How to Conduct Research with Limited Resources: Playbook for 2025

9 mins read
How to conduct research with limited resources 2025

Great products don’t happen by accident. And high-quality UX research doesn’t happen out of thin air.

But what if you don’t have a dedicated research team, a large research budget, or ample time to conduct new research? What if you’re a UX designer or product manager without formal research training?

UX research is key to building user-centered products. Yet many teams face the challenge of limited resources, tight deadlines, and more research requests than they can handle. And for non-researchers tasked with conducting research, the process can feel even more daunting.

The good news? 

You can still conduct valuable research even with limited resources. All you need is a strategic approach.

Here’s a playbook that you can use to run a lean research operation, even when time and headcount are limited. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Before You Jump Into Any Research Project — Review Your Passive Data

Before launching a new research project, consider tapping into the knowledge you already possess: passive customer data. It is the information collected through your team’s everyday operations. Leveraging passive data can save you weeks of research time while speeding up your insight discovery. 

Passive data sources include:

Sales Calls

Make sales call recordings and transcripts a key part of your learning process. They can act as a direct line to hidden customer needs, pain points, and reactions. And they offer crucial insights into deal outcomes.

Support Tickets

Dive deeper into user frustrations, usability issues, and common problems your users face. Analyze tickets to reveal recurring issues and areas where the product or user experience falls short.

Customer Surveys

Surveys can provide actionable insights into customer satisfaction and areas for improvement within your product. Integrate your survey tool with a research repository to combine feedback with research data. 

App Store Reviews

Track what users are saying about your product in their own words. Pay attention to positive and negative reviews to see what your users say about your product or service. With Marvin, you can dive into what worked for them and what didn’t. You may find some surprises about what they value most.

Social Media

Analyze comments, mentions, and reviews to understand public perception and identify trending topics related to your product or industry. Tools like Marvin have integrations to help you listen to your users and merge it to your repository.

Website/App Analytics

Tracking user behavior will help you to pinpoint drop-off points, and understand user flows better. This data can reveal usability issues and areas for optimization. And it can help your UX designer kickstart a redesigning project to improve user experiences. 

Internal Communication

Discussions on Slack or other internal communication platforms have customer insights trapped in chats. Team members like customer success and sales often discuss customer feedback there. With Marvin’s Slack integration, you can turn a casual Slack chat into actionable research data.  

Tap into the power of passive feedback with Marvin

Step 2: Create A Single Source of Truth for Storing and Discovering Customer Insights

Your sales team is talking to your users, support is handling their complaints, marketing is running surveys, and your researchers are conducting their user interviews. But if all that user feedback is stored in separate tools, you’re missing out on the full story. 

A UX research repository like Marvin allows you to store, organize, and analyze various types of research data in a single, accessible location. By building a central location of all your customer interactions, you can leverage purpose built AI features to summarize, tag, and run analysis across projects and files. 

Start with storing your passive data and using AI to run auto analysis on your data sources. Example analysis you can run include finding quotes, themes, answering questions from custom prompts, and more. 

Integrations with Your Favorite Tools Allow for Easy Access and Storage in Your Repository

Marvin connects with platforms you’re already using, making it super easy to import and store data. 

Record Your Customer Conversations and Interviews 

Conversations are happening daily in Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom across your company. Send Marvin to record your conversations and take advantage of a suite of features to help with post interview analysis. 

Pull in Survey Feedback

Automatically sync NPS data, customer survey’s, and more from SurveyMonkey Qualtrics, Google Forms, and Pendo. 

Import Support Tickets

Connect Zendesk and Intercom to your repository to create a feed of customer conversations. Analyzing support tickets can be a hidden gold mine for aggregating and understanding customer challenges.    

Sync Sales Conversations 

Sales teams are on the front lines talking about user pain points and selling your product. Sync Gong.io recordings directly into Marvin.  

Once you’ve set-up a central hub for all your user data, you’ve built the foundation to conduct, analyze, and share research more effectively.

The power of centralizing all your customer data.

Step 3: Leverage AI to Speed Up Your Analysis Process

From cross-project analysis to asking AI to analyze images, AI simplifies qualitative data analysis. With Marvin’s AI, you can turn research data into actionable, shareable insights in seconds. 

