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.  

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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.

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

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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How to bring research into your product development process 🤔

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

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

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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.

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6 key steps to integrate UX research 👟

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Step 1: Define your research questions

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

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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?

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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.

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Step 2: Create your research plan

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

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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.

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Step 3: Prepare any research logistics

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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.

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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?

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Step 4: Decide which method will be used

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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.

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Typically, there are two approaches to testing:

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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.

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Step 5: Run your research session

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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. 

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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.

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

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

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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?

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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. 

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Wrap Up 🥙

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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. 

User research and design can be tough in this fast-moving world. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in what we’re doing, or what we think we’re supposed to be doing, that we don’t take the time to look for other options and other ways to use the tools we already know and love. I’ve compiled this list over last few days (my brain hurts) by talking to a few customers and a few people around the office. I’m sure it's far from comprehensive. I’ve focused on quick wins and unique examples. I’ll start off with some obvious ones, and we’ll get a little more abstract, or niche, as we go. I hope you get some ideas flying as you read through, enjoy!
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#1 Benchmark your information architecture (IA)

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Without a baseline for your information architecture, you can’t easily tell if any changes you make have a positive effect. If you haven’t done so, benchmark your existing website on Tree testing now. Upload your site structure and get results the same day. Now you’ll have IA scores to beat each month. Easy.
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#2 Find out precisely where people get lost

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Use Tree testing Pietree to find out exactly where people are getting lost in your website structure and where they go instead. You can also use First-click testing for this if you’re only interested in the first click, and let’s face it, that is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.
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#3 Start at the start

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If you’re just not sure where to begin then take a screenshot of your homepage, or any page that you think might have some issues and get going with First-click testing. Write up a string of things that people might want to do when they find themselves on this page and use these as your tasks. Surprise all your colleagues with a maddening heatmap showing where people actually clicked in response to your tasks. Now you’ll know have a better idea of which area of your site to focus a tree test or card sort on for your next step.

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#4 A/B test your site structure

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Tree testing is great for testing more than one content structure. It’s easy to run two separate Tree testing studies — even more than two. It’ll help you decide which structure you and your team should run with, and it won’t take you long to set them up. Learn more.
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#5 Make collaborative design decisions

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Use Optimal Sort to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs — logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on. By creating a closed image sort with categories where your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.
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#6 Do your (market) research

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Card sorting is a great UX research technique, but it can also be a fun way to involve your users in some market research. Get a better sense of what your users and customers actually want to see on your website, by conducting an image sort of potential products. By providing categories like ‘I would buy this’, ‘I wouldn’t buy this’ to indicate their preferences for each item, you can figure out what types of products appeal to your customers.
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#7 Customer satisfaction surveys with surveys

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The thoughts and feelings of your users are always important. A simple survey can help you take a deeper look at your checkout process, a recently launched product or service, or even on the packaging your product arrives in — your options are endless.

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#8 Crowdsource content ideas

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Whether you’re running a blog or a UX conference, Questions can help you generate content ideas and understand any knowledge gaps that might be out there. Figure out what your users and attendees like to read on your blog, or what they want to hear about at your event, and let this feed into what you offer.
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#9 Do some sociological research

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Using card sorting for sociological research is a great way to deepen your understanding of how different groups may categorize information. Rather than focusing solely on how your users interact with your product or service, consider broadening your research horizons to understand your audience’s mental models. For example, by looking at how young people group popular social media platforms, you can understand the relationships between them, and identify where your product may fit in the mix.
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#10 Create tests to fit in your onboarding process

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Onboarding new customers is crucial to keeping them engaged with your product, especially if it involves your users learning how to use it. You can set up a quick study to help your users stay on track with onboarding. For example, say your company provided online email marketing software. You can set up a First-click testing study using a photo of your app, with a task asking your participants where they’d click to see the open rates for a particular email that went out.

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#11 Quantify the return on investment of UX

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Some people, including UX Agony Aunt, define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. By attaching a value to the time spent completing tasks, or to successful completion of tasks, you can approximate an ROI or at least illustrate the difference between two options.

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#12 Collate all your user testing notes using qualitative Insights

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Making sense of your notes from qualitative research activities can be simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. It’s fun being out on the field and jotting down observations on a notepad, or sitting in on user interviews and documenting observations into a spreadsheet. You can now easily import all your user research and give it some traceability.

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#13 Establish which tags or filters people consider to be the most important

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Create a card sort with your search filters or tags as labels, and have participants rank them according to how important they consider them to be. Analytics can tell you half of the story (where people actually click), so the card sort can give another side: a better idea of what people actually think or want.

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#14 Reduce content on landing pages to what people access regularly

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Before you run an open card sort to generate new category ideas, you can run a closed card sort to find out if you have any redundant content. Say you wanted to simplify the homepage of your intranet. You can ask participants to sort cards (containing homepage links) based on how often they use them. You could compare this card sort data with analytics from your intranet and see if people’s actual behavior and perception are well aligned.

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#15 Crowd-source the values you want your team/brand/product to represent

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Card sorting is a well-established technique in the ‘company values’ realm, and there are some great resources online to help you and your team brainstorm the values you represent. These ‘in-person’ brainstorm sessions are great, and you can run a remote closed card sort to support your findings. And if you want feedback from more than a small group of people (if your company has, say, more than 15 staff) you can run a remote closed card sort on its own. Use Microsoft’s Reaction Card Method as card inspiration.

