Every UX research project should start with a plan
UX research helps influence decisions made in a business, the target market, product, and future goals of your business. How you do your research will help with the success or failure of your product. It is an important method to ensuring users take the right actions, avoid confusion, and benefit from features and product flows.
Every UX research project should start with a plan.
A user research plan is a concise reference point for your project’s timeline, goals, main players, and objectives. It’s not always used extensively after the project has started, except to remind stakeholders of a project’s purpose. Usually, your research projects come to you in two different ways:
- From precious research insight
- From an internal stakeholder
A research plan consists of:
- What do we want to know? The research-questions and the context. Context can be a target audience for research in user research, the companies you want to research in competitor research, the time-period, etc.
- Why? What is the business impact? What will happen with this research? What happens if we don’t do it?
- What do we already know? What are our assumptions? Which previous research exists, what do we want to find out extra? What are the assumptions of the team?
- How will we research this? Which methods, which steps, how long will research run, who is involved, how and when will results be communicated?
Why you should never compromise on creating a UX research plan:
- It allows you to create designs that are valuable to users and make them efficient to use
- Enable users to complete their tasks without making errors
- Defines the learning curve for your product by making it easy to use
- It helps you estimate the return on investment (ROI) of development and launching product updates
- It helps you to identify early adopters
- It allows you to learn about competitor products and understand important comparison points from customers
The life of a research project
The steps a user researcher generally takes for a research project are:
This is a typical journey and research won’t always happen in such a linear and clean fashion. Often, you have to skip straight to recruitment because of timelines or conduct research while recruiting.
What to Include in Your Research Plan
1 — Background: What is the problem statement? This section summarizes all the conversations you have had with the team leading to why this research was initiated. It’s a brief explanation you can give to anyone who asks what this research is about. What we will be studying, what the research is about and what we hope to understand, what is the company trying to learn.
The study’s goal is sometimes hard to set, as people get so excited that they would jump straight to writing up their questions. If you don’t define your goal, what you want to learn and achieve with this study, you’ll never know for sure if you succeeded. Defining the goal should be done by collaborating with the stakeholders (for example product managers). Such discussions also help to uncover assumptions, and risky areas in a project that would need further investigation with other methods.
Questions to ask to the stakeholders:
- Have you done previous research on this?
- What do you want to learn from this research?
- Do we have any data?
- Who should be involved? (stakeholders, specific users)
- What are you trying to achieve from this project?
- What business KPIs might be impacted through this project?
- What are a few major competitors?
2 — Business objectives and goals of the research What business KPIs might be impacted through this research such as revenue, retention, acquisition
3 — Who are the stakeholders involved Who will be impacted by this research? es. Retention team, acquisition team.
4 — Research objectives This regards how we are going to study the problem statement.
Scientific research uses hypotheses. Hypotheses lead to yes/no answers which are rarely useful in business. Rejecting or accepting a hypothesis also give you a false confidence. Write research-questions and objectives instead, they make you inquisitive and lead to useful data that can support your decision making process.
A list of questions on what you intend to learn with the research. Personally I like to set this list as wide as possible, as long as the questions are within the scope defined by the goal.
I am researching the following:
- We need to understand the process people are currently going through (generative research)
- We need to uncover what people think about the prototype and how they expect to use it (generative + usability testing)
- We need to evaluate the performance of a feature or a product and what people think about it (evaluative research)
Identify the key site areas and user journeys which will be included in the research. What tasks and features do we want participants to test?
- Complete and submit a form
- Sign up
- Submit a request
- Find customer support
- Complete a transaction
Identify which competitors will be included in the research.
Research objectives frame generative research questions. Turn each objective into 3–5 questions.
5 — Methods The research methods you use should be informed by your research questions. Some questions are best answered by quantitative research methods like surveys or A/B tests, with others by qualitative methods like contextual inquiries, user interviews and usability testing. You’ll also find that some questions are best answered by multiple methods, in what’s known as mixed methods research.
- Generative research allows a deep understanding of who our users are (inside and outside of a product/service). We can learn what they experience in their everyday lives. It allows us to see users as human, beyond their interaction with a product/service.
- Evaluative research is about assessing how a product/service works when placed in front of a user. It isn’t merely about functionality, but also about findability, efficiency, and the emotions associated with using the product/service. Many people think evaluative research = usability testing, but it goes much further than that.
- Hybrid research is a combination of generative research and evaluative research. It helps us simultaneously understand our users, as well as how a product/service is performing. Since it covers both spaces at once, it does not go as deeply into a place of understanding or evaluation.
