November 18, 2022
4 min

Create a user research plan with these steps

A great user experience (UX) is one of the largest drivers of growth and revenue through user satisfaction. However, when budgets get tight, or there is a squeeze on timelines, user research is one of the first things to go. Often at the cost of user satisfaction.  

This short sighted view can mean project managers are preoccupied with achieving milestones and short term goals. And UX teams get stuck researching products they weren’t actually involved with developing. As a result no one has the space and understanding to really develop a product that speaks to users needs, desires and wants. There must  be a better way to produce a product that is user-driven.  Thankfully there is.

What is user research and why should project managers care about it? 👨🏻💻

User research is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, user research involves using different research methods to gather information about your end users. 

Essentially it aims to create the best possible experience for your users by listening and learning directly from those that already or potentially will use your product. You might conduct interviews to help you understand a particular problem, carry out a tree test to identify bottlenecks or problems in your navigation, or do some usability testing to directly observe your users as they perform different tasks on your website or in your app. Or a combination of these to understand what users really want.

To a project manager and team, this likely sounds fairly familiar, that any project can’t be managed in a silo. Regular check-ins and feedback are essential to making smart decisions. The same with UX research. It can make the whole process quicker and more efficient. By taking a step back, digging into your users’ minds, and gaining a fuller understanding of what they want upfront, it can curtail short-term views and decisions.

Bringing more user research into your development process has major benefits for the team, and the ultimately the quality of that final product. There are three key benefits:

  1. Saves your development team time and effort. Ensuring the team is working on what users want, not wasting time on features that don’t measure up.
  2. Gives your users a better experience by meeting their requirements.
  3. Helps your team innovate quickly by understanding what users really want.

As a project manager, making space and planning for user research can be one of the best ways to ensure the team is creating a product that truly is user-driven.

How to bring research into your product development process 🤔

There are a couple of ways you can bring UX research into your product development process

  1. Start with a dedicated research project.
  2. Integrate UX research throughout the development project.

It can be more difficult to integrate UX research throughout the process, as it means planning the project with various stages of research built in to check the development of features. But ultimately this approach is likely to turn out the best product. One that has been considered, checked and well thought out through the whole product development process. To help you on the way we have laid out 6 key steps to help you integrate UX research into your product development process.

6 key steps to integrate UX research 👟

Step 1: Define your research questions

Take a step back, look at your product and define your research questions

It may be tempting just to ask, ‘do users like our latest release?’ This however does not get to why or what your users like or don’t like. Try instead:

  • What do our users really want from our product?
  • Where are they currently struggling while using our website?
  • How can we design a better product for our users?

These questions help to form the basis of specific questions about your product and specific areas of research to explore which in turn help shape the type of research you undertake.

Step 2: Create your research plan

With a few key research questions to focus on, it’s time to create your research plan.

A great research plan covers your project’s goals, scope, timing, and deliverables. It’s essential for keeping yourself organized but also for getting key stakeholder signoff.

Step 3: Prepare any research logistics

Every project plan requires attention to detail including a user research project. And with any good project there are a set of steps to help make sense of it.

  1. Method: Based on your questions, what is the best user research method to use? 
  2. Schedule: When will the research take place? How long will it go on for? If this is ongoing research, plan how it will be implemented and how often.
  3. Location: Where will the research take place? 
  4. Resources: What resources do you need? This could be technical support or team members.
  5. Participants: Define who you want to research. Who is eligible to take part in this research? How will you find the right people?
  6. Data: How will you capture the research data? Where will it be stored? How will you analyze the data and create insights and reports that can be used?
  7. Deliverables: What is the ultimate goal for your research project?

Step 4: Decide which method will be used

Many user research methods benefit from an observational style of testing. Particularly if you are looking into why users undertake a specific task or struggle.

