Before you can design an interface, you have to know who will use it, what they are trying to accomplish, and how they think the system works. This topic covers the front end of user-centered design: identifying your actual users (as opposed to the imagined "average person"), researching their needs through interviews, observation, surveys, and contextual methods, and modeling their goals and mental models so that your design matches their expectations rather than the developer's internal logic.
The second half of the topic turns research into structure. Task analysis is the practice of breaking down what users do into describable units: Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) decomposes a high-level goal into subtasks and plans that govern their order, while Cognitive Task Analysis focuses on the knowledge, decisions, and attention demands hidden behind observable actions. Both feed directly into design decisions — what to put on a screen, what to automate, what to group together, and where errors are likely.
The videos below focus on the research methods side of this topic. As you watch, pay attention to three things: what kind of data each method produces (what people say versus what people do), what context the data is gathered in, and how a researcher avoids leading or biasing the participant. Try to connect each method back to how you would use its output to build an HTA or a mental-model description for a system you are designing.
A short overview of contextual inquiry, a research method in which the researcher observes and questions users in their own working environment while they perform real tasks. Based on its title and description, it explains what contextual inquiry is used for — defining requirements, improving processes, and learning what matters to users — and when it is an appropriate choice. Expect a compact introduction rather than a step-by-step field guide.
Nielsen Norman Group is a well-established UX research organization, and this video maps directly onto the "Methods for Researching User Needs" subtopic; contextual inquiry is also the classic source of raw material for task analysis, since it captures real tasks in real settings.
A broader survey of the UX research methods you are most likely to encounter, including common techniques and several lesser-known ones, with discussion of what each is used for. At about eleven minutes it provides enough room to compare methods rather than just name them, which helps you see how interviews, observation, surveys, and testing differ in the kind of evidence they produce. Use it to build a mental catalog of options you can draw on later.
It gives you the comparative overview that the "Methods for Researching User Needs" subtopic requires, so you can justify choosing one method over another instead of defaulting to whichever one you learned first.
A practical guide to the think-aloud protocol: how to explain the technique to participants, why verbalizing while working is useful, and how to prompt people who fall silent without putting words in their mouths. The focus is on facilitation skill — reinforcing the behavior and keeping the session natural rather than scripted.
Think-aloud is the primary way researchers get access to a user's mental model and decision-making, which makes it the best bridge between the research methods subtopics and both "User Goals and Mental Models" and "Cognitive Task Analysis."
These videos support the module outcomes mainly by supplying the evidence-gathering skills that the analysis and evaluation outcomes depend on. Contextual inquiry and think-aloud sessions are how you surface a user's mental model and detect where it diverges from system behavior (MO2), and the verbalized reasoning and observed task sequences they produce are the raw input you decompose into goals, subtasks, and plans when performing a Hierarchical Task Analysis (MO3). The survey of UX research methods gives you the comparative vocabulary needed to argue why one technique fits a given design context better than another, which carries directly into selecting between expert-driven inspection and user testing later in the module (MO4), while the findings from all three feed the design and prototyping decisions you will make in MO1 and MO5.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.