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#16 Input your learnings and observations from a UX conference with qualitative insights

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If you're lucky enough to attend a UX conference, you can now share the experience with your colleagues. You can easily jot down ideas quotes and key takeaways in a Reframer project and keep your notes organized by using a new session for each presenter Bonus — if you’re part of a team, they can watch the live feed rolling into Reframer!

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#17 Find out what actions people take across time

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Use card sorting to understand when your participants are most likely to perform certain activities over the course of a day, week, or over the space of a year. Create categories that represent time, for example, ‘January to March’, ‘April to June’, ‘July to September’, and ‘October to December’, and ask your participants to sort activities according to the time they are most likely to do them (go on vacation, do their taxes, make big purchases, and so on). While there may be more arduous and more accurate methods for gathering this data, sometimes you need quick insights to help you make the right decisions.

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#18 Gather quantitative data on prioritizing project tasks or product features

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Closed card sorting can give you data that you might usually gather in team meetings or in Post-its on the wall, or that you might get through support channels. You can model your method on other prioritization techniques, including Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, for example.

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#19 Test your FAQs page with new users

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Your support and knowledge base within your website can be just as important as any other core action on your website. If your support site is lacking in navigation and UX, this will no doubt increase support tickets and resources. Make sure your online support section is up to scratch. Here’s an article on how to do it quickly.

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#20 Figure out if your icons need labels

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Figure out if your icons are doing their job by testing whether your users are understanding them as intended. Uploading icons you currently use, or plan to use in your interface to First-click testing, and ask your users to identify their meaning by making use of post-task questions.

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#21 Give your users some handy quick tools

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In some cases, users may use your website with very specific goals in mind. Giving your users access to quick toos as soon as they land on your website is a great way to ensure they are able to get what they need done easily. Look at your analytics for things people do often that take several clicks to find, and check whether they can find your ‘quick tool’ in a single click using First-click testing.

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#22 Benchmark the IA of your competition

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We all have some sort of competitors, and researchers also need to pay attention to what they get up too. Make life easy in your reporting by benchmarking their IA and then reviewing it each quarter for the board and leaders to be wowed with. Also, not a perfect comparison, as users and separate sites have different flows, but compare your success scores with theirs. Makes your work feel like the Olympics with the healthy competition going on.

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#23 Improve website conversions

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Make the marketing team’s day by doing a fast improvement on some core conversions on your website. Now, there are loads of ways to improve conversions for a check out cart or signup form, but using First-click testing to test out ideas before you start going live A/B test can take mere minutes and give your B version a confidence boost.

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#24 Reduce the bounce rates of certain sections of your website

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People jumping off your website and not continuing their experience is something (depending on the landing page) everyone tries to improve. The metric ‘time on site’ and ‘average page views’ is a metric that shows the value your whole website has to offer. Again, there are many different ways to do this, but one big reason for people jumping off the website is not being able to find what they’re looking for. That’s where our IA toolkit comes in.

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#25 Test your website’s IA in different countries

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No, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to go to all these countries to test, although that’d be pretty sweet. You can remotely research participants from all over the world, using our integrated recruitment panel. Start seeing how different cultures, languages, and countries interact with your website.

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#26 Run an empathy test (card sort)

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Empathy – the ability to understand and share the experience of another person – is central to the design process. An empathy test is another great tool to use in the design phase because it enables you to find out if you are creating the right kind of feelings with your user. Take your design and show it to users. Provide them with a variety of words that could represent the design – for example “minimalistic”, “dynamic”, or “professional” – and ask them to pick out which the words which they think are best suited to their experience.

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#27 Recall test with first-click testing

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This is a technique that is a great way to find out if you have the correct visual hierarchy on the page. For example, a client may come to you and say you need to make the logo bigger as they are worried people won’t spot the branding. A recall test will test if this is correct and check whether people are seeing the things you want them to see on the page. Show your design to a user for a small amount of time (five seconds, for example) and ask them to recall what they see, and the order in which they recall it.

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#28 Take Qualitative Insights into the field

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Get out of the office or the lab and observe social behaviour in the field. Use Qualitative Insights to input your observations on your field research. Then head back to your office to start making sense of the data in the Theme Builder.

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#29 Use heatmaps to get the first impressions of designs

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Heatmaps in our First-click testing tool are a great way of getting first impressions of any design. You can see where people clicked (correctly and incorrectly), giving you insights on what works and doesn’t work with your designs. Because it’s so fast to test, you can iterate until your designs start singing.

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#30 Multivariate testing

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Multivariate testing is when more than two versions of your studies are compared and allows you to understand which version performs better with your audience. Use multivariate testing with Tree testing and First-click testing to find the right design on which to focus and iterate.

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#31 Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) with tree testing

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Yes, a good IA improves your SEO. Search engines want to know how your users navigate throughout your site. Make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for, and you’ll start to see improvement in your search engine ranking.

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#32 Test your mobile information architecture

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As more and more people are using their smartphones for apps and to browse sites, you need to ensure its design gives your users a great experience. Test the IA of your mobile site to ensure people aren’t getting lost in the mobile version of your site. If you haven’t got a mobile-friendly design yet, now’s the time to start designing it!

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#33 Run an Easter egg hunt using the correct areas in first-click testing

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Liven up the workday by creating a fun Easter egg hunt in Chalkmark. Simply upload a photo (like those really hard “spot the X” photos), set the correct area of your target, then send out your study with participant identifiers enabled. You can also send these out as competitions and have closing rules based on time, number of participants, or both.
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#34 Keystroke level modeling

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When interface efficiency is important you'll want to measure how much a new design can improve task times. You can actually estimate time saved (or lost) using some well-tested approaches that are based on average human performance for typical computer-based operations like clicking, pointing and typing. Read more about measuring task times without users.

