The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Desk Research: squeeze some research into your day π
Dear Reader,
Q: How do I make time for research?
A: Try to squeeze a bit of desk research in here and there. π
Desk research, also known as secondary research, is an excellent way to build continuous learning into your design practice.
It's called desk research because it's research you can do by yourself at the desk.
Primary research is custom-created for each project, but who has time for that?
Secondary research has already been conducted, and only needs to be discovered or revisited by busy designers.
Desk research is a perfect discovery method because it allows you to do a quick check of what's out there.
Checking the front page of Google or doing a quick search on your internal wiki tool is an excellent example of this.
If you want to get fancy, you could even try looking at scientific papers or other non-obvious sources.
There are three primary sources of desk research where you should be looking: Internal Knowledge, External Research, and Existing Products
1. Internal Knowledge
You can find internal knowledge in local places:
- Company wiki - Confluence, Notion, etc.
- Product documentation - Google Docs, Jira, etc.
- Cloud storage - Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
- Data analytics - Google analytics, Dovetail
- Messaging platforms - Gmail, Slack, etc.
For example: Internal knowledge could be a comment on a user flow in a Google doc
I recommend searching past interviews transcripts, NPS reviews, and research presentations to find internal knowledge.
2. External Research
External Research is secondary research that was once conducted by someone outside of your company as primary research. Sources for external research are academic papers, research reports, and scientific studies.
Here are some places to start your external secondary research:
- βhttps://scholar.google.com/ - find scholarly articles
- βhttps://www.pewresearch.org/internet/ - find internet usage studies
- βhttps://www.researchgate.net/ - find research papers
- βhttps://www.academia.edu/ - find research papers
- βhttps://www.statista.com/ - find industry insights
- libraries & bookstores - find inspiration in analog
3. Existing Products
With all of the software out there in the world, someone has already solved your problem. Don't reinvent the wheel!
For example: If you're adding a messaging functionality to your product, take inspiration from existing messaging products.
Avoid hypothetical products that you might find on Dribbble or Behance. If it isn't live, it's likely that the approach still has lots of usability kinks to be worked out.
Here are some excellent places to find existing products that are live:
- βhttps://www.trustpilot.com/ - look for 2-4 star reviews of competitors
- βhttps://www.producthunt.com/ - see if someone already solved it
- βhttps://goodui.org/ - learn about A/B tests that companies are running
- βhttps://uigarage.net/ - a searchable database of screenshots of products
Desk research is pretty simple, but once you do it for a bit, you'll start to find your own special sources.
Until next week, squeeze a few sessions of desk research into your day!
Jeff Humble
βDesigner & Co-Founder
βThe Fountain Institute
β
P.S. It's finnnnnnnally done...π
I've been working on this mini course on UX research for weeks, and it's packed with so many nuggets to help you level up in UX research.
βGet the free 7-day UX Research Short Courseβ
I hope you like it π₯Ή
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Why Decisions Feel So Hard Right Nows By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Over the last few months, Iβve been talking with design and product leaders across very different organizations, large companies, smaller teams, fast-moving environments, and slower ones. And I keep hearing the same thing. Their teams are being asked to make decisions faster than ever, and yet, deciding feels heavier than it used to. Not slower, exactly. Just harder. At first, people often explain this in familiar ways: too...
When Speed Stops Being the Bottleneck by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Quick question: What happens when the thing that used to take 12 weeks now takes 4 days? I've been watching this play out across the industry, and it's wild. Lots of companies aren't sharing their new speeds, but a few are: Code and Theory (an agency that works with Microsoft and Amazon) is building dashboards in 40 minutes that used to take a week. They report cutting time-to-prototype by 75%. Coinbase reports a 2-5x increase...
Missed a few newsletters last year? Start here. By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Before we jump into new ideas for the year ahead, we wanted to pause for a moment. If your inbox was anything like ours last year, thereβs a good chance you missed a few newsletters. So instead of sending another new idea right away, we put together a curated catch-up, a handful of pieces from 2025 that capture the questions we kept returning to. If you only read a few things from us last year, these are a good place...