Guide to Conducting UX Research

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Published by: Elizabeth Akpan

Starting off a UX research with a plan gives you and other stakeholders a sense of direction to your project. The user experience research process is an opportunity to gain insight into and better understand the users’ perspective on a product; a user research plan helps to achieve this efficiently.

Whether you are new to research or you need a refresher on how to plan your next user research, this article is perfect for you.

User research plans provide clarity on the following:

• Who is involved in the research project?
• What do you plan to achieve with the research project?
• Where and how will this research be conducted?
• How long will the research last?
• Do you need a budget for the research?

To answer the questions listed above, the following points will explain the step-by-step process of creating a UX research plan.

1. Identify Stakeholders: The stakeholders are individuals relevant to the success of the research project. The stakeholders are the people you will be working on the research with and the people who will support the research.
2. Define Objective: The research objective is a sentence that describes what you plan to achieve with the research. For instance, if you are trying to design a feature for a social media platform that enhances productive conversations, the first step will be trying to understand how people communicate and what influences that. A suitable objective will be “The purpose of this research is to understand the conversations and tools social media users consider productive as well as identify new ways to enhance productive conversations on social media platforms.” The example research objective is generic to social media because it is hypothetical however, being specific about the research objective will do a lot of good to your plan.
3. Identify Participants: With an understanding of the research objective, the next step will be identifying the target demography for your research. In this section of your research plan, the goal is to gain clarity on who exactly the users or potential users are as this will inform your choice of participants for the research.
4. Research Method: This is where you decide on the approach that will be most suited for the research and how you plan to collect information from the research participants. Here, you also identify if a qualitative method, a quantitative or a mixed research method is suitable for the project. For instance, using the scenario described in the “Define Objective” point, a suitable research method will be user interviews as the right approach to conducting the research helps achieve the objectives.
5. Define Time-frame: A realistic time-frame will be one that covers the whole process of reaching out to participants, getting their consent and successfully interviewing them.
6. Budget: Figuring out a budget may not apply to your project if it is an individual endeavour for your portfolio. However, in an organisational context where you might need to run social media ads to recruit interview participants or incentivize interview participants, a budget is a necessity.
7. Research Protocol: The research protocol includes information on the consent form for the participants, tools you will use in conducting the research, for instance, zoom for conducting interviews remotely, Google forms for surveys.

We also have an article that is a great resource on how you can use the information gathered from user research to gather requirements.