Typically, there are two approaches to testing:

  1. Moderated testing is when a moderator is present during the test to answer questions, guide the participant, or dig deeper with further questions.
  2. Unmoderated testing is when a participant is left on their own to carry out the task. Often this is done remotely and with very specific instructions.Your key questions will determine which method will works best for your research.  Find our more about the differences.

Step 5: Run your research session

It’s time to gather insights and data. The questions you are asking will influence how you run your research sessions and the methods you’ve chosen. 

If you are running surveys you will be asking users through a banner or invitation to fill out your survey. Unmoderated and very specific questions. Gathering qualitative data and analyzing patterns.

If you’re using something qualitative like interviews or heat mapping, you’ll want to implement software and gather as much information as possible.

Step 6: Prepare a research findings report and share with stakeholders

Analyze your findings, interrogate your data and find those insights that dive into the way your users think. How do they love your product? But how do they also struggle?

Pull together your findings and insights into an easy to understand report. And get socializing. Bring your key stakeholders together and share your findings. Bringing everyone across the findings together can bring everyone on the journey. And for the development process can mean decisions can be user-driven. 

Wrap Up 🥙

Part of any project, UX research should be essential to developing a product that is user-driven. Integrating user research into your development process can be challenging. But with planning and strategy it can be hugely beneficial to saving time and money in the long run. 

Share this article
Author
Optimal
Workshop

Related articles

View all blog articles
Learn more
1 min read

Efficient Research: Maximizing the ROI of Understanding Your Customers

Introduction

User research is invaluable, but in fast-paced environments, researchers often struggle with tight deadlines, limited resources, and the need to prove their impact. In our recent UX Insider webinar, Weidan Li, Senior UX Researcher at Seek, shared insights on Efficient Research—an approach that optimizes Speed, Quality, and Impact to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of understanding customers.

At the heart of this approach is the Efficient Research Framework, which balances these three critical factors:

  • Speed – Conducting research quickly without sacrificing key insights.
  • Quality – Ensuring rigor and reliability in findings.
  • Impact – Making sure research leads to meaningful business and product changes.

Within this framework, Weidan outlined nine tactics that help UX researchers work more effectively. Let’s dive in.

1. Time Allocation: Invest in What Matters Most

Not all research requires the same level of depth. Efficient researchers prioritize their time by categorizing projects based on urgency and impact:

  • High-stakes decisions (e.g., launching a new product) require deep research.
  • Routine optimizations (e.g., tweaking UI elements) can rely on quick testing methods.
  • Low-impact changes may not need research at all.

By allocating time wisely, researchers can avoid spending weeks on minor issues while ensuring critical decisions are well-informed.

2. Assistance of AI: Let Technology Handle the Heavy Lifting

AI is transforming UX research, enabling faster and more scalable insights. Weidan suggests using AI to:

  • Automate data analysis – AI can quickly analyze survey responses, transcripts, and usability test results.
  • Generate research summaries – Tools like ChatGPT can help synthesize findings into digestible insights.
  • Speed up recruitment – AI-powered platforms can help find and screen participants efficiently.

While AI can’t replace human judgment, it can free up researchers to focus on higher-value tasks like interpreting results and influencing strategy.

3. Collaboration: Make Research a Team Sport

Research has a greater impact when it’s embedded into the product development process. Weidan emphasizes:

  • Co-creating research plans with designers, PMs, and engineers to align on priorities.
  • Involving stakeholders in synthesis sessions so insights don’t sit in a report.
  • Encouraging non-researchers to run lightweight studies, such as A/B tests or quick usability checks.

When research is shared and collaborative, it leads to faster adoption of insights and stronger decision-making.

4. Prioritization: Focus on the Right Questions

With limited resources, researchers must choose their battles wisely. Weidan recommends using a prioritization framework to assess:

  • Business impact – Will this research influence a high-stakes decision?
  • User impact – Does it address a major pain point?
  • Feasibility – Can we conduct this research quickly and effectively?

By filtering out low-priority projects, researchers can avoid research for research’s sake and focus on what truly drives change.

