UX Research
At Spruce, every UX Research engagement starts from the same place: a deep understanding of your users.
The best design and business decisions are grounded in real user behavior – not assumptions.
Every research plan Spruce creates is custom. The methods we use depend on your goals, not a fixed checklist.
Trusted by public agencies, enterprises, and mission-driven organizations, Spruce brings the same research rigor to every engagement – regardless of sector or scale.
The Challenge: Deciding What’s Worth Testing, and When
Guesswork Over Evidence
Design and product decisions get made on internal opinion instead of validated user behavior.
Unclear Where to Start
Without a research baseline, it’s hard to know which usability issues or opportunities matter most.
Costly Late-Stage Fixes
Problems caught after launch cost more to fix – and quietly erode user trust before anyone notices.
Hover or tab to each card to see the challenge
How We Can Help
Thirteen research methods, organized into five categories – drawn on according to what your engagement actually needs.
Evaluative & Usability Testing
We validate designs with real users at any stage, whether it’s still in design or already live, surfacing usability issues so they can be resolved.
Structural & Information Architecture
We validate how content and navigation should be organized, so people find what they need without a second thought.
Foundational & Discovery Research
When there’s no fixed starting point, we run our own UX analysis to identify what’s worth testing first.
Strategic Synthesis
We translate raw research into a shared, evidence-based picture of the user – one that design, product, and leadership can align around.
Surveys & Data Collection
We validate qualitative findings at scale, reaching more users than one-on-one sessions alone allow.
How We Meet You Wherever You Are
Our process adapts to how much you already know going in, rather than forcing every engagement through the same fixed intake.
You bring the questions
You come to us with specific things to test – a redesign, a new feature, a friction point you already suspect. We build a custom plan around exactly what you want to learn.
We bring the starting point
No fixed starting point yet? We run our own UX analysis – heuristic review, analytics review, and competitive research – to identify what’s worth testing, then build the plan from there.
We meet in the middle
Most engagements land somewhere in between: your input plus our independent analysis, blended into one research plan.
Whatever the entry point, every engagement starts from the same place: a deep understanding of your users.
UX Research Success Story
A Multi-Page Research Program for UJA Federation of New York
UJA partnered with Spruce to evaluate how its homepage, content pages, paid media landing page, donation flow, and event registration guide users toward understanding, motivation, and action. Depending on what each page needed to prove, testing included component-level preference testing, full-experience usability testing, or both – always grounded in real users completing realistic tasks.
- Message framing: Comparative testing showed how differently users interpreted organization-wide messaging versus program-specific messaging – directly shaping which framing Spruce recommended as the default.
- Content sequencing: Usability testing showed that the order information appears in shapes trust and motivation just as much as the content itself.
- Transactional flows: Testing on donation and registration surfaced friction points – extra steps, mistimed asks, non-essential fields – translated into specific, low-risk design fixes rather than a full redesign.
Research isn’t a phase we run once and file away. It’s the throughline that keeps design, strategy, and business decisions grounded in what people actually do – not what we assume they’ll do.
