Roadmapping for More Strategic Research
Most UX researchers can recall a time or a place in our work lives when the biggest hurdle to providing impactful research was that our stakeholders weren’t coming to us for help. They didn’t understand who we were or what we could provide. Our biggest challenge was gaining visibility, getting that one research study into the process to show our teams how we could help them create better products. Sometimes it feels like this is just the natural first stage of evolution for any UX research team: roaming the wilderness, trying to get somebody to bite.
But times change and evolution winds on. More and more product teams bought in on the value of UX research to build products that jibed better with their customers. Suddenly most stakeholders have questions about their customers most of the time. And they’re looking at you, researcher, to answer them. Welcome to the second era of the UX research team evolution: it’s less a famine than a feeding frenzy.
At HubSpot, we’re glad to say our product organization is really hungry for user research.
But in this new era, our biggest challenge is that with a limited number of resources, the researchers can’t do it all. And I’d even argue that we shouldn’t.
So how do UX researchers at HubSpot make sure they’re running with the research that really matters to our business and our customers?
Enter a simple document that helps guide our researchers to the path of the highest-impact research: the UX research roadmap.
A researcher’s roadmap is a plan that expresses:
- What UX research is going to be run in a given time period
- Why we’re focused on that research in particular
- When, roughly, this research is going to be run
Every research roadmap will have a different look and feel, tailored to the different needs of varied groups, triads and UX researchers. It’s not about the format of the roadmap — it’s the process of creating the roadmap that really drives its value.
This process can be boiled down into three simple phases:
- Work with your stakeholders
- Prioritize against complexity and risk
- Draw a line in the sand
Three Steps To Creating a Research Roadmap
1. Work with your stakeholders
Identify any open questions, research needs, and problem spaces for the given time period with the stakeholders owning the problem space
The first step to producing a roadmap is gathering information. It’s a time for researchers and their stakeholders to look ahead a little and sync on relevant questions and uncertainties on everyone’s mind. I like a quarterly cadence for roadmaps — it’s long enough to provide a good projection of upcoming research, but short enough that the items on the roadmap aren’t as susceptible to big shifts and changing priorities. With a quarterly cadence, I’ll hold these fact-finding conversations a little before the start of an upcoming quarter.
The goal of these conversations is to produce a list of all the relevant open questions and problem spaces for the time period the roadmap will capture. The more social you make this, the more comprehensive it is: Don’t be shy about bringing in all the key players in your relevant project space, and giving them a venue to share what’s on their mind.
Some prompts for a researcher to ask herself and her stakeholders to generate this list includes:
- What are you going to be working on next quarter, and what feels the most challenging about that work?
- What questions — about our users and our products — are on your mind right now?
- What areas of complexity are you thinking about? What problems feel really hard to solve? Why?
- What do you wish you had more information or more certainty about?
As that list is being generated, the UX researcher is likely already engaging with a first round of filtering: asking which of these questions are best solved by user research, and which are better served by a different approach (for instance, sometimes a question a UX researcher is asked to investigate is actually a better question for someone like a product analyst through an analysis of usage metrics — this is the perfect time for the team to share that question with your analyst).
The outcome of this phase: A list of all the user-research-appropriate questions on people’s minds for the chosen roadmap time frame.
2. Prioritize against complexity and risk
Now that the UX researcher and stakeholders have all of their unknowns on the table, it’s time to gauge their rough priority.
I’ve found that the best way to judge the priority of UX research topics, questions, or problem spaces is through a simple assessment of complexity and risk.
For each question or problem space, I ask:
Question 1: How complex is this problem?
Asking this question helps researchers get at the size and scope of the research project required to help solve it. The greater the complexity, the bigger and more varied the research needs to be.
Note that for a UX researcher, complexity is about the problem space, not the solution. What do I mean by that? Well, imagine a team is building a tool that will require a detailed, multi-part final design, but ultimately, because of real-world constraints, the tool being designed can only function two or three different ways.