5. Depth of Understanding: Go Beyond Surface-Level Insights

Speed is important, but efficient research isn’t about cutting corners. Weidan stresses that even quick studies should provide a deep understanding of users by:

  • Asking why, not just what – Observing behavior is useful, but uncovering motivations is key.
  • Using triangulation – Combining methods (e.g., usability tests + surveys) to validate findings.
  • Revisiting past research – Leveraging existing insights instead of starting from scratch.

Balancing speed with depth ensures research is not just fast, but meaningful.

6. Anticipation: Stay Ahead of Research Needs

Proactive researchers don’t wait for stakeholders to request studies—they anticipate needs and set up research ahead of time. This means:

  • Building a research roadmap that aligns with upcoming product decisions.
  • Running continuous discovery research so teams have a backlog of insights to pull from.
  • Creating self-serve research repositories where teams can find relevant past studies.

By anticipating research needs, UX teams can reduce last-minute requests and deliver insights exactly when they’re needed.

7. Justification of Methodology: Explain Why Your Approach Works

Stakeholders may question research methods, especially when they seem time-consuming or expensive. Weidan highlights the importance of educating teams on why specific methods are used:

  • Clearly explain why qualitative research is needed when stakeholders push for just numbers.
  • Show real-world examples of how past research has led to business success.
  • Provide a trade-off analysis (e.g., “This method is faster but provides less depth”) to help teams make informed choices.

A well-justified approach ensures research is respected and acted upon.

8. Individual Engagement: Tailor Research Communication to Your Audience

Not all stakeholders consume research the same way. Weidan recommends adapting insights to fit different audiences:

  • Executives – Focus on high-level impact and key takeaways.
  • Product teams – Provide actionable recommendations tied to specific features.
  • Designers & Engineers – Share usability findings with video clips or screenshots.

By delivering insights in the right format, researchers increase the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in and action.

9. Business Actions: Ensure Research Leads to Real Change

The ultimate goal of research is not just understanding users—but driving business decisions. To ensure research leads to action:

  • Follow up on implementation – Track whether teams apply the insights.
  • Tie findings to key metrics – Show how research affects conversion rates, retention, or engagement.
  • Advocate for iterative research – Encourage teams to re-test and refine based on new data.

Research is most valuable when it translates into real business outcomes.

Final Thoughts: Research That Moves the Needle

Efficient research is not just about doing more, faster—it’s about balancing speed, quality, and impact to maximize its influence. Weidan’s nine tactics help UX researchers work smarter by:


✔️  Prioritizing high-impact work
✔️  Leveraging AI and collaboration
✔️  Communicating research in a way that drives action

By adopting these strategies, UX teams can ensure their research is not just insightful, but transformational.

Watch the full webinar here

Learn more
1 min read

5 key areas for effective ResearchOPs

Simply put, ResearchOps is about making sure your research operations are robust, thought through and managed. 

Having systems and processes around your UX research and your team keep everyone (and everything) organized. Making user research projects quicker to get started and more streamlined to run. And robust sharing, socializing, and knowledge storage means that everyone can understand the research insights and findings and put these to use - across the organization. And even better, find these when they need them. 

Using the same tools across the team allows the research team to learn from each other, and previous research projects and be able to compare apples with apples, with everyone included. Bringing the team together across tools, research and results.

We go into more detail in our ebook ResearchOps Checklist about exactly what you can do to make sure your research team is running at its best. Let’s take a quick look at 5 way to ensure you have the grounding for a successful ResearchOps team.

1. Knowledge management 📚

What do you do with all of the insights and findings of a user research project? How do you store them, how do you manage the insights, and how do you share and socialize?

Having processes in place that manage this knowledge is important to the longevity of your research. From filing to sharing across platforms, it all needs to be standardized so everyone can search, find and share.

