Keep your pages light and your load speeds lightning-fast with Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool

For each component of technical analysis, you’ll come away with hard numbers—pages with load times above 10 seconds, devices with above-average bounce rates, browsers with below-average conversion rates, etc.

Method 2: digital analytics

The second component of quantitative research, digital analytics, has two main goals:

• Identify the most important parts of the site

• Ignore the metrics that don’t matter

Think, what’s the most important action someone can take on your site? For B2B companies, it may be filling out a lead form. For ecommerce companies, it’s almost certainly completing a purchase. A review of your analytics can show you which pages are valuable and which ones ‘leak’ money.

For example, does a sticky bar on the homepage generate tons of leads? It may be worth testing on other pages. Does a particular product line have a high cart abandonment rate? You need to find out what’s causing uncertainty for buyers.

Ultimately, digital analytics should give you a good idea of what people do on your site, and how that compares to what you’d like them to do.

💡 Pro tip: with Goals & Key Events in Contentsquare, you can create custom goals based on user navigation behaviors like views, clicks, or hovers. 

These goals don’t always have to be tied to revenue—they can be any key action you want users to complete, such as “clicked on add to cart” or “viewed list page.” To set this up, head to ‘Analysis setup’ from the main menu, and then select ‘Goals’ from the sub-menu. 

By tracking these goals, you can analyze the contribution of specific pages or zones to goal completion, and study how different segments behave once they’ve achieved these events. This allows you to focus your analysis on what truly drives user engagement and conversions, rather than just looking at surface-level metrics.

Method 3: mouse tracking

Mouse tracking shows user movements on a website. Often, movements and interactions are layered on top of one another to create a heatmap—red parts represent places with lots of activity; blue sections show areas that get ignored (by the mouse, at least).

'Hover maps' show mouse movements and 'click maps' show attempted mouse clicks

There are different types of heatmap reports you can use:

• Reports that show where the mouse moved are known as 'hover’ or ‘move maps'

• ‘Click maps' that highlight hotspots based on clicks

• ‘Scroll maps’, which use scroll tracking to record how far down the page users went

There are 2 common learnings from this type of analysis:

1. Identifying elements that visitors think are links but cannot be clicked. This is usually an easy issue to solve—simply expand or add a clickable area.

2. Seeing how far users make it 'below the fold', if at all. On many websites, users never scroll below the fold. Understanding if they scroll (and how far) can help you figure out where to put important content. You don’t want to leave critical information where no one sees it.

💡 Pro tip: not all clicks are created equal. Use Contentsquare Heatmaps to see the hotspots where users actually engage—and the cold zones where their interest fizzles out. If your CTAs are drowning in blue, it’s time for a rethink!

Contentsquare Heatmaps lets you create different types of maps to see where users move, click or scroll on your page

Method 4: user testing (quantitative feedback)

User testing allows real people to use and give feedback about your website, which in turn helps you collect quantitative and qualitative data (the latter is discussed in the next section).

Typically, with a tool like Contentsquare’s User Tests, you provide the user with a task and record their screen movements and narration as they finish the task and track the time it took them to complete it. There are 3 types of tasks:

• Broad: 'find green shorts'

• Specific: 'find green athletic shorts'

• Funnel completion: 'find green athletic shorts and complete the purchase'

Contentsquare’s User Tests tool lets you watch real people complete tasks on your site, so you can spot usability issues and fix them fast

The quantitative feedback is usually the amount of time it takes a user to complete a task. For example, if you’re revamping your checkout process, you can time users on the old site and the new. If the new version reduces the checkout time by 30%, you know you’ve made progress.

If it takes longer than the previous version, the 'intuitive' design changes may not be so intuitive after all. The good news is that you have a chance to fix those issues now before pushing the new site live: you don’t want to realize your mistake only after revenue begins to decline.

3 qualitative research methods and what you’ll learn from them

Too often, marketers ignore qualitative research. It’s messier, and it can be expensive. But it’s also vital—you learn what your customers think and, critically, the words they use to describe their thoughts. Often, that information translates directly into high-converting copy.