Ask AI

The best thing about an AI-powered UX research repository like Marvin is that it can do all the heavy lifting for you. Marvin is more than a storehouse for all your customer data and can act like a search engine. 

With Marvin’s AI, you can query your entire research repository. Sifting through mountains of data is a massive task, especially with limited time. With Ask AI, you can prompt Marvin with “What are the most common feature requests from enterprise customers?”. The AI will analyze hundreds or thousands of files in your repository and output cited responses. Need to narrow your output, use Ask AI on a single file or project to focus your output.

At Marvin, we recommend searching your passive data as a first step before you conduct new research. This is where AI-powered tools become invaluable. They can do a first-pass analysis of your data to help inform whether you need further research on that topic.

Get your research questions answered instantly.

Automated Transcriptions

Automatically transcribe audio and video recordings to make them searchable and easier to analyze. Marvin, for example, offers accurate and fast transcription services. It also supports translations to multiple languages like French, German, Hindi, and more.

AI-Generated Summaries & Notes

Get to the core of your data faster with Marvin’s AI. Instead of spending hours analyzing raw research data, Marvin can generate summaries and notes in seconds. Be it a lengthy document or hours of user interviews, get instant insights with AI. It allows you to quickly learn the main points without having to read or listen to everything in detail. Marvin can also automatically identify key moments in your video recordings and create highlight reels.

For instance, say you have uploaded user testing videos to Marvin. Marvin’s AI automatically transcribes the recordings and generates summaries for each session. You can quickly see that several users struggled with the “password creation” step. You now have concrete evidence to inform your redesign, and it only took minutes. You can also dig deeper by asking follow-up questions.

Get automated summaries, create auto-notes and dive deeper into each call with Marvin's AI.

AI Analysis

From survey responses to Excel sheets, AI can analyze large datasets in seconds and create insight reports for you. For instance, when you import your NPS data, Marvin’s AI automatically creates a chart that will display all your promoters, detractors, and passives at a glance. It allows you to analyze the overall sentiment expressed in your data and quickly identify areas where users are particularly happy or frustrated. 

With Marvin, you can also create custom reports. You can choose from the report templates, like a usability test report, and the AI will create one for you. Or you can ask for a custom report to meet your specific requirements as well.

Auto-Push Research Insights

You’ve identified your existing data and leveraged AI for qualitative data analysis.  But what happens to all those insights now? With limited resources, you can’t afford to have them gather dust in a repository. That’s where automated insight sharing becomes crucial.

You need a system to automatically push those key findings to the right people at the right time. This is how you can maximize the impact of your research, even with a lean team.

Marvin’s AI streamlines sharing insights for teams with limited resources. For instance, with Marvin’s AI, you can share the latest research insights in a newsletter with your team members and other stakeholders. 

Or, you could export the research insights to Notion as sub-pages. For example, say you’re running an onboarding redesign page and conducting user interviews. You can export the AI-generated summaries and key quotes to a Notion page dedicated to your “Onboarding Redesign” project. You could also auto-share insights to a Slack channel to keep everyone on your team aligned.

Auto-share your latest research insights with Marvin.

Step 4: Plan Ahead and Prioritize Your Research Efforts

They say we will never have enough researchers to do all the research that we need and you can’t say “yes” to every research request that comes your way. A clear prioritization framework is essential for making sure you’re focusing on the most impactful research.

Allocate Time

Even if it’s just a few hours a week or a dedicated day each month, block out time specifically for strategic research. Treat it as a non-negotiable commitment.

Research Sprints

Consider running periodic “research sprints” where the team focuses exclusively on a specific strategic question or area of exploration. This can be a great way to generate new ideas and explore uncharted territory.

Proactive Exploration

Encourage regular analysis of passive data to identify emerging trends and opportunities for deeper investigation. Marvin analyzes the data you already have (like support tickets or sales calls) to help you figure out what you don’t know about your users. 

With the Ask AI feature, search your existing customer data and see if it demands deeper research. You can also tag team members on insights and foster a collaborative research culture. See if they also think a particular issue or theme needs further investigation. 