Once I place the goals into one of these three buckets, I can decide on the methodologies that would help answer these goals. The most common associations are:
Generative research
- 1:1 in-depth interviews
- Contextual inquiry
- Mental models
- Customer journey interviewing
- JTBD
Evaluative research
- Usability Testing
- A/B testing
- Competitive testing or analysis
- Benchmarking
- Surveys
Hybrid
- 1x1 in-depth discussion + usability testing
- Card sorting
- 1x1 in-depth discussion + follow-up survey
6 — Determine the scale of the research (number of participants and research duration)
Who you recruit for your research comes from your research questions. Who can best give you the answers you need? While you can often find participants by working with your customer support, sales and marketing teams, certain research questions may require you to look further afield. For qualitative research methods like interviews and usability testing, you may find you’re able to gather enough useful data after speaking with 5 people. For quantitative methods like card sorts and tree tests, it’s best to have at least 30 participants.
Who are the participants you are targeting for this particular project considering demography, geography, non users versus users. Are we recruiting through agencies or internal? Remote or in-person?
With your goal, research questions and method set the user profile you want to research with. This can be even some demographics or a persona description, but the best is to describe it with behaviours, so “users who do x”. Maybe even some hard metrics, like “shopping 4 times per week”.
Consent forms are required for all participants in order to inform them of the purpose of the study and get their agreement in a way that protects everyone legally. The exact wording may require approval in advance by stakeholders and any businesses you may visit for the research. Include at a minimum: what the study involves, who is conducting the research, why you’re doing it, the date, any incentive paid.
Decide on the dates of the research and book the facility (if in-person)
7 — Interview guides Why you need a script, if you already have your research questions? Unfortunately just plainly asking the users what you want to learn will probably lead to biased information. Make a detailed facilitation script that includes introductions, instructions, any needed prompts for materials exchanges, timing cues for switching tasks and turning tools on and off, task scenarios, questions you plan to ask, and so on. Plan how to edit scripts between sessions as needed. Scripts usually include some of these components:
Introduction
- Thank the participant.
- Introduce yourself and explain why you are doing the study.
- Set expectations for how the session will proceed.
- Get consent from the participant in writing.
- If applicable, give the participant the compensation for the study.
- Go over any instructions and, if you’re using a think-aloud method, read the think-aloud instructions to the participants
Include some sample questions using the TEDX approach (talk about, explain,describe, walk me through) for generative research.
8 — Analysis techniques How I summarize the research es. Affinity map, affinity diagram, persona, recordings and video clips, quotes.
9 — UX metrics in case of usability tests the ux metrics to consider are customer satisfaction, recommendation, usability research, user tasks.
10 — Timeline
How long do you think your user research project will take? This is a necessary consideration, especially if you’ve got people who are expecting to see the results of your research.
The timeline of a typical project can be over three to six weeks. It can include just generative research (which is about four weeks total) or just usability testing (which is about three weeks). Another standard timeline is conducting generative research to understand the problem, and then creating insight-based prototypes to usability testing.
Although timelines can differ (through recruitment availability and tools the company has), here are the basic guidelines:
- Generative research methods can take 4–6 weeks
- Evaluative research methods (usability testing) can take 2–4 weeks
- Surveys can take 1–2 weeks
- Recruitment can take 1–2 weeks
- Alignment meetings can take up to 1 week
Some of these methods can overlap, but keep these in mind when determining a timeline. As a note, you can start researching before you finish recruiting to cut down timelines!
11 — Budget
The other factor that goes into this section of the plan is any other logistical things you’ll need to cover. Is there a budget for your research? Will you give the participants an incentive? Do you need to reserve a space to conduct your research? Do you need to pay for additional software?
Next steps
This is one of the most important parts of your plan, because it outlines what happens once you’ve finished your research. Is there another study you want to complete after this one? How will people access your research after you complete it?
Consider how you will present your research findings to your stakeholders and your team. Telling a compelling story and including quotes and videos of your participants during the session can help stakeholders identify with the impact of your research. Storing your insights so they’re easy for anyone to access and understand after everything is said and done ensures your research has a lasting impression on your team.
Snapshots are a quick way for the team to easily visualize what important information has come from the research sessions. My snapshots include:
- Which participants faced this issue (ex: P1, P4, P5, P7)
- The insight/problem
- The actions/recommendations
- A quote
- 1–2 video relevant video clips that highlight the issue
- If it is a usability test, an annotation of the screen and what happened
One important thing to know about plans: they tend to not behave exactly how we intended them to behave during usage.
Thanks for reading!