These are the 3 primary qualitative methods of research:

Method 1: heuristic analysis

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned the danger of relying on opinion instead of research. While that’s true, an expert’s opinion still has value. That’s what a heuristic analysis is: an experience-based assessment of your website run by an expert, based on an evaluation framework that typically follows these guidelines:

• Relevancy: does the page meet user expectations?

• Clarity: is the content/offer on the page as clear as possible?

• Value: is the page communicating value to the user? Can it do better?

• Friction: what on the page is causing doubts, hesitations, or uncertainties?

• Distraction: what on the page does not help the user take action?

The takeaways from a heuristic analysis are not absolutes. Instead, like other research components, they’re pieces of the puzzle.

Once you’ve conducted all your research, you’ll be able to see which other data points reinforce your heuristic takeaways.

Method 2: online surveys

Surveys are a huge topic—enough to deserve way more than a section of a blog post. That said, here are a few guidelines.

If you want to survey site users, you can run on-page surveys or exit surveys with a tool like Contentsquare Surveys:

• On-page surveys typically target a subset of pages. For example, you could ask blog visitors which topics they’d like to learn more about.

• Exit-intent surveys prompt users to finish a survey just before they leave your site

On-site surveys are best to gather smaller bits of qualitative research. If you want deeper feedback, you’ll need to conduct user interviews, send out a survey to email subscribers/customers, or pay for a research panel to push a survey to your target audience.

Contentsquare’s Surveys tool gives you the exact feedback you need to fine-tune your site and boost user experience

To make qualitative surveys successful:

• Ask open-ended questions: you’ll learn more from open-ended research questions than you will from yes/no or multiple-choice questions. When it comes to qualitative feedback, you want to learn what customers really think—and to hear them explain it in their own words.

• Avoid leading questions: it’s easy to guide customers toward an answer. For example, if you’re redesigning your website and ask, ”On a scale from 1 to 5, how smooth was the checkout flow?” you’ve already planted the word 'easy' in their head. It would be better to ask, “Describe your experience during checkout” or “How easy or hard was it to check out?”

• Leverage AI to categorize responses: with automated coding, AI helps you quickly analyze and identify patterns that align with user behavior. Contentsquare's AI-powered Surveys tool automates the classification of feedback, allowing you to segment responses based on themes and sentiment.

Let Contentsquare’s AI-powered Surveys tool do all the heavy lifting when analyzing survey results

Method 3: user testing (qualitative feedback)

The qualitative component of user testing is about getting users to narrate their experience. Subjects are asked to 'think out loud' as they move through your website. By getting access to their thoughts, you learn less about how they feel about particular elements and more about why something is easy or hard. With a platform like Contentsquare you can deepen this analysis by:

• Leveraging the Interviews tool to recruit, schedule, and conduct user interviews at scale so you can hear directly from users about what they truly think of, for example, your checkout or signup pages.

• Using User Tests, which allows you to observe real users interacting with your site in real time, and lets them articulate friction points they’ve encountered on your pages, which helps you validate design decisions with authentic behavioral data.

• Launching a post-task survey to ask user testing subjects about their experience. However, It’s best to deliver the survey as quickly as possible before memory fades.

Contentsquare’s Interviews tool lets you have one-on-one conversations with your users—so you can optimize their experience

Get buy-in for user research—no matter what kind you need to do

It’s not easy to get buy-in for UX research: it can slow down a site relaunch and require a decent chunk of change. That doesn’t make it less essential.

One of the strongest cases you can make for user research is how much money it saves:

1. Development resources are expensive. Conducting research before coding a site design makes it more likely that early decisions will be the right ones. Recoding large sections of the site is more expensive than upfront research.

2. You’re already spending money on CRO and ads. If you’re already spending thousands or millions to optimize or promote a site, shouldn’t you invest a few thousand dollars to give CRO and ad teams the research they need to spend those resources wisely?

Once you’ve conducted your research, you can sift through all the data—quantitative and qualitative—to organize your findings. Those with the highest potential value should be tested or implemented first.

And just as you never stop testing, research doesn’t stop either. With every analytics check-up, session replay, or open-ended survey, you’ll learn something new.

If you use that information wisely, you’ll translate more knowledge into more revenue.

FAQs about qualitative and quantitative user research