How can a small business do UX research on a budget?
A small business can do useful UX research for little or no money by combining three things: reading the questions customers already send you, asking front-desk and sales staff what people get stuck on, and watching five people try to complete real tasks on your current site or a competitor's.
Those three steps take a week or two of spare hours and tell you most of what a new website needs to fix.
Research is cheapest before design starts. Moving a button in a sketch costs minutes; rebuilding a finished page because nobody could find the prices costs days. The aim is to find the top tasks, the handful of things most visitors come to do, such as checking a price, booking a slot, finding the address or asking a question on WhatsApp, and make those effortless. Visual fashion matters far less. Keeping an eye on current web design trends is fine, but a trendy page that hides your opening hours still loses customers.
Start with what you already have
Customer messages
Your LINE chats, WhatsApp threads, Facebook messages and email inbox are a free research archive. Scroll back three months and copy every question into a spreadsheet, without names or phone numbers. Group them: price, location and parking, availability, how to pay, language, delivery times. The biggest groups are your top tasks, and any question asked ten times is content the website failed to provide.
Staff knowledge
Receptionists, sales staff and delivery coordinators hear the confusion first. Give them 20 minutes and three questions: what do customers ask most, what do they misunderstand, and what makes them give up or go elsewhere? In a bilingual business, ask separately about Thai and foreign customers, because their questions often differ.
Search Console and analytics
Google Search Console shows the search queries that led people to your site and which pages they landed on. Queries such as "price", "near me", "open Sunday" or a treatment name in Thai reveal intent in the visitor's own words. Your analytics tool (our GA4 setup guide covers the basics) adds which pages people leave from quickly and which device they use. For many Bangkok businesses, the answer to that last question turns out to be a phone.
Five-user tests you can run yourself
Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group argued that testing with about five users finds most of a design's usability problems, and that several small rounds beat one large study. For a small business, that means one afternoon of testing can change a whole website plan.
You do not need a lab. A quiet table, a phone, and a friend or customer who has never used your site are enough. Recruit people who match your customers: for a clinic, people who have booked a treatment recently; for a B2B supplier, buyers or office managers, not your cousin who studies design. A small thank-you, such as a voucher or a free coffee, is normal.
Informal "hallway" tests also work. Hand your phone to someone in the target group at a co-working space or a trade event and ask them to find one thing. Two minutes each, repeated five times, will surface the obvious problems.
- Step 1
Pick three tasks
Real top tasks, for example: find the price of a service, book a slot, find how to get there.
- Step 2
Write neutral instructions
Describe the goal, not the button. Say 'you want a facial on Saturday', not 'use the Book Now menu'.
- Step 3
Ask them to think aloud
Explain that you are testing the site, not them, and that there are no wrong answers.
- Step 4
Watch and stay quiet
Do not help. Note where they hesitate, scroll back or give up.
- Step 5
Ask two questions at the end
What was hardest, and what did they expect to find but could not?
- Step 6
Summarise the same day
List each problem and how many of the five people hit it.
Remote tools, heatmaps and surveys
Remote unmoderated tests
Online testing platforms recruit participants, give them your tasks and send back screen recordings with their spoken comments. They are useful when your customers live abroad, for example tourists planning a Bangkok trip. Pricing varies widely and many charge per participant or by subscription, so run one small round before paying for more. Check whether the panel includes Thai speakers if your audience does.
Heatmaps and session recordings
Microsoft Clarity is a free tool that shows heatmaps of where people click and scroll, and replays anonymised sessions. Watching ten recordings of mobile visitors on your service pages often shows the same pattern: people scroll past the section you thought mattered and tap on something that is not a link. Other heatmap tools offer similar features on paid plans.
Short surveys
A one-question on-page survey, such as "What did you come here to do today?", collects top tasks in visitors' own words. Keep it optional and short.
Test on real phones as well as on a desktop. A layout that looks fine on a laptop can bury the Book button on a small Android screen. Our guide to responsive web design explains what should adapt between screen sizes, so you know what to check during a test.
Card sorting for your menu
Card sorting shows how customers group your services, which tells you how to name and arrange the menu. Write each service or page on a card, 20 to 40 cards is plenty, and ask a participant to group them in whatever way makes sense and name each group.
- Open sort: people create and name their own groups. Use it early, when you do not yet know the categories.
- Closed sort: you give the group names and people place the cards. Use it to check a menu you have already drafted.
Paper cards on a table work well with five to ten people. Online card sorting tools do the same remotely and add simple analysis. Watch for the words people use: a spa owner might write "body treatments" while customers group the same cards under "massage". Run the sort in Thai and in English if you serve both audiences, since the natural groups can differ between languages.
Consent and PDPA
Recording someone's screen, voice or face during a test collects personal data, so Thailand's PDPA applies. Keep it simple and fair:
- Explain in writing, in the participant's language, what you will record, why, who will see it and how long you keep it.
- Get clear consent before you start recording, and let people say no to video while still taking part.
- Store recordings securely, share them only with the people doing the work, and delete them when the project ends.
- For heatmap and recording tools on your live site, mask form fields and mention the tool in your privacy notice and cookie banner.
This is general guidance, not legal advice; check your wording with a PDPA adviser if you record sensitive topics such as health.
From findings to a fix list
Research only pays off when it changes the site. Put every finding into one list and score each item on two things: how many people it affects, and how badly it blocks a top task. A problem that stopped four of five testers from finding the price goes to the top. A colour someone disliked goes to the bottom.
Then sort the fixes into three kinds:
- Content fixes: missing prices, unclear service names, no parking information, English-only pages for a Thai audience. These are cheap and often the most valuable.
- Layout and flow fixes: buried buttons, long forms, a booking path with too many steps. These shape the design brief. If the terms are new to you, our explainer on what UI and UX design mean helps you brief a designer.
- Trust fixes: stock photos where real ones would reassure, or no sign of who runs the business. Our tips for business website photography cover the practical side.
Collect a few reference sites your testers found easy, and look through a gallery of web design inspiration for layouts that solve the same problems. B2B firms should also compare findings with how their buyers research suppliers; our article on B2B website lead generation for Thai companies covers what those buyers look for.
A research plan for your next build
Match the research to the money you have. The checklist below runs from free steps to a small spend; even the first three items will sharpen a website brief.
Bring the results to your designer. When we take on custom website design or a redesign, a list of top tasks and real customer questions lets us plan pages around what visitors do rather than guesswork. Our Starter package begins from THB 10,000 and the Business package, with English and Thai and two revision rounds, from THB 30,000, both indicative one-time prices. When your findings are ready, ask for a price for your project and the final figure will be set in a written quote.
- Free: mine your messagesThree months of LINE, WhatsApp and email questions, grouped into top tasks.
- Free: interview your staffTwenty minutes with front-desk and sales staff, Thai and foreign customers asked about separately.
- Free: read Search ConsoleTop queries and landing pages, noting the words customers use.
- Free: install a heatmap toolWatch ten mobile sessions on key pages, with consent covered in your privacy notice.
- Low cost: five-user testThree tasks, five matching participants, a small thank-you each.
- Low cost: card sortPaper or an online tool, in Thai and English if you serve both.
- Small spend: remote test roundOne round on a testing platform for audiences you cannot meet in person.
More design guides
Sources
- Nielsen Norman Group: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
- Microsoft Clarity
- Google Search Console Help: Performance report
- Personal Data Protection Act B.E. 2562 (2019), English translation
Builds and ranks the websites: the systems behind the 17 client sites whose Search Console numbers we publish. This guide was written by the Website Development Bangkok team. More about us