2. Guidelines and process templates 📝

Providing a framework for how to run research projects is are important. Building on the knowledge base from previous research can improve research efficiencies and cut down on groundwork and administration. Making research projects quicker and more streamlined to get underway.

3. Governance 🏛

User research is all about people, real people. It is incredibly important that any research be legal, safe, and ethical. Having effective governance covered is vital.

4. Tool stack 🛠

Every research team needs a ‘toolbox’ that they can use whenever they need to run card sorts, tree tests, usability tests, user interviews, and more. But which software and tools to use?

Making sure that the team is using the same tools also helps with future research projects, learning from previous projects, and ensuring that the information is owned and run by the organization (rather than whichever individuals prefer). Reduce logins and password shares, and improve security with organization-wide tools and platforms. 

5. Recruitment 👱🏻👩👩🏻👧🏽👧🏾

Key to great UX research is the ability to recruit quality participants - fast! Having strong processes in place for screening, scheduling, sampling, incentivizing, and managing participants needs to be top of the list when organizing the team.

Wrap Up 💥

Each of these ResearchOps processes are not independent of the other. And neither do they flow from one to the other. They are part of a total wrap around for the research team, creating processes, systems and tools that are built to serve the team. Allowing them to focus on the job of doing great research and generating insights and findings that develop the very best user experience. 

Afterall, we are creating user experiences that keep our users engaged and coming back. Why not look at the teams user experience and make the most of that. Freeing time and space to socialize and share the findings with the organization. 

Learn more
1 min read

Collating your user testing notes

It’s been a long day. Scratch that - it’s been a long week! Admit it. You loved every second of it.

Twelve hour days, the mad scramble to get the prototype ready in time, the stakeholders poking their heads in occasionally, dealing with no-show participants and the excitement around the opportunity to speak to real life human beings about product or service XYZ. Your mind is exhausted but you are buzzing with ideas and processing what you just saw. You find yourself sitting in your war room with several pages of handwritten notes and with your fellow observers you start popping open individually wrapped lollies leftover from the day’s sessions. Someone starts a conversation around what their favourite flavour is and then the real fun begins. Sound familiar? Welcome to the post user testing debrief meeting.

How do you turn those scribbled notes and everything rushing through your mind into a meaningful picture of the user experience you just witnessed? And then when you have that picture, what do you do next? Pull up a bean bag, grab another handful of those lollies we feed our participants and get comfy because I’m going to share my idiot-proof, step by step guide for turning your user testing notes into something useful.

Let’s talk

Get the ball rolling by holding a post session debrief meeting while it’s all still fresh your collective minds. This can be done as one meeting at the end of the day’s testing or you could have multiple quick debriefs in between testing sessions. Choose whichever options works best for you but keep in mind this needs to be done at least once and before everyone goes home and forgets everything. Get all observers and facilitators together in any meeting space that has a wall like surface that you can stick post its to - you can even use a window! And make sure you use real post its - the fake ones fall off!

Mark your findings (Tagging)

Before you put sharpie to post it, it’s essential to agree as a group on how you will tag your observations. Tagging the observations now will make the analysis work much easier and help you to spot patterns and themes. Colour coding the post its is by far the simplest and most effective option and how you assign the colours is entirely up to you. You could have a different colour for each participant or testing session, you could have different colours to denote participant attributes that are relevant to your study eg senior staff and junior staff, or you could use different colours to denote specific testing scenarios that were used. There’s many ways you could carve this up and there’s no right or wrong way. Just choose the option that suits you and your team best because you’re the ones who have to look at it and understand it. If you only have one colour post it eg yellow, you could colour code the pen colours you use to write on the notes or include some kind of symbol to help you track them.

