July 14, 2020
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How to create a UX research plan

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.

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.

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”.

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

Your research recipe for success

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.

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.

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

Make a list of your stakeholders

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.

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).

Action: Make a list of all of your stakeholders.

Write your research questions

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.

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?”

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.

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

What is your budget?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

How long will your project take?

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.

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.

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.

Understanding participant recruitment

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which research methods will you use?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Develop your research protocol

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.

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.

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

Happy researching!

Related UX plan reading

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1 min read

User research and agile squadification at Trade Me

Hi, I’m Martin. I work as a UX researcher at Trade Me having left Optimal Experience (Optimal Workshop's sister company) last year. For those of you who don’t know, Trade Me is New Zealand’s largest online auction site that also lists real estate to buy and rent, cars to buy, jobs listings, travel accommodation and quite a few other things besides. Over three quarters of the population are members and about three quarters of the Internet traffic for New Zealand sites goes to the sites we run.

Leaving a medium-sized consultancy and joining Trade Me has been a big change in many ways, but in others not so much, as I hadn’t expected to find myself operating in a small team of in-house consultants. The approach the team is taking is proving to be pretty effective, so I thought I’d share some of the details of the way we work with the readers of Optimal Workshop’s blog. Let me explain what I mean…

What agile at Trade Me looks like

Over the last year or so, Trade Me has moved all of its development teams over to Agile following a model pioneered by Spotify. All of the software engineering parts of the business have been ‘squadified’. These people produce the websites & apps or provide and support the infrastructure that makes everything possible.Across Squads, there are common job roles in ‘Chapters’ (like designers or testers) and because people are not easy to force into boxes, and why should they be, there are interest groups called ‘Guilds’.The squads are self-organizing, running their own processes and procedures to get to where they need to. In practice, this means they use as many or as few of the Kanban, Scrum, and Rapid tools they find useful. Over time, we’ve seen that squads tend to follow similar practices as they learn from each other.

How our UX team fits in

Our UX team of three sits outside the squads, but we work with them and with the product owners across the business.How does this work? It might seem counter-intuitive to have UX outside of the tightly-integrated, highly-focused squads, sometimes working with product owners working on stuff that might have little to do with what’s being currently developed in the squads. This comes down to the way Trade Me divides down the UX responsibilities within the organization. Within each squad there is a designer. He or she is responsible for how that feature or app looks, and, more importantly, how it acts — interaction design as well as visual design.Then what do we do, if we are the UX team?

We represent the voice of Trade Me’s users

By conducting research with Trade Me’s users we can validate the squads’ day-to-day decisions, and help frame decisions on future plans. We do this by wearing two hats. Wearing the pointy hats of structured, detailed researchers, we look into long-term trends: the detailed behaviours and goals of our different audiences. We’ve conducted lots of one-on-one interviews with hundreds of people, including top sellers, motor parts buyers, and job seekers, as well as running surveys, focus groups and user testing sessions of future-looking prototypes. For example, we recently spent time with a number of buyers and sellers, seeking to understand their motivations and getting under their skin to find out how they perceive Trade Me.

This kind of research enables Trade Me to anticipate and respond to changes in user perception and satisfaction.Swapping hats to an agile beanie (and stretching the metaphor to breaking point), we react to the medium-term, short-term and very short-term needs of the squads testing their ideas, near-finished work and finished work with users, as well as sometimes simply answering questions and providing opinion, based upon our research. Sometimes this means that we can be testing something in the afternoon having only heard we are needed in the morning. This might sound impossible to accommodate, but the pace of change at Trade Me is such that stuff is getting deployed pretty much every day, many of which affects our users directly. It’s our job to ensure that we support our colleagues to do the very best we can for our users.

How our ‘drop everything’ approach works in practice

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 10.00.21 am

We recently conducted five or six rounds (no one can quite remember, we did it so quickly) of testing of our new iPhone application (pictured above) — sometimes testing more than one version at a time. The development team would receive our feedback face-to-face, make changes and we’d be testing the next version of the app the same or the next day. It’s only by doing this that we can ensure that Trade Me members will see positive changes happening daily rather than monthly.

How we prioritize what needs to get done

To help us try to decide what we should be doing at any one time we have some simple rules to prioritise:

  • Core product over other business elements
  • Finish something over start something new
  • Committed work over non-committed work
  • Strategic priorities over non-strategic priorities
  • Responsive support over less time-critical work
  • Where our input is crucial over where our input is a bonus

Applying these rules to any situation makes the decision whether to jump in and help pretty easy.At any one time, each of us in the UX team will have one or more long-term projects, some medium-term projects, and either some short-term projects or the capacity for some short-term projects (usually achieved by putting aside a long-term project for a moment).

