It's difficult to find good advice on user research or guides to more sophisticated experiments once you crossed the beginner's threshold. We have plenty of books and blog posts on the easy stuff. But finding resources that help you to professionalize your user research is a challenge.

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User research is when you talk to people or observe them while they are trying to achieve something. Achieving something might be solving a problem, getting some task done or aiming to succeed in something. It can be as simple as making a restaurant reservation or as complicated as investing tax refunds. Throughout the day we're trying to achieve a plentora of things, and, we usually use existing products, services and infrastructure to get them done (let's call them "approaches"). User research is for understanding the behaviors of us while we're doing that. It aims to unpack our motivations, our struggles with existing approaches and uncover rudiments for desigining better ones.

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This is how you innovate. You take the learnings from your user research and start building and monetizing better stuff. Advanced user research is my term for user research strategies and practices that go beyond the introductory level you find in most resources online. In this collection, I write about them. I ponder on the limitations of user research, better ways of embedding them in established organizations, how to communicate user research not just to peers, but to the public and academic researchers. I test new techniques and look at ways of combining user research with other methodologies in the field.