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#35 Feature prioritization — get some help for your roadmap

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Find out what people think are the most important next steps for your team. Set up a card sort and ask people to categorize items and rank them in descending order of importance or impact on their work. This can also help you gauge their thoughts on potential new features for your site, and for bonus points compare team responses with customer responses.

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#36 Tame your blog

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Get the tags and categories in your blog under control to make life easier for your readers. Set up a card sort and use all your tags and categories as card labels. Either use your existing ones or test a fresh set of new tags and categories.

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#37 Test your home button

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Would an icon or text link work better for navigating to your home page? Before you go ahead and make changes to your site, you can find out by setting up a first-click testing test.

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#38 Validate the designs in your head

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As designers, you’ve probably got umpteen designs floating around in your head at any one time. But which of these are really worth pursuing? Figure this out by using The Optimal Workshop Suite to test out wireframes of new designs before putting any more work into them.

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#39 ‘Buy now’ button shopping cart visibility

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If you’re running an e-commerce site, ease of use and a great user experience are crucial. To see if your shopping cart and checkout processes are as good as they can be, run a first-click test.

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#40 IA periodic health checks

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Raise the visibility of good IA by running periodic IA health checks using Tree testing and reporting the results. Management loves metrics and catching any issues early is good too!

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#41 Focus groups with qualitative insights

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Thinking of launching a new product, app or website, or seeking opinions on an existing one? Focus groups can provide you with a lot of candid information that may help get your project off the ground. They’re also dangerous because they’re susceptible to groupthink, design by committee, and tunnel vision. Use with caution, but if you do then use with Qualitative Insights! Compare notes and find patterns across sessions. Pay attention to emotional triggers.

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#42 Gather opinions with surveys

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Whether you want the opinions of your users or from members of your team, you can set up a quick and simple survey using Surveys. It’s super useful for getting opinions on new ideas (consider it almost like a mini-focus group), or even for brainstorming with teammates.

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#43 Design a style guide with card sorting

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Style guides (for design and content) can take a lot of time and effort to create, especially when you need to get the guide proofed by various people in your company. To speed this up, simply create a card sort to find out what your guide should consist of. Find out the specifics in this article.

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#44 Improve your company's CRM system

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As your company grows, oftentimes your CRM can become riddled with outdated information and turn into a giant mess, especially if you deal with a lot of customers every day. To help clear this up, you can use card sorting and tree testing to solve navigational issues and get rid of redundant features. Learn more.

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#45 Sort your life out

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Let your creativity run wild, and get your team or family involved in organizing or prioritizing the things that matter. And the possibilities really are endless. Organize a long list of DIY projects, or ask the broader team how the functional pods should be re-organized. It’s up to you. How can card sorting help you in your work and daily life?

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#46 Create an online diary study

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Whether it’s a product, app or website, finding out the long-term behaviour and thoughts of your users is important. That’s where diary studies come in. For those new to this concept, diary studies are a longitudinal research method, aimed at collecting insights about a participant’s needs and behaviors. Participants note down activities as they’re using a particular product, app, or website. Add your participants into a qualitative study and allow them to create their diary study with ease.

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#47 Source-specific data with an online survey

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Online survey tools can complement your existing research by sourcing specific information from your participants. For example, if you need to find out more about how your participants use social media, which sites they use, and on which devices, you can do it all through a simple survey questionnaire. Additionally, if you need to identify usage patterns, device preferences or get information on what other products/websites your users are aware of/are using, a questionnaire is the ticket.

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#48 Guerrilla testing with First-click testing

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For really quick first-click testing, take First-click testing on a tablet, mobile device or laptop to a local coffee shop. Ask people standing in line if they’d like to take part in your super quick test in exchange for a cup of joe. Easy!

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#50 Ask post-task questions for tree testing and first-click testing

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You can now set specific task-related questions for both Tree testing and First-click testing. This is a great way to dive deeper into the mushy minds of your participants. Check out how to use this new(ish) feature here!

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#51 Start testing prototypes

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Paper prototypes are great, but what happens when your users are scattered around the globe, and you can’t invite them to an in-person test? By scanning (or taking a photo) of your paper prototypes, you can use Chalkmark to test them with your users quickly and easily. Read more about our approach here.

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#52 Take better notes for sense making

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Qualitative research involves a lot of note-taking. So naturally, to be better at this method, improving how you take notes is important. Reframer is designed to make note-taking easy but it can still be an art. Learn more.

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#53 Make sure you get the user's first-click right

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Like most things, read a little, and then it’s all about practice.We’ve found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully. Get your first clicks right in Treejack and Chalkmark and you’ll start seeing your customers smile.

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#54 Run a cat survey. Yep, cats!

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We’ve gained some insight into how people intuitively group cats, and so can you (unless you’re a dog person). Honestly, doing something silly can be a useful way to introduce your team to a new method on a Friday afternoon. Remember to distribute the results!

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#55 Destroy evil attractors in your tree

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Evil attractors are those labels in your IA that attract unjustified clicks across tasks. This usually means the chosen label is ambiguous, or possibly a catch-all phrase like ‘Resources’. Read how to quickly identify evil attractors in the Destinations table of tree test results and how to fix them.

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#56 Affinity map using card sorts

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We all love our Post-its and sticking things on walls. But sometimes you need something quicker and accessible for people in remote areas. Try out using Card Sorts for a distributed approach to making sense of all the notes. Plus, you can easily import any qualitative insights when creating cards in card sort. Easy.