We manage our time and projects on Trello, where we can see at a glance what’s happening this and next week, and what we’ve caught sniff of in the wind that might be coming up, or definitely is coming up.On the whole, both we and the squads favour fast response, bulleted list, email ‘reports’ for any short-term requests for user testing.  We get a report out within four hours of testing (usually well within that). After all, the squads are working in short sprints, and our involvement is often at the sharp end where delays are not welcome. Most people aren’t going to read past the management summary anyway, so why not just write that, unless you have to?

How we share our knowledge with the organization

Even though we mainly keep our reporting brief, we want the knowledge we’ve gained from working with each squad or on each product to be available to everyone. So we maintain a wiki that contains summaries of what we did for each piece of work, why we did it and what we found. Detailed reports, if there are any, are attached. We also send all reports out to staff who’ve subscribed to the UX interest email group.

Finally, we send out a monthly email, which looks across a bunch of research we’ve conducted, both short and long-term, and draws conclusions from which our colleagues can learn. All of these latter activities contribute to one of our key objectives: making Trade Me an even more user-centred organization than it is.I’ve been with Trade Me for about six months and we’re constantly refining our UX practices, but so far it seems to be working very well.Right, I’d better go – I’ve just been told I’m user testing something pretty big tomorrow and I need to write a test script!

Learn more
1 min read

How to create a UX research plan

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.

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.

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”.

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

Your research recipe for success

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.

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.

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

Make a list of your stakeholders

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.

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).

Action: Make a list of all of your stakeholders.

Write your research questions

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.

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?”

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.

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

What is your budget?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

How long will your project take?

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.

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.

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.

Understanding participant recruitment

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which research methods will you use?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Develop your research protocol

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.

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.

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

Happy researching!

Related UX plan reading

Learn more
1 min read

Different ways to test information architecture

We all know that building a robust information architecture (IA) can make or break your product. And getting it right can rely on robust user research. Especially when it comes to creating human-centered, intuitive products that deliver outstanding user experiences.

But what are the best methods to test your information architecture? To make sure that your focus is on building an information architecture that is truly based on what your users want, and need.

What is user research? 🗣️🧑🏻💻

With all the will in the world, your product (or website or mobile app) may work perfectly and be as intuitive as possible. But, if it is only built on information from your internal organizational perspective, it may not measure up in the eyes of your user. Often, organizations make major design decisions without fully considering their users. User research (UX) backs up decisions with data, helping to make sure that design decisions are strategic decisions. 

Testing your information architecture can also help establish the structure for a better product from the ground up. And ultimately, the performance of your product. User experience research focuses your design on understanding your user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations. It is an essential part of creating, building, and maintaining great products. 

Taking the time to understand your users through research can be incredibly rewarding with the insights and data-backed information that can alter your product for the better. But what are the key user research methods for your information architecture? Let’s take a look.

Research methods for information architecture ⚒️

There is more than one way to test your IA. And testing with one method is good, but with more than one is even better. And, of course, the more often you test, especially when there are major additions or changes, you can tweak and update your IA to improve and delight your user’s experience.

Card Sorting 🃏

Card sorting is a user research method that allows you to discover how users understand and categorize information. It’s particularly useful when you are starting the planning process of your information architecture or at any stage you notice issues or are making changes. Putting the power into your users’ hands and asking how they would intuitively sort the information. In a card sort, participants sort cards containing different items into labeled groups. You can use the results of a card sort to figure out how to group and label the information in a way that makes the most sense to your audience. 

There are a number of techniques and methods that can be applied to a card sort. Take a look here if you’d like to know more.

Card sorting has many applications. It’s as useful for figuring out how content should be grouped on a website or in an app as it is for figuring out how to arrange the items in a retail store.You can also run a card sort in person, using physical cards, or remotely with online tools such as OptimalSort.

Tree Testing 🌲

Taking a look at your information architecture from the other side can also be valuable. Tree testing is a usability method for evaluating the findability of topics on a product. Testing is done on a simplified text version of your site structure without the influence of navigation aids and visual design.

Tree testing tells you how easily people can find information on your product and exactly where people get lost. Your users rely on your information architecture – how you label and organize your content – to get things done.

Tree testing can answer questions like:

  • Do my labels make sense to people?
  • Is my content grouped logically to people?
  • Can people find the information they want easily and quickly? If not, what’s stopping them?

Treejack is our tree testing tool and is designed to make it easy to test your information architecture. Running a tree test isn’t actually that difficult, especially if you’re using the right tool. You’ll  learn how to set useful objectives, how to build your tree, write your tasks, recruit participants, and measure results.

Combining information architecture research methods 🏗

If you are wanting a fully rounded view of your information architecture, it can be useful to combine your research methods.

Tree testing and card sorting, along with usability testing, can give you insights into your users and audience. How do they think? How do they find their way through your product? And how do they want to see things labeled, organized, and sorted? 

If you want to get fully into the comparison of tree testing and card sorting, take a look at our article here, which compares the options and explains which is best and when. 

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