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Quantitative and Qualitative

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Both qualitative and quantitative methods of user research play important roles in research. Data from quantitative research—such as market size, demographics, and user preferences—provides important information for business decisions. Qualitative research provides valuable data for use in the design of a product—including data about user needs, behavior patterns, and use cases. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, and each can benefit from our combining them with one another. This month, we’ll take a look at these two approaches to user research and discuss how and when to apply them.
Quantitative studies provide data that can be expressed in numbers—thus, their name. Because the data is in a numeric form, we can apply statistical tests in making statements about the data. These include descriptive statistics like the mean, median.
Data from qualitative studies describes the qualities or characteristics of something. You cannot easily reduce these descriptions to numbers—as you can the findings from quantitative research; though you can achieve this through an encoding process. Qualitative research studies can provide you with details about human behavior, emotion, and personality characteristics that quantitative studies cannot match. Qualitative data includes information about user behaviors, needs, desires, routines, use cases, and a variety of other information that is essential in designing a product that will actually fit into a user’s life.
These two methods together help business see things like sales trends in the market place. For example we see by number and by human emotion that certain goods are purchased surrounding particular seasons and holidays. These numbers (quantitative) show what people will and will not buy. In contrast the emotions of buyers (qualitative) also shows us the behavior of

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