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#57 Preference test with first-click testing

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Whether you’re coming up with a new logo design, headline, featured image, or anything, you can preference test it with First-click testing. Create an image that shows the two designs side by side and upload it to First-click testing. From there, you can ask people to click whichever one they prefer!

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#58 Add moderated card sort results to your card sort

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An excellent way of gathering valuable qualitative insights alongside the results of your remote card sorts is to run a moderated version of the sorts with a smaller group of participants. When you can observe and interact with your participants as they complete the sort, you’ll be able to ask questions and learn more about their mental models and the reasons why they have categorized things in a particular way. Learn more.

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#59 Test search box variations with first-click clicking

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Case study by Viget: “One of the most heavily used features of the website is its keyword search, so we wanted to make absolutely certain that our redesigned search box didn’t make search harder for users to find and use.”

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#60 Run an image card sort to organize products into groups

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You can add images to each card that allows you understand how your participants may organize and label particular items. Very useful if you want to organize some retail products and want to find out how other people would organize them given a visual including shape, color, and other potential context.

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#61 Test your customers' perceptions of different logo and brand image designs

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Understand how customers perceive your brand by creating a closed card sort. Come up with a list of categories, and ask participants to sort images such as logos, and branded images.

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#62 Run an open image card sort to classify images into groups based on the emotions they elicit

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Are these pictures exhilarating, or terrifying? Are they humoros, or offensive? Relaxing, or boring? Productive, or frantic? Happy memories, or a deep sigh?

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#63 Run an image card sort to organize your library

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Whether it’s a physical library of books, or a digital drive full of ebooks, you can run a card sort to help organize them in a way that makes sense. Will it be by genre, author name, color or topic? Send out the study to your coworkers to get their input! You can also do this at home for your own personal library, and you can include music/CDs/vinyl records and movies!

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#64 HR exercises to determine the motivations of your team

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It’s simple to ask your team about their thoughts, feelings, and motivations with a Questions survey. You can choose to leave participant identifiers blank (so responses are anonymous), or you can ask for a name/email address. As a bonus, you can set up a calendar reminder to send out a new survey in the next quarter. Duplicate the survey and send it out again!

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#65 Designing physical environments

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If your company has a physical environment in which your customers visit, you can research new structures using a mixture of tools in The Optimal Workshop Suite. This especially comes in handy if your customers require certain information within the physical environment in order to make decisions. For example, picture a retail store. Are all the signs clear and communicate the right information? Are people overwhelmed by the physical environment?

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#66 Use tree testing to refine an interactive phone menu system

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Similar to how you’d design an IA, you can create a tree test to design an automated phone system. Whether you’re designing from the ground up, or improving your existing system, you will be able to find out if people are getting lost.

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#67 Have your research team categorize and prioritize all these ideas

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Before you dig deeper into more of these ideas, ask the rest of the team to help you decide which one to focus on. Let’s not get in the way of your work. Start your quick wins and log into your account. Here’s a spreadsheet of this list to upload to card sort. Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s a wrap! *Takes out gym towel and wipes sweaty face.
*Got any more suggestions to add to this list? We’d love to hear them in our comments section — we might even add them into this list

What’s better than a UX team doing awesome research? A whole organization backing investment in UX research. What’s that look like in practice?  Collaboration and support from stakeholders across the organization throughout the research process from set up, doing studies, sharing insights, and digesting, understanding, and actioning recommendations based on the amazing insights you generate.

UX research should be something that is known, understood, and expected across your organization. Rather than keeping all the insight goodies to yourselves, why not democratize user research by making it accessible and shareable to all stakeholders to drive understanding of its value wherever they sit in the organization?

We go into this in more detail in our ebook UX Research for Teams. By including the stakeholders throughout the process, the role of research becomes a lot more visible throughout the organization. Having the best online tools to make the whole process simple and straightforward is a great place to start.

1. Who owns the research?

Recognition that the user research undertaken in your organization benefits the whole organization is essential for setting up key resources. By ensuring that everyone is operating from the same set of tools, the insights and results are easier to manage, find and file. It also means if someone leaves,  they don’t leave with all the insights and knowledge.

2. Everyone’s a researcher

Everyone within the organization should have the opportunity to be involved with UX research and should be encouraged to have a base understanding of the process (and even try out the tools) or, at the very least, have some understanding of the results and insights. If everyone has access to the tools, they can use these no matter where they sit in the organization. 

3. Don’t get distracted by shiny things

Maintaining a single source of research, with a well-organized filing system means you can always look at what has gone before. It is a great place to start. The best UX researchers often revisit past studies to see where to go from here. Creating consistency through the process and output means comparing insights are simpler.

4. Research is better with friends

What’s better than one mind? It’s two or more. Working alongside a team opens new perspectives, thinking, problem-solving, and approaches. New ways to see a problem and how to interpret insights and results. By socializing your results with the key stakeholders, you bring them on the journey, explaining how and why UX research is important to the project and the wider team. Firming up the opportunity for future research.

5. Qualitative research insights that are simple to find

Qualitative research tools are designed to assist you with testing types, including user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability tests. Working as a team with tags, sorting, and recording can be made simple and streamlined. 

One of the best decisions you can make as a researcher is to bring the organization along for the ride. Setting up consistent tools across the team (and beyond) will help streamline research, making it simpler for all to be involved at each step of the process. Embedding UX research into each part of the organization. 

Take a look at our ebook UX Research for Teams, where we go into more detail.

Summary: A detailed UX research plan helps you keep your overarching research goals in mind as you work through the logistics of a research project.

