HOW TO MAP OUT A UX RESEARCH PLAN (pt 3)
METHODOLOGY, PARTICIPANTS and SCRIPT
Hi again! This is the last part of my series: “How to map out a UX Research Plan”. It is to help you plan yourself ahead of an intensive UX research. It touches everything you would need to get started and how best to document your project.
If you have not read part 1 and 2, I’d recommend you do by clicking on my profile.
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Okay, we have touched 4 critical elements of a UX research plan which are: the project background, the research goals, the research questions and the key performance indicators or KPIs, leaving the remaining three which are: The research methodology, the participants and the interview script.
Let’s go through them now.
Element 5: Research Methodology
This part of your plan explains your data collection and analysis methods. It explains what you did during your research and how you did it in order to help your readers view the validity of your research.
There are various research methods but an important fact is that they are all centered around the user — their pain points, motivations and behaviors surrounding your product.
For instance, if you are conducting a usability study on a product, you might use a moderated or an unmoderated usability study method.
If you are trying to find out how many people within an environment shop online, you might want to conduct a quantitative survey…and so on.
Element 6: Participants
This lists out the potential research participants. Questions like “Who are the participants?” “What characters do they have?” “What is their location?” “What is their salary range?” “What is their occupation?” and more arises during this stage, depending on the project. You do not want to interview the wrong people who might give you answers you don’t need.
For instance, you are carrying out a survey to find out how working parents look and hire babysitters while they work. You wouldn’t get reasonable answers from people with no children or full time parents. But even with this, you need to be careful of what we call Sample Bias.
Using the example above — You want to find out how working parents look and hire babysitters. It would be biased of you to only send out your survey to married mothers only. You would be leaving out single parents, married fathers, homosexual couples, grandparents, people who adopted their children and more.
So you need to study participants who are representatives of ALL your users, not just a select group.
Element 7: Script
Your final step in your research plan is to prepare and script your interview questions. Regardless of what type of research this is, you will have questions or tasks for your participants. Prepare them carefully, make sure they will help you achieve your goals, make sure they speak to the KPIs you are trying to achieve.
For instance, if your research goal is to find out why people are not using your feature and your KPI is to check for the drop off rates, you can conduct a usability study, give the user a task to complete and ask questions like: “Did you face any challenges while trying to complete this task?”
Now that you know all the seven elements of a research plan, you can begin your research with much confidence that you know what you are looking for, how to get it and how to measure/validate the success of your research.
And that’s it! The end of this session. I hope you found it helpful and feel free to reach out to me if you have ideas, thoughts or questions.
Thanks,
Joyce Eboh N.
missjoycered@gmail.com