Focus on the most impactful research when you're conducting research with limited resources.

Step 5: Empower Your Team to Conduct Basic Research

Democratizing user research is not about offloading research to individual teams like UX designers or Customer success. It’s about connecting every single person in an organization with research. It’s about expert researchers guiding others to see the value of research and being a coach. While dedicated researchers bring specialized expertise, others can effectively perform many research tasks. And with AI-powered UX research tools, even non-researchers can contribute meaningfully to the research process.

Here’s how to empower your team with a little help from Marvin:

Provide Basic Research Training

Acting as a strategic advisor, equip your team (designers, product managers, customer success, etc.) with fundamental research skills. Marvin can act as a powerful training aid and ongoing support tool throughout the research workflow.

Discovering Insights from Existing Research

Train your team to search and utilize your research repository effectively. Show them how to identify relevant keywords, filter by project or data type, and extract key insights from past studies. 

Marvin’s intuitive interface and search capabilities, like Ask AI, make it easy for anyone to find the information they need. They only need to ask, and Marvin will deliver the insights in seconds.

Crafting Research Questions

Research questions define what you’re trying to learn and guide your entire research process. Help them formulate research questions that are clear, focused, and answerable through research. You could also create a discussion guide within Marvin to guide your team with the right questions for the right research.

Survey Analysis

Teach them how to design unbiased surveys that gather meaningful information. With Marvin’s survey tool integrations with Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and more, you can upload surveys to Marvin for analysis. Marvin automatically categorizes responses, surfaces key themes, visualizes sentiment, and can even run NPS survey analysis. The AI-driven analysis makes it easier for your team to understand the results.

Help your team conduct basic research under your guidance.

Create Templates

Providing templates for research plans, interview guides, and surveys will help you ensure consistency and quality. From discussion guides to custom insight templates, Marvin encourages the researcher to standardize the entire workflow. Instead of starting from scratch every time, your team members can simply adapt an existing template. By providing a clear framework, you can lead your team to collect higher-quality data and more reliable insights. 

Get Buy-In from Stakeholders

Many stakeholders, especially those unfamiliar with user research, may be skeptical of its value. Research is more often seen as a time-consuming process that delays product launches. But with an AI-powered UX repository like Marvin in place, you can demonstrate its tangible impact on business.

Here’s how you can do it with Marvin:

Connect Research to Business Goals

Don’t just present data; explain how it connects to the bigger picture. Marvin helps you create custom insight templates. You can use it to show how unique research insights directly inform decisions that impact key business objectives. For example, show how research on user onboarding can directly lead to improved activation rates.

Show, Don’t Just Tell

Stakeholders are often short on time. Instead of lengthy reports, Marvin helps you use clear and concise data visualizations to communicate your findings. Charts, graphs, and other visuals can make complex data more accessible and easy to understand.

Focus More on Outcomes

Instead of saying, “Users found the onboarding workflow confusing,” share evidence-backed insights. Marvin creates insights backed by data and linked to the original source.

Share Research Wins

Regularly share key findings and success stories through various channels, such as AI-generated newsletters or Slack updates. Use Marvin’s AI features to ensure stakeholders are always in the loop. You can invite your stakeholders to participate in user interviews with Marvin’s Streaming feature. They can also collaborate or guide you through the interviews without disturbing the participants.

Marvin makes it easier to link research insights with your business outcomes.

Research Is Not A Luxury — It’s a Necessity

Don’t let a small team or a tight budget stop you from doing research. A startup with only one designer can still analyze customer support tickets to identify common usability problems. Passive data is an untapped resource of user insights at most companies.

You might be surprised how much useful information you’re already collecting without realizing it. Start with what you have. Choose the right UX tool to be your perfect AI research assistant to help you conduct research with limited resources.

Remember that research is an investment, not an expense.

Ready to unlock the power of your existing data and streamline your research process?  Book your free demo now!

Indhuja Lal is a product marketing manager at HeyMarvin, a UX research repository that simplifies research & makes it easier to build products your customers love. She loves creating content that connects people with products that simplify their lives.

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