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There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sitting down to interview one of your users, steering the conversation in interesting directions and taking note of valuable comments and insights. But, as every researcher knows, it’s also easy to get carried away. Sometimes, the very process of user research can be so engrossing that you forget the reason you’re there in the first place, or unexpected things that come up that can force you to change course or focus.

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This is where a UX research plan comes into play. Taking the time to set up a detailed overview of your high-level research goals, team, budget and timeframe will give your research the best chance of succeeding. It's also a good tool for fostering alignment - it can make sure everyone working on the project is clear on the objectives and timeframes. Over the course of your project, you can refer back to your plan – a single source of truth. After all, as Benjamin Franklin famously said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.

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In this article, we’re going to take a look at the best way to put together a research plan.

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Your research recipe for success

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Any project needs a plan to be successful, and user research is no different. As we pointed out above, a solid plan will help to keep you focused and on track during your research – something that can understandably become quite tricky as you dive further down the research rabbit hole, pursuing interesting conversations during user interviews and running usability tests. Thought of another way, it’s really about accountability. Even if your initial goal is something quite broad like “find out what’s wrong with our website”, it’s important to have a plan that will help you to identify when you’ve actually discovered what’s wrong.

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So what does a UX research plan look like? It’s basically a document that outlines the where, why, who, how and what of your research project.

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It’s time to create your research plan! Here’s everything you need to consider when putting this plan together.

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Make a list of your stakeholders

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The first thing you need to do is work out who the stakeholders are on your project. These are the people who have a stake in your research and stand to benefit from the results. In those instances where you’ve been directed to carry out a piece of research you’ll likely know who these people are, but sometimes it can be a little tricky. Stakeholders could be C-level executives, your customer support team, sales people or product teams. If you’re working in an agency or you’re freelancing, these could be your clients.

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Make a list of everyone you think needs to be consulted and then start setting up catch-up sessions to get their input. Having a list of stakeholders also makes it easy to deliver insights back to these people at the end of your research project, as well as identify any possible avenues for further research. This also helps you identify who to involve in your research (not just report findings back to).

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Action: Make a list of all of your stakeholders.

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Write your research questions

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Before we get into timeframes and budgets you first need to determine your research questions, also known as your research objectives. These are the ‘why’ of your research. Why are you carrying out this research? What do you hope to achieve by doing all of this work? Your objectives should be informed by discussions with your stakeholders, as well as any other previous learnings you can uncover. Think of past customer support discussions and sales conversations with potential customers.

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Here are a few examples of basic research questions to get you thinking. These questions should be actionable and specific, like the examples we’ve listed here:

• “How do people currently use the wishlist feature on our website?”
• “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”
• “How do people make a decision on which power company to use?”
• “What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”

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A good research question should be actionable in the sense that you can identify a clear way to attempt to answer it, and specific in that you’ll know when you’ve found the answer you’re looking for. It's also important to keep in mind that your research questions are not the questions you ask during your research sessions - they should be broad enough that they allow you to formulate a list of tasks or questions to help understand the problem space.

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Action: Create a list of possible research questions, then prioritize them after speaking with stakeholders.

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What is your budget?

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Your budget will play a role in how you conduct your research, and possibly the amount of data you're able to gather.

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Having a large budget will give you flexibility. You’ll be able to attract large numbers of participants, either by running paid recruitment campaigns on social media or using a dedicated participant recruitment service. A larger budget helps you target more people, but also target more specific people through dedicated participant services as well as recruitment agencies.

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Note that more money doesn't always equal better access to tools - e.g. if I work for a company that is super strict on security, I might not be able to use any tools at all. But it does make it easier to choose appropriate methods and that allow you to deliver quality insights. E.g. a big budget might allow you to travel, or do more in-person research which is otherwise quite expensive.

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With a small budget, you’ll have to think carefully about how you’ll reward participants, as well as the number of participants you can test. You may also find that your budget limits the tools you can use for your testing. That said, you shouldn’t let your budget dictate your research. You just have to get creative!

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Action: Work out what the budget is for your research project. It’s also good to map out several cheaper alternatives that you can pursue if required.

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How long will your project take?

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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. For example, your organization’s marketing team may be waiting for some of your exploratory research in order to build customer personas. Or, a product team may be waiting to see the results of your first-click test before developing a new signup page on your website.

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It’s true that qualitative research often doesn’t have a clear end in the way that quantitative research does, for example as you identify new things to test and research. In this case, you may want to break up your research into different sub-projects and attach deadlines to each of them.

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Action: Figure out how long your research project is likely to take. If you’re mixing qualitative and quantitative research, split your project timeframe into sub-projects to make assigning deadlines easier.

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Understanding participant recruitment

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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.

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The methods you use to carry out your research will also have a part to play in your participants, specifically in terms of the numbers required. For qualitative research methods like interviews and usability tests, 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. You can read more about participant numbers in this Nielsen Norman article.

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At this stage of the research plan process, you’ll also want to write some screening questions. These are what you’ll use to identify potential participants by asking about their characteristics and experience.

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Action: Define the participants you’ll need to include in your research project, and where you plan to source them. This may require going outside of your existing user base.

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Which research methods will you use?

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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 tests. You’ll also find that some questions are best answered by multiple methods, in what’s known as mixed methods research.

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If you’re not sure which method to use, carefully consider your question. If we go back to one of our earlier research question examples: “How do our current customers go about tracking their orders?”, we’d want to test the navigation pathways.

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If you’re not sure which method to use, it helps to carefully consider your research question. Let’s use one of our earlier examples: “Is it easy for users to check their order history in our iPhone app?” as en example. In this case, because we want to see how users move through our app, we need a method that’s suited to testing navigation pathways – like tree testing.