Processing the paper (Collating)

That pile of paper is not going to process itself! Your next job as a group is to work through the task of transposing your observations to post it notes. For now, just stick them to the wall in any old way that suits you. If you’re the organising type, you could group them by screen or testing scenario. The positioning will all change further down the process, so at this stage it’s important to just keep it simple. For issues that occur repeatedly across sessions, just write them down on their own post its- doubles will be useful to see further down the track.In addition to  holding a debrief meetings, you also need to round up everything that was used to capture the testing session/s. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Handwritten notes, typed notes, video footage and any audio recordings need to be reviewed just in case something was missed. Any handwritten notes should be typed to assist you with the completion of the report. Don’t feel that you have to wait until the testing is completed before you start typing up your notes because you will find they pile up very quickly and if your handwriting is anything like mine…. Well let’s just say my short term memory is often required to pick up the slack and even that has it’s limits. Type them up in between sessions where possible and save each session as it’s own document. I’ll often use the testing questions or scenario based tasks to structure my typed notes and I find that makes it really easy to refer back to.Now that you’ve processed all the observations, it’s time to start sorting your observations to surface behavioural patterns and make sense of it all.

Spotting patterns and themes through affinity diagramming

Affinity diagramming is a fantastic tool for making sense of user testing observations. In fact it’s just about my favourite way to make sense of any large mass of information. It’s an engaging and visual process that grows and evolves like a living creature taking on a life of its own. It also builds on the work you’ve just done which is a real plus!By now, testing is over and all of your observations should all be stuck to a wall somewhere. Get everyone together again as a group and step back and take it all in. Just let it sit with you for a moment before you dive in. Just let it breathe. Have you done that? Ok now as individuals working at the same time, start by grouping things that you think belong together. It’s important to just focus on the content of the labels and try to ignore the colour coded tagging at this stage, so if session one was blue post its don’t group all the blue ones together just because they’re all blue! If you get stuck, try grouping by topic or create two groups eg issues and wins and then chunk the information up from there.

You will find that the groups will change several times over the course of the process  and that’s ok because that’s what it needs to do.While you do this, everyone else will be doing the same thing - grouping things that make sense to them.  Trust me, it’s nowhere near as chaotic as it sounds! You may start working as individuals but it won’t be long before curiosity kicks in and the room is buzzing with naturally occurring conversation.Make sure you take a step back regularly and observe what everyone else is doing and don’t be afraid to ask questions and move other people’s post its around- no one owns it! No matter how silly something may seem just put it there because it can be moved again. Have a look at where your tagged observations have ended up. Are there clusters of colour? Or is it more spread out? What that means will depend largely on how you decided to tag your findings. For example if you assigned each testing session its own colour and you have groups with lot’s of different colours in them you’ll find that the same issue was experienced by multiple people.Next, start looking at each group and see if you can break them down into smaller groups and at the same time consider the overall picture for bigger groups eg can the wall be split into say three high level groups.Remember, you can still change your groups at anytime.

Thinning the herd (Merging)

Once you and your team are happy with the groups, it’s time to start condensing the size of this beast. Look for doubled up findings and stack those post its on top of each other to cut the groups down- just make sure you can still see how many there were. The point of merging is to condense without losing anything so don’t remove something just because it only happened once. That one issue could be incredibly serious. Continue to evaluate and discuss as a group until you are happy. By now clear and distinct groups of your observations should have emerged and at a glance you should be able to identify the key findings from your study.

A catastrophe or a cosmetic flaw? (Scoring)

Scoring relates to how serious the issues are and how bad the consequences of not fixing them are. There are arguments for and against the use of scoring and it’s important to recognise that it is just one way to communicate your findings.I personally rarely use scoring systems. It’s not really something I think about when I’m analysing the observations. I rarely rank one problem or finding over another. Why? Because all data is good data and it all adds to the overall picture.I’ve always been a huge advocate for presenting the whole story and I will never diminish the significance of a finding by boosting another. That said, I do understand the perspective of those who place metrics around their findings. Other designers have told me they feel that it allows them to quantify the seriousness of each issue and help their client/designer/boss make decisions about what to do next.We’ve all got our own way of doing things, so I’ll leave it up to you to choose whether or not you score the issues. If you decide to score your findings there are a number of scoring systems you can use and if I had to choose one, I quite like Jakob Nielsen’s methodology for the simple way it takes into consideration multiple factors. Ultimately you should choose the one that suits your working style best.

