Research planning

Tag(s)

Research & testing

Cook(s)

Jung Mee Park

Rebecca Blakiston

Nutrition profile

Start your UX research project with a plan. Driven by your research questions and goals, you'll identify your audience, methods, and resourcing needed.

Cooking time

Varies depending on the scope and scale of your research. Lightweight research planning can happen in an hour. In-depth research planning can take months.

Perfect for

Kicking off your research project with a practical, actionable plan.

You'll benefit from research planning if you have a gap in your understanding or a problem that needs a solution. Perhaps you need to learn more about your audience for a potential product or learn how well a service is meeting user needs. Research plans keep you on track for small and large projects.

Prep work

Do your homework

See what other research is already out there so you're not starting from scratch. If you're at the University of Arizona Libraries, consider checking the library's research repository to see if anyone completed a similar project. You might also conduct a literature review to see what information or findings already exist and if you might want to replicate a past study.

Example of past website research from the library's research repository

Also browse through some of our other recipes, like user interviews and usability testing, to get inspiration and start thinking about what method(s) might work well for you.

Determine the intention of the research

Some research requires approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to make sure it's ethical and doesn't harm people. Often, UX research is exempt from IRB if its intention is just to improve a product or service.

But it's important to decide up front if you will be conducting research intending to generalize findings to a broader population (requires IRB approval), or program-level evaluation intended only for improving quality of a service or product (usually exempt). Going through IRB can add a bit to your timeline. If you're not sure, you might need to fill out a determination form.

If you're at the University of Arizona, see Human Subject Protection Program. The university’s Office of Research Innovation & Impact has a guide around human research, which helps clarify between applied work and research.

Determine the type of research

Consider what type of research will meet your goals.

Generative or exploratory research helps you identify opportunities, define problems, and better understand user needs and expectations.

Evaluative research helps you assess the effectiveness of a product, service, space, or website. Evaluative research likely includes questions specific to a product or service.

Example of how generative and evaluative research might fit into a broader UX process, from Ryan H.

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Another type of research is insight or landscape analysis, which helps you understand the existing environment, such as the competition and marketplace for your product or services. This can also help inform design decisions, though is usually independent literature research that doesn't involve participants.

Ingredients

Research planning is best when informed and collaborative. You may need:

Past research insights or findings from related projects
Access to subject matter experts and stakeholders
A clear description of your audience (see: Personas recipe)
An understanding of your research questions or goals
A collaborative editing tool, such as Google Drive or Notion.so
A project management system to set a timeline and track tasks

Directions

Try using this UX Research Plan template. Sections can include:

Product description
Research questions
Research goals
Audience
Research methods
Project resourcing
Recruitment plan

Describe your product

If applicable, describe the product or service you are conducting research for. Try a one-sentence description along with a link to the product.

Write your research questions

Good research questions are focused and answerable.

For example:

Generative: What are the biggest barriers to academic success for first-generation college students?
Evaluative: How easy is it for alumni to contribute ongoing donations using the website?
Landscape analysis: What are the features of existing project management software?

Articulate your research goals

Research goals explain why you are doing the research in the first place and how you plan to use the findings from your research to make decisions or take action. Your goals could be to gain insights on a topic, to come up with actionable plans for a problem, or to resolve misconceptions. For example:

Generative: Identify barriers for first-generation college students to inform program priorities.
Evaluative: Identify usability issues in the donation form so we can make improvements.
Landscape analysis: Learn the common features of project management software to draft an initial set of product requirements.

Identifying research questions and goals should be done collaboratively with your research team and stakeholders

Define your audience

You may have several audience segments depending on product and goals, and may have both a primary and secondary audience.

Personas can be a helpful way to define your audience. Most UX research involves participants, so this will inform your recruitment strategy.

Select your research method(s)

Depending upon your research question and goals, you'll need to identify one or more research methods.

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Choose Your Own UX Adventure! If you're not sure where to start, this activity will guide you to useful methods for your project.

Your questions and goals should help inform which research method is best. For instance, if your goal is to understand users' behaviors, writing a survey that asks users how they feel about a certain product isn't the right method as it gives you data on people's attitudes, not behaviors.

As you're selecting a research method, keep in mind that different methods provide you with different types of data:

Behavioral data tells you what people do.
Attitudinal data tells you how people think.
Quantitative data produces numbers or graphs.
Qualitative data produces words, stories, and quotes.

Types of user research methods mapped to behavioral, attitudinal, qualitative, and quantitative from Nielsen Norman Group's article on types of methods.

Make a recruitment plan

For each method, determine how many people you want to participate (it can be a range). Typically, lightweight usability tests require just five participants. More quantitative tools, like surveys, require many more, especially if you're hoping to make statistical inferences.

Consider:

Who is the primary audience?
What channels will you use to recruit (e.g. direct emails, social media)?
How will you incentivize participation?

Identify resourcing

You may need to recruit people to join the research team, and then assign roles to particular team members. For example, usability tests tend to require a facilitator and note-taker. Roles to consider include:

Recruitment
Moderation
Note taking
Analysis

If useful, you can also include amount of effort expected from each team member throughout the course of the project, or role per method if you're using a mixed methods approach.

This research team that conducted user interviews included moderators, note takers, data analysts, and subject matter experts

Plating

Try adapting our Research Planning Template, using the sections most applicable to you and creating more if needed.

As you're writing your plan, consider your audience, what they care about, and what questions they might have. For example:

If you're making the case, include a "Problem" or "Context" section that clearly articulates the problem you're solving for.
If it's a product that impacts other areas of work or systems, include a section on "Potential impacts" or "Interdependencies."
If you have a lot of stakeholders, include a "Communication plan" section articulating how you'll share results and recommendations.
If you intend to make recommendations that include design deliverables such as prototypes, include a "Deliverables" section.

Some other tips:

Keep things succinct, especially if you're presenting the plan to busy people.
Avoid jargon if your entire audience isn't familiar with it. Spell out acronyms on first instance.
Write in plain language that's easy to digest. Avoid unnecessary modifiers like, "It is interesting to note that" and keep paragraphs short to avoid walls of text. The Hemingway App is a good way to do a quick check on the readability of your writing.
If appropriate, write in conversational voice using first person e.g. "We will" rather than "The project team will."

Pro tips

Stay focused on a small set of research goals. It can be easy to overdo it and overwhelm the research team.
Do not get stuck on one method. A mixed methods approach, where you're using qualitative and quantitative techniques or collecting both attitudinal and behavioral data, is common and often better.
Revisit the research plan once your project is underway. Research plans change as the project goes on. Have a solid plan but be flexible.
You may not have the resources you expected or might have to adjust your approach based on preliminary data.

Resources

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Research planning template

Credits

Generative vs. Evaluative Research: What's the Difference? by Janelle Estes, UserTesting

When to use which UX research methods by Christian Rohrer, Nielsen Norman Group

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

UX Research: Practical Techniques for Designing Better Products by Brad Nunnally and David Farkas