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For the question: “What actions do our customers take when they’re thinking about buying a new TV?”, we’d want to take a different approach. Because this is more of an exploratory question, we’re probably best to carry out a round of user interviews and ask questions about their process for buying a TV.

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Action: Before diving in and setting up a card sort, consider which method is best suited to answer your research question.

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Develop your research protocol

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A protocol is essentially a script for your user research. For the most part, it’s a list of the tasks and questions you want to cover in your in-person sessions. But, it doesn’t apply to all research types. For example, for a tree test, you might write your tasks, but this isn't really a script or protocol.

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Writing your protocol should start with actually thinking about what these questions will be and getting feedback on them, as well as:

• The tasks you want your participants to do (usability testing)
• How much time you’ve set aside for the session
• A script or description that you can use for every session
• Your process for recording the interviews, including how you’ll look after participant data.

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Action: This is essentially a research plan within a research plan – it’s what you’d take to every session.

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Happy researching!

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Related UX plan reading

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• What is mixed methods research? – Learn how a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods can set your research project up for success.
• How to encourage people to participate in your study – Attracting participants to your study can be a tough undertaking. We’ve got a few different approaches to help.
• Which comes first: card sorting or tree testing? – Card sorting, tree testing, which one should you use first? And why does it matter?
• How to write great questions for your research – Learn how you can craft effective questions for your next research project.
• 5 ways to increase user research in your organization – One of the best ways to get other teams and stakeholders on board with your own research projects is by helping to spread awareness of the benefits of user research.
• How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design continuing to grow in organizations across the globe, we’re going to need skilled UX leaders.
• How to benchmark your information architecture – Before embarking on any major information architecture projects, learn how you can benchmark your existing one.

For many people, UX research is seen as a chore: they know that it’s useful and important, but are liable to just keep putting it off. Then, there are others who carry out discovery research at the start of a new project, but then quickly forget about it as they lose themselves in the design and development process. Lastly, we’ve got people who carry out research on a regular basis, both at the start of a project as discovery work and throughout to test assumptions and work through design or development problems.

Regardless of where you sit on the above scale, the insights that only user-focused research can deliver are key to building successful products, and if you don’t build products that address real user needs, then your competitors certainly will. 

Paula Makuck sums it quite well: “User research helps us to understand how people go about performing tasks and achieving goals that are important to them. It gives us context and perspective and puts us in a position to respond with useful, simplified, and productive design solutions.”

Of course, there’s a big jump from understanding the value of user research to actually successfully executing the entire research workflow. What’s more, the internet is filled with thousands of articles, guides and books that attempt to either explain the ‘how’ of the entire process or focus in on one small aspect. This article is designed to shine a high-level light on the key stages of the research workflow, and then point you off to more useful resources where appropriate. This article is for everyone who’s ever said: “Ok, I get the value of user research, but where do I actually start?”.

With that in mind, let’s dive into the first section of our guide, stakeholder interviews.

Run stakeholder interviews

A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your research, and more specifically the output. Working with stakeholders is especially important for anyone carrying out user research as you need to know both what they already know about a particular problem and what they need to find out. Understandably, strong communication throughout the research process is key.

While the way in which you communicate with stakeholders during a project may vary, interviews are the best way to identify what they know and need to know at the beginning. As with user interviews, it’s hard to beat sitting down face to face with someone to discuss their needs and problems. Digital.gov has an excellent article on the why of stakeholder interviews, as well as how to actually go about the process of setting them up. You can find that article here.

We’re not done with our stakeholders just yet, either. They’ll play an integral role in the entire user research workflow as we move through the various stages of our project.

Identify your known data

With our stakeholder interviews wrapped up, it’s time to turn our attention to another critical part of the early-stage user research process; identifying our known data. It’s certainly not always easy (and one of the reasons why a good research repository is so key), but the work is important. 

Why? Well, in addition to helping you avoid duplicate research work, taking the time to assess all of the existing data related to your research problem may help you to identify further avenues of research.

So what does this stage of the research workflow look like? It depends on your organization. For those with an established research function, it may be as easy as accessing the company Airtable or Google Drive and pulling up any existing findings. For those without such an operation, things may be a little trickier. Research will have almost certainly been carried out at some point or another, but your mileage may vary when it comes to actually locating it.

Here are just a few of the functions within an organization where you’re likely to find existing data:

• Product teams: Any product-focused organization is likely to have at least some insight into customer data. And while it may not be in the form of a tidy written report or a collated spreadsheet, product teams should be able to deliver data in the form of how users are actually using a product.
• Marketing teams: A potential treasure-trove of user data lies with marketing teams. These are the people within an organization that base much of their work on user behavior, and so are likely to have information like personas on hand.
• Sales team: In much the same way, sales teams will also likely have user data sitting around.

Wherever you end up locating existing research data, taking the time to collate it will certainly serve you well as you begin your own research project.

Develop an approach

Your approach is the mechanism by which you’ll gather more information about your research problem. In simple terms, the research questions and the methodologies you’ll use to answer them.

Research questions are essentially your research objectives. The ‘why’ of your research project. These should be informed by the existing data you’ve uncovered as well as discussions with your stakeholders. As for what research questions should look like, here are some examples: 

• “How do people currently use the cart feature on our mobile app?”
• “How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”
• “How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”

When formulating your research questions, keep in mind that these are not the same questions you should be asking your users. Basically, they should be broad enough that you can use them to then generate tasks or questions for your users, the outputs of which should hopefully shed a little more light on the problem you’re working on.