Let’s say you did decide to score the issues. Start by writing down each key finding on it’s own post it and move to a clean wall/ window. Leave your affinity diagram where it is. Divide the new wall in half: one side for wins eg findings that indicate things that tested well and the other for issues. You don’t need to score the wins but you do need to acknowledge what went well because knowing what you’re doing well is just as important as knowing where you need to improve. As a group (wow you must be getting sick of each other! Make sure you go out for air from time to time!) score the issues based on your chosen methodology.Once you have completed this entire process you will have everything you need to write a kick ass report.

What could possibly go wrong? (and how to deal with it)

No process is perfect and there are a few potential dramas to be aware of:

People jumping into solution mode too early

In the middle of the debrief meeting, someone has an epiphany. Shouts of We should move the help button! or We should make the yellow button smaller! ring out and the meeting goes off the rails.I’m not going to point fingers and blame any particular role because we’ve all done it, but it’s important to recognise that’s not why we’re sitting here. The debrief meeting is about digesting and sharing what you and the other observers just saw. Observing and facilitating user testing is a privilege. It’s a precious thing that deserves respect and if you jump into solution mode too soon, you may miss something. Keep the conversation on track by appointing a team member to facilitate the debrief meeting.

Storage problems

Handwritten notes taken by multiple observers over several days of testing adds up to an enormous pile of paper. Not only is it a ridiculous waste of paper but they have to be securely stored for three months following the release of the report. It’s not pretty. Typing them up can solve that issue but it comes with it’s own set of storage related hurdles. Just like the handwritten notes, they need to be stored securely. They don’t belong on SharePoint or in the share drive or any other shared storage environment that can be accessed by people outside your observer group. User testing notes are confidential and are not light reading for anyone and everyone no matter how much they complain. Store any typed notes in a limited access storage solution that only the observers have access to and if anyone who shouldn’t be reading them asks, tell them that they are confidential and the integrity of the research must be preserved and respected.

Time issues

Before the storage dramas begin, you have to actually pick through the mountain of paper. Not to mention the video footage, and the audio and you have to chase up that sneaky observer who disappeared when the clock struck 5. All of this takes up a lot of time. Another time related issue comes in the form of too much time passing in between testing sessions and debrief meetings. The best way to deal with both of these issues  is to be super organised and hold multiple smaller debriefs in between sessions where possible. As a group, work out your time commitments before testing begins and have a clear plan in place for when you will meet.  This will prevent everything piling up and overwhelming you at the end.

Disagreements over scoring

At the end of that long day/week we’re all tired and discussions around scoring the issues can get a little heated. One person’s showstopper may be another person’s mild issue. Many of the ranking systems use words as well as numbers to measure the level of severity and it’s easy to get caught up in the meaning of the words and ultimately get sidetracked from the task at hand. Be proactive and as a group set ground rules upfront for all discussions. Determine how long you’ll spend discussing an issue and what you will do in the event that agreement cannot be reached. People want to feel heard and they want to feel like their contributions are valued. Given that we are talking about an iterative process, sometimes it’s best just to write everything down to keep people happy and merge and cull the list in the next iteration. By then they’ve likely had time to reevaluate their own thinking.

And finally...

We all have our own ways of making sense of our user testing observations and there really is no right or wrong way to go about it. The one thing I would like to reiterate is the importance of collaboration and teamwork. You cannot do this alone, so please don’t try. If you’re a UX team of one, you probably already have a trusted person that you bounce ideas off. They would be a fantastic person to do this with. How do you approach this process? What sort of challenges have you faced? Let me know in the comments below.

Seeing is believing

Explore our tools and see how Optimal makes gathering insights simple, powerful, and impactful.