HOW TO MAP OUT A UX RESEARCH PLAN (pt 1)
PROJECT BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH GOALS
Take a look at this scenario: You’re working and are about to carry out UX research on a project — This can be for a new product, a new feature, an improvement on an existing feature, finding out why something is not reaching its set goals and so on [yes, you can research ANYTHING in UX]. You don’t know where to start from and you have a million things to do in mind. I’ll help you with a UX research process that works for me and that was also recommended by Google from their UX course.
First, have a plan.
[This series is focused solely on UX Research plans, Not UX research as a whole]
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A UX Research Plan is a document that lists out your research steps and expectations. This helps you document your process (you are a pro, document your steps!) and communicate efficiently with your clients or stakeholders. There are templates online for you to use but I personally use the google template, I find it very easy to use and understand. It has the 7 elements one might need for the research which are:
1. Project Background
2. Research Goals
3. Research Questions
4. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
5. Methodology
6. Participants
7. Scripts
Using a template as a starting point makes planning and writing easier and helps you and your team stay focused on the who, what, why, and when of research.
This plan will give you an overview of all the processes involved in the research and all the elements you would need. I will discuss each element of a plan to help you fully understand how to go about them. This will be a lot to read so I’m dividing them into 3 parts which will be released weekly.
For the first part, we will touch the INTRODUCTION. This encompasses two of the elements of a research plan: the project background and the research goals.
Element 1 & 2: Project Introduction
This has the Title of the project, the Author(s), the Stakeholders, the Date, the Project Background and the Research goals.
Title of the project: This could be a few words about the focus of the study. Something like “ Usability testing for twitter blue feature”.
Author: This should have your full name, job title and email address in one line.
Stakeholders: The names of the stakeholders and their roles in brackets. E.g. Rick Sanchez (CEO), Morty Smith (Sidekick).
Date: Updated every time you edit the plan.
Project Background: This should be a brief writeup of what led you to carry out this research. It gives an insight to your readers on the needs, objectives and purpose of the study. It should include a problem statement which would show what question you are trying to answer through this research.
An example is: The purpose of this study is to understand the major pain points our users experience in subscribing and using our feature (insert feature name) and how this contributes to low usage and increased drop off rates.
We will be using usability testing to follow the user experience of this feature and the obstacles they encounter leading up to the point of subscription. We will also be using generative research techniques to better understand the customer’s experience of our brand and the challenges and needs they face in subscribing.
Another one is: We are creating an app that allows users access tons of mobile arcade games online so they don’t have to go through the stress of searching for hours for the right one. We need to find out if the main user experience, finding and downloading a game, is easy for users to complete. We’d also like to understand the specific challenges that users might face in the searching, reading recommendations, watching previews and downloading processes.
Now that you have that, you can move on to the last part of your introduction.
Research Goals: Now this is when you ask yourself what you are trying to gain from this research. The first one explains how you got to this point (your questions) while this one shows what you want to get out of this (your answer). Seeking out answers to these questions should be a collaborative effort between you and your stakeholders. This is why you would need to involve them in every process. We will get to that but here some examples of research goals: To understand how our users are currently using our subscription feature. To determine the elements of *** features that are difficult to use or unappealing. Identify why people don’t use *** feature.
Usually for me, I present this to the stakeholders and we then have a meeting based on this information before I move on to the next stage (Research Questions). Here I conduct an interview with the stakeholders, asking them important questions relating to their product and this project.
Some examples are: Who are your ideal users? What are their behaviours, goals, motivations and needs? What assumptions do you think you are making about your users?, What are the most common problems your users face?, What have you tried that has/hasn’t worked? and so on.
From practice, I have discovered that these meetings usually turn out to be very intense and eye opening not just for you, but for your clients also.
In my next article, I will continue on these research plan elements, hopefully by the end of these 3 parts, you will have all you need to plan your UX research. At the end, I will also give tips on how to continue from there.
Until then, do some personal reading and keep working hard!