As for the methods you’ll use to actually attempt to answer these questions, we’ll get to those further down.

Put together a plan or brief

Putting together a detailed research plan is really a process that overlaps many of the steps we’ve outlined above. You’ll want to feed in things like who your stakeholders are, research methodologies, any budget estimates and the participants or participant groups you’re likely to bring on board.

For these reasons, a research plan is something that you should develop throughout the early stages of your research project and then refer back to throughout to ensure you’re still focusing on what you set out to answer. It’s fine to pivot a project if the problem leads you in a more useful direction, but always compare refer to your plan and stakeholders when doing so. Scope creep and rabbit holes are all too common in the field of user research.

Most of what we’ve talked about above will end up constituting your research plan, but a formal document is still an extremely useful tool to have. Don’t fall into the trap of simply dumping everything into a folder on your computer. Such an approach may be fine for you during the project (and possibly even when you need to come back in the future), but it’ll be a nightmare for anyone else needing to pick up where you left off.

Collect the data

Now we come to the data gathering stage of the research process, requiring the use of various research methods to answer our questions. As we covered in our Intro to UX research guide, there’s really no shortage of user research methods available. From card sorting to usability testing, each method – when used correctly – can be a powerful way to get the answers you need.

The methods you end up using should be informed by your research questions. While some questions are best answered using qualitative methods (like user interviews or usability tests), others are better suited to quantitative testing methods. Alternatively, you could even use a combination by mixing methods.

Determining which method to use requires careful consideration of your research question. If we take a look at the question: “How do our existing users go about tracking their purchases?”, we’d want to look at how they navigate through the website, meaning tree testing would be a suitable option. Alternatively, the question: “How do potential customers of ours decide between us and one of our competitors?”, would be better suited to a qualitative research method like a user interview where we can sit down with a user and ask them questions directly.

Of course, to even execute any of these research methodologies, you’re going to need participants.

Source your participants

You’ve got a research plan, key stakeholders, the questions you need to answer and an understanding of the methods you’d like to use to answer those questions. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to participant recruitment.

There’s a common misconception that finding participants is one of the hardest parts of the user research process, being time consuming, costly and annoying – but this isn’t actually the case. With just a little digging, you’ll likely be able to uncover a pool of people without ever leaving your desk.

Here are just a few of the potential participant sources that researchers, designers and marketers use on a regular basis. This list is by no means exhaustive, but should serve as a good starting point. You’ll also want to consider payment. Your participants are giving up some of their time to help you, so think about a small monetary reward or even a discount for your products or services. The amount and how you broach this depends on the channel.

• Product teams: Even if your organization doesn’t employ any researchers, chances are your product teams will be a good link to your users. Reach out to product managers, designers and developers to see whether they have any regular contact with users. You may find they work with users directly on a regular basis.
• Sales, customer support and marketing teams: Similarly, sales and marketing teams also serve as a solid link to your users. Marketing and customer support teams will often manage lists of your existing users, whereas sales teams will have a good understanding of active or engaged users as well as prospective users.
• Social channels: This one is quite simple. Consider recruiting directly through your social channels.
• Recruitment services: There are a number of dedicated participant recruitment services available (you can check out our one here) that essentially handle the entire recruitment process for you. All you need to do is specify the type of people you need and they’ll handle the rest.
• Intercepts: Running a live pop-up message on your website is another great way to recruit participants. If you’re using a messaging app like Intercom, you can easily set up a participant recruitment message to pop up on the screens of people that match the criteria you set.
• Meetups: Heading to a local meetup group of the people you’re interested in testing can provide you with a good source of participants. This approach is quite useful if you’re looking for people outside of your organization’s users.

Understand the data

We’ve now recruited our participants, chosen our testing methods and run the tests. With the results starting to roll in, it’s time to analyze the data and make sense of it all. No small task. The insights you draw out of your data will obviously depend on the user research methods you’ve used, with methods like card sorting and tree testing giving you more quantitative data to analyze, and usability tests and user interviews providing you with qualitative insights. In any case, the key thing to focus on with this part of the UX research workflow is drawing out useful insights that help you to address your research questions and how you’re going to present this information back to your stakeholders. 

Connect to stakeholders

We’re now at the penultimate step in the research process; taking what we’ve learned and communicating it back to our stakeholders. Consider the following before you sit down in a room with them.

Aim to have detailed answers to your research questions as well as actionable next steps for your stakeholders. You’ve just put in significant time running the research process and as such are best suited to actually making suggestions based on the outputs of that research. It’s also important to understand not only your stakeholders, but the groups likely to be making use of the research further down the track. The easier you can make the process for them (of utilizing your research), the more value they’ll see in the process. Consider using tools that utilize visualizations as one way of making it easy for people to make sense of your research.

Lastly, it’s often a good idea to actually sit down with your stakeholders in a room again instead of simply sending your research results over in an email. Being able to sit down with your stakeholders one-on-one and explain your findings and recommendations will put you in good stead for future research projects.

Store learnings

Let’s recap on what we’ve covered. We’ve gone through:

• The stakeholder interview process
• How to uncover any data that already exists within the organization
• Putting together an approach, as well as a plan or brief
• The data collection phase
• Participant recruitment
• Data analysis
• Connecting your results back to your stakeholders.

There’s a final step that can be easy to overlook, but it’s a critical one in order to ensure that your research (and the insights you’ve managed to uncover) remain accessible. One of the most common failings of the user research process is storing the data in a sustainable way. All too often, the people conducting the studies run their tests, pull out the information they need, and then simply leave the data in the tool they used to run the research or in nested folders on the organization’s server. 

