What is the difference between UX Research, Product Research, User Research, and Market Research?

The research field is unnecessarily divided.

If I asked 100 researchers, “What is the difference between User Research and User Experience Research?” I suspect I would get 100 different answers.

I might get answers like:

• User Research is more related to talking to people to know about their behaviors while UX Research is more about knowing about users’ experiences with a product or a service.
• UX Research is more about usability
• There is no difference between them

If you do a Google search, you won’t find a reigning opinion. If you scour the job boards, you will find no single prevailing definition.

There is an incontrovertible fact; if researchers can’t define a distinction, those outside of the research disciplines definitely won’t know the difference.

This begs the question, should people even think about User Research and User Experience Research as two different disciplines? What about when we add Product Research and Market Research into the mix?

We are overcomplicating this.

The distinction for me is clear; UX Research, User Research, and Product Research all focus on the “micro” level, i.e. how a person interacts with a product or service. Conversely, Market Research focused on how people (aggregate) interact with a product or service.

While market research is oriented around selling customers’ products, UX focuses on the interaction between customers and products.

Making a more granular distinction between User Research, Product Research, and UX Research doesn’t make sense. These terms should be used synonymously.

User Research = Product Research = UX Research

There is precisely no benefit to differentiating them.

As researchers, united we stand, divided we fall.

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