That’s a complex design, but less of a complex problem space. The team direction could be set with concept tests of designs that facilitate those two or three ways the tool could work. We don’t necessarily need to play as much in the space of research into customer behaviors to define how the solution should work from scratch when there are only a few ways it can work at all.
This helps the researcher judge: is it a good idea for me to run research into this problem space so I can give it my full attention, time, and expertise?
At HubSpot, where product designers might run their own designs through simple concept tests to set themselves on the right track, judging the complexity of the question space helps teams decide whether a researcher should be fully involved and run the study, whether a researcher could act as an advisor as the designer runs their own simple study, or whether the complexity is so low that the team may be best served by moving ahead without UX research, relying on other strategies like experimentation to evaluate small design changes.
Complexity is all about the details of a problem. But everyone at HubSpot (and everyone in industry design and research) is working within another constraint: the needs and goals of our business.
So I’d also encourage all UX researchers to ask a second question of every item that might end up on their roadmap:
Question 2: How risky is it for our business and for our customers if our teams move ahead on this problem without full understanding?
A risk assessment is best when the UX researcher, Design and Business partners owning a problem all weigh in.
We all bring different viewpoints about risk to the table; that’s why at HubSpot we work together to solve problems. Risk is an amalgam of what we stand to lose in customer experience, customer trust, business value, business reputation, revenue, market position, and future possibilities if we don’t do a great job tackling a new project.
Why does assessing risk matter? Because for some projects it’s just not worth pouring UX research into a problem space, even an interesting one, if there’s minimal risk to our customers’ experience or our business. When that’s the case, it’s a safer space to try out a solution, fail, learn, and try again, saving research efforts and calories for higher-risk projects.
There are endless user research studies we could be doing, but by assessing complexity and risk together, UX researchers can make sure they’re focusing their time on the projects that it’s valuable to our business and our customers that we get it right.
Outcome of this phase: Now we’ve assigned every research question or problem space in our list a rough level of complexity and risk — the higher these two factors are, the higher priority we should consider the research need for the problem space.
3. Draw a line in the sand
Prioritization isn’t over when you’ve put things in order of priority. The last and hardest part of prioritization is saying no to everything at the bottom of that list; everything there isn’t bandwidth to tackle.
This is especially tough when teams have valid research questions that UX researchers can’t elevate to their roadmap because their plates are already full with higher priority research for the time in question.
To that end, at HubSpot we’re always keeping on eye on what kinds of problems and questions have to fall off research roadmaps.
If the problems the researcher can’t get to are on the higher end of complexity and risk, then it sounds like this group might need another UX researcher to start catching more research.
What we want is for those untackled problems to be lower risk and lower complexity.
But why, you might ask, would you want any questions to fall off the roadmap if you can help it?
Because it might be better for our users that we go ahead without research. Especially at a B2B company like HubSpot, our customers are a valued and limited resource. We should prioritize their time, too, and remind ourselves to go to them when it’s most important that we get their feedback and input.
Outcome of this phase: The researcher has decided — based on need, priority, and bandwidth — what she’ll tackle and what she’ll intentionally omit in the roadmap time frame.
Roadmap: Complete!
By traversing these three phases of research roadmapping, UX researchers can confidently arrive at:
- The “what” of their research roadmap: the items, questions, and problem spaces the researcher will tackle with research
- The “why” of their research roadmap: these problems are being prioritized because they’re the highest complexity and the highest risk
- The “when” of their research roadmap: the time frame that’s set at the beginning, in which this research will get done
At the outset I noted that the power of the research roadmap is in the process, but I’ll end with a note on why the artifact itself is important.
Whether your roadmap is a text-only document, spreadsheet, or visual timeline, committing your quarterly roadmap to paper (or pixels) means you can socialize your priorities and your efforts.
Sharing and socializing your roadmap lets everyone around you know what you’re working on and why it’s important enough for the organization that it’s on your plate.
It also gives you something to refer back to when you have to explain to a team why you can’t tackle their research question today, but how their work might end up on your radar in the future.
Does working with product teams as a strategic researcher sound exciting to you? HubSpot’s UX Research Team is hiring!