The solution is quite simple in theory, although a little harder in practice – especially when you’re working within a larger team. We’ve talked about building research repositories in this article (point 4), but the key takeaway is that while you should certainly use the right tool to store your findings, you also need to ensure you create a sustainable process. There’s no sense going to the trouble of setting up a new tool if you don’t have a system in place for others to feed in their own research or access historical research in the future.

You don’t need much to create a research repository – you’ll often find many researchers are able to put together one using a tool like Airtable or Excel. Whatever you end up using, just make sure it’s easy to update and access.

Wrap up + summary

Hopefully, by breaking down each stage of the research workflow into actionable steps, we’ve shown that it’s actually quite a simple undertaking – albeit one with quite a few steps. Let us know if you’ve got any questions or thoughts of your own.

The Age of the Customer is well and truly here. In every industry and vertical across the globe, UX professionals now dictate the terms, placing customers at the heart of every design decision. Or at least, this is the new reality that’s unfolding in the organizations and businesses that don’t want to be left behind.

Make no mistake; simply claiming to be the best is no longer enough. To survive and thrive, people need to be placed at the heart. The golden key that will allow organizations to pivot to this new reality lies with that of the user researcher.

But it’s not enough to simply “do user research”. Sure, some customer insight is obviously better than none at all, but to really be useful it needs to be effective research. That’s what this article is all about.

Get comfortable, because this is going to be a long one – for good reason.

Why (effective) user research is so important

You are not your user. As much as you may like to think that you are, you’re not. It can be a tricky proposition to get your head around, especially when we regularly assume that everyone thinks like us. There are 8 billion people out there who have a vastly different set of experiences and perspectives than you. With that in mind, when we start to generalize based on our own personal experiences, this is what’s known as availability bias.

Unfortunately, solving this is issue not as easy as getting into a room with customers and having a chat. People don’t always tell the truth! This isn’t to say that the participant in your last user interview was flat out lying to you, but the things that people say are different from the things that people do. It;’s your job (as a user researcher) to intuit the actual behaviors and actions, and identify their needs based on this data.

When you’re doing your job correctly, you’ve given your organization the best possible chance of success. Everything  – and I mean everything – starts with a solid understanding of your users. Doors will open, paths will reveal themselves – you get the idea.

The qualities of an effective user researcher

Let me preface this section by saying that you don’t have to have all of these qualities in spades, the list below is really just a way for you to better understand some of the traits of an effective user researcher, to get you thinking and on the right path.

• Curious: User research can be quite repetitive, especially when you get to the 6th user interview and need to ask the same questions. A genuine curiosity about people, the challenges they face and their behaviors will go a long way in helping you to push through.
• Pragmatic: Being an idealist has its uses, but it’s also important to be pragmatic. As a researcher, you need to operate on a fine line and balance your capacity to do research with business goals, finances and the desires of your stakeholders. Do the most with what you’ve got.
• Organized: It takes a lot to plan a research project, from scheduling testing sessions to assembling large slide decks for presentations. You’ve got to manage a large number of complex components, so it’s important that you can organize and prioritize.
• Collaborative: User research is most effective when it’s carried out collaboratively. This means working with your team, with the organization and with other disciplines. Think outside the box: Who stands to benefit from your research and how can you involve them?
• Empathetic: Real, natural empathy is a rare trait, but adopting an empathetic mindset is something everyone can (and should) learn. Beyond just uncovering insights from your participants, consider what these insights mean and how they all connect. This will truly enable you to understand your users.
• Sociable: You don’t have to suddenly adopt an extroverted persona, but being actively interested in other people will help you build relationships both inside your organization and with customers.
• Perceptive: User research means listening and observing. During a user interview or usability test, you need to be able to filter all of the data entering your mind and extract the most relevant insights.
• Analytical: In a similar vein to perceptiveness, being analytical is also key if you want to understand all of the data that your research will produce. Filter, examine, extract and move on.

How to run user research effectively (and at a low cost)

There are innumerable methods for user research, but many are resource- and time-intensive. What’s more, certain research methods come attached with significant costs.

But, research doesn’t have to be the time and money sink that it can often first appear to be. Certain actions before you ever step into the room with a participant can make a world of difference.

Conduct research at the start

User research is obviously valuable whenever you do it, but you’ll see the biggest impact when you carry it out right the start of a project. Conduct research to get the lay of the land; to learn how and why customers make certain decisions, and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Note: Don’t research in a silo, involve your team, stakeholders and other interested parties.

Have clear goals – and a plan

Every research project needs a clear objective, and that comes from a detailed UX research plan, which includes well-formulated research questions. Every project will have a different question, but they’re the best starting point to ensure research success.

Choose the right methods

There’s no shortage of research methods to choose from, but being an effective user researcher is all about being able to pick the right methods for each project, and use them correctly. Nearly every research project will benefit from using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to generate the most useful insights.

To understand which method to use, it’s a good idea to view them using the following framework:

Involve stakeholders

Bring stakeholders into your research project as early as possible. These are the people that will end up utilizing the results of your work, and chances are they’re the ones who’ll have the most questions at the end. Involve them through consultation, regular updates, the all-too-important presentation at the end of the project and by letting them take notes for you during research sessions.

Wrap up

It’s not enough to simply run a card sort now (although that’s still a very useful exercise). You need to think cohesively about the role of your research in your organization and make sure that you’re as aware of your bias as you are of the various methods and tools available to you. Happy researching!