Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 8]

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

We are kicking off week 2 of the #30dayUXchallenge and this week is all about User Research. Literally. 7 days of research tips. So, first things first?

If you have been following our challenge so far, you just went through the “discovery stage” where we united with our teams to uncover:

what is the problem/opportunity we are tackling
who is our user and what are their motivations
what do we know about the user’s journey
what are the riskiest assumptions we should be researching about

It’s time to put our hands on and summarise how all this knowledge & the identified assumptions can be validated through research.

So why do we need to consolidate the Research Plan in a “one-page-document”?

The research plan is, mainly, a document that will ensure our stakeholders are onboard & that we will get their buy-in down the road, whenever we present the research findings.

However, it’s important to understand what that specific research initiative will focus on. Any project will have hundreds of unanswered questions & assumptions that need validation, but there is only “so much” we can do with our resources and time constraints, so it’s important to understand what our research goal will be for this round and to make sure we keep track of our goal as we move forward.

After defining our main goal, the next step is to find what will be the ideal method to be applied — and, if you stick around, Natalia will cover “methods and tips” tomorrow in a bit more detail tomorrow, on day 9! ❤

The Research Plan structure

The document itself shouldn’t be too extensive (as we want stakeholders to validate it after all!), so, basically, it should look like this:

Research Goal
What is the goal of the research?
What are the assumptions/questions that will be validated?
What are the assumptions and question that ~won’t~ be validated?
Both questions above are essential to set up expectations and ensure our stakeholders won’t create any false expectations.
Target user
Among our personas, who exactly is the user we will be targeting?
Screening Process
How will they be recruited?
Or, if it is a data-driven research, where will we find this data?
Budget
Do we need to offer incentives to the users?
Will we need to hire any 3rd-parties for recruitment or execution?
If so, what is the investment necessary?
Timeline
When does the plan need to be validated and approved?
When will the research be executed?
When will the results be analysed and presented?
Method
What will be the method applied?
Ie.: user interview, user test, focus group, contextual inquiry?
It’s a good opportunity to describe the execution plan in detail as well. If needed, we can also write a script to help us ensuring nothing will be missed.

And that’s it ❤

As you soon as we start answering the questions above, it’s natural to identify gaps, find things we overlooked or even find out that we are trying to tackle too much and is not even feasible to try to cover all we wanted in one single research piece. Or we can potentially find out that research won’t be the best way to invest our energy at the moment and it’s actually wiser to move on: either way, it will help us getting clarity over what needs to be covered and ensuring every single detail is planned and is on track with our goal.

Executing our User Research usually takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. We often don’t have too many chances to talk to users or to observe them using our products, so it’s essential to ensure we get our method/questions absolutely right before executing it!

A Research Plan template with the structure above can be found here,
for free ❤

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Gabi Braga — UX Designer at Envato Elements, freelancer at Toptal & beer enthusiast in her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Why You Need a User Research Plan was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why You Need a User Research Plan

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