Set learning objectives to get the most from your User Research

Any gap in your team’s knowledge about the product you’re building should be a catalyst for user research — whether that is questions about the problems your users have, or assumptions you’ve made about the right way to approach the solution. These questions and assumptions will form the basis for your learning objectives.

Collecting questions and assumptions

Identifying questions and assumptions should be a continuous task that all team members do throughout the project. Create an accessible place for all your team members to collect these as they think of them — a Google Doc, a specific Git issue tag, a project in Asana or list in Trello. Remind your team regularly to make note of these. The more questions and assumptions that are validated with your users, the more likely you are building something valuable for them.

Turning them into Learning Objectives

When you begin planning your user research, take the list of assumptions and questions you have collected and identify the high-level themes that appear. Write down these themes as your learning objectives.

For example:

• “Evaluate the effort involved in registering for our app.”
• “Understand what are movie-goers’ biggest needs when they leave a movie theater.”

Focus on 3 or 4 high-level learning objectives — any more than that and you are probably trying to do too much in a single session. Each learning objective will be representative of a dozen questions in your actual session, that all ladder up to the general theme it describes.

Answering your objectives

While learning objectives should be high-level, they should be specific enough that you can provide a concise answer for them upon when you are done your research project.

For people not directly involved in the research, they provide a quick overview of what the purpose for the research was, and give you a means to quickly convey what was learned.

“We want to understand what movie-goers’ biggest needs are when they leave a movie theater. For the majority of the people we spoke to it was to check their text messages because of a perceived fear of missing out on what their friends are doing while they were watching the movie.”

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