Smashing Newsletter: Issue #525

Editorial

Some companies and organizations are heavily allergic to user research. It’s not that they don’t value research. They want to avoid disruptions, delays, and minimize risk. Reluctance might be a fear of challenging the status quo. Or a fear of uncovering failures and the costs of fixing them. Or a fear of insights that conflict with top-level decisions.

Research typically raises uncomfortable questions that nobody really wants to answer. It also exposes wrong decisions and failures that put decision-makers in a bad light. At best, they “slow down” a signed-off project; at worst, they endanger it.

But research is an extremely valuable and effective tool for preventing risky and expensive projects. It’s also a very powerful tool to increase retention and loyalty — not by asking users what they want or prefer, but by studying where they struggle, their needs, and their context. After all, no business can be successful without successful customers.

In this newsletter, we explore UX research, how to measure its impact, how to gather useful feedback, and how to conduct UX research without direct access to users. We hope you’ll find a few useful gems in here.

After wrapping up SmashingConf Freiburg, our next stop is SmashingConf New York (Oct 6–9), with hands-on workshops on AI, dashboards, complex products, CSS, design patterns, and accessibility. With friendly bundle tickets for truly smashing teams. Jump to the details.

Don’t despair and keep trying — ask for very small commitments, and progress from there. It might not take too long for research initiatives to be noticed, appreciated, supported — and perhaps even initiated by top-level management. Fingers crossed!

— Vitaly

1. Affinity Mapping In UX

Affinity mapping is a powerful tool for distilling the insights you’ve gained during customer experience research or solution brainstorming. However, there’s more to good affinity maps than simply grouping your findings by topics.

How to do affinity mapping that doesn’t suck

To help you take your affinity mapping game to the next level, Slava Shestopalov shares his recipe for strong affinity maps. His approach involves seven steps, from creating quality notes and organizing them on the canvas to identifying groups and adding hierarchy with clusters. By following these tips, you can prevent your affinity maps from becoming just a wall of sticky notes no one acts upon, and instead turn them into a valuable tool for driving decisions. (cm)

2. UX Research Bookmarks

Research is essential to creating a good user experience. It helps us uncover user needs and prevents us from basing our design decisions on assumptions, hunches, and guesses. Gregg Bernstein, UX research leader and author of the book Research Practice, published his personal collection of research-related bookmarks in a Notion database.

The collection features more than 200 useful links, covering everything from recruiting, interviews, and documentation to prioritization, data analysis, and AI. Each bookmark comes with a short description and a tag to make it easier to find resources that are relevant to you. A treasure chest, whether you’re new to UX research or looking to improve your workflow. (cm)

3. Design Research Framework

In many organizations, there’s a lack of clarity around design research or different standards competing with each other. To give you a touchstone and checklist you can use in conversations with anyone involved in design decisions within your organization, Erika Hall created a design research framework.

The framework is a visual representation of the approach that Erika recommends to her clients and follows herself. It involves six phases, and although the discrete steps may seem like a lot at first glance, they can often be very short conversations or a quick chat in Slack, if your team is already working well together. A great foundation for making more informed and intentional decisions. (cm)

4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences

That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s a quick overview:

Behavioral Design Workshop UX
with Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk. Sep 18 – Oct 3
Dataviz Accessibility Workshop Dev
with Sarah L. Fossheim. Sep 22 – Oct 6
Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Sep 30 – Oct 9
Advanced Design Systems Workflow
with Brad Frost. Oct 1–10
Live UX Training + video course UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 17 – Nov 17
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 30 – Nov 13
Jump to all workshops →

5. Gathering Useful User Feedback

Nothing beats in-person usability sessions for gathering user feedback. Unfortunately, they don’t work at scale. So what else can we do to get useful feedback from our users? In his post on Linkedin, Vitaly looks into practical alternatives to feedback widgets, survey prompts, and NPS emails.

As Vitaly points out, the best way to gather feedback is to ask for help and be helpful. So instead of using generic widgets, he recommends asking for very specific feedback about a very specific feature that a user has just interacted with. In his post, he explores in detail what this could look like and what to watch out for so as not to draw wrong conclusions. (cm)

6. UX Research Without Users

Whether it’s strict NDAs, privacy regulations, high costs, or the fact that your product is still in an early phase, there are plenty of situations where you don’t have access to users to conduct UX research. So how can we make UX research work with no or only limited access to users?

In his post “How To Run UX Research Without Access To Users,” Vitaly explores exactly that. He looks into workarounds that help you better understand pain points and issues that users might have when using your products and shares tips for making a strong case for UX research. A must-read, whether you’re working on a brand-new product that doesn’t have any users yet or facing reluctance from stakeholders who don’t see the value in UX research. (cm)

7. UX Research Books And Templates

You’re new to user research? Or maybe you want to brush up on a couple of topics? Then the User Experience Research Field Guide is for you.

Created by the team at User Interviews, the field guide takes you from zero to UX research pro in ten modules. It covers everything from planning UX research to conducting sessions to analyzing and reporting your findings.

For more useful insights into UX research, also be sure to check out the resource collection that Vitaly compiled. It features free books and templates to support you during all phases of your UX research journey. Happy reading! (cm)

8. How To Measure UX Research Impact

How can you make sure your UX research makes a real impact and doesn’t collect dust in someone’s drawer? Karin den Bouwmeester proposes a multi-level framework for defining and measuring UX research impact.

Karin’s framework defines three levels for measuring the impact of UX research: outcomes (i.e., the value that research creates), organizational influence (i.e., if research is driving change), and research practice (i.e., how deeply research is embedded in day-to-day operations and the product development cycle). As Karin points out, there’s no need to track everything; just start with the level that aligns best with your current goals. (cm)

9. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”

“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print edition shipping Fall 2025. eBook also available for download in Fall 2025. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

September 16, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #525

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