Script Writing Guidelines for UX Research

If you’re reading this, hopefully it means you or your team has decided to conduct some UX research with real humans, yay! Below are some tips I’ve learned along the way while conducting UX research sessions.

🤓 Know what you want to learn

Sync with your team members and align on what you want to get out of the sessions. These should somehow tie back into the goals of the project itself. Examples of some goals could be to understand behavior under certain circumstances, how users might expect a certain experience to work, validation that a design works well or not and why, etc. — typically these should help answer questions your team is unsure about.

👋 Start with some introductions

Share the basics like your name, role, and who else is in the room. Feel free to give a brief intro of how the session is going to run and to reassure the participant that there are no wrong answers and that you just want their honest and candid feedback.

Example:

Hi [Participant name]! Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us. My name is [Name] and I’m [Role/Team]. [Introduce the other people in the room]. During the session, we’ll be going through [agenda].

Please know that there are no right or wrong answers — we really want your honest and candid feedback so know that you’re not hurting our feelings at all.

If you have any questions as we go along, please ask them. In some cases, I may ask you to answer your own questions to dig into how you think. However, I will try to answer your questions the best I can during the session or at the end.

🤝Get to know who you’re talking to

Instead of jumping straight into your main questions, try to get to know who you’re talking to — you can ask questions like how their day was, what their role is, the team they’re on, their typical day-to-day etc. This can help the participant feel more at ease and gives them time to transition into the meat of the session — this information can also help you understand where they’re coming from and what their everyday environment looks/feels like.

Example:

Tell me about yourself…

What apps do you use the most often?

What does your typical day-to-day look like?

What’s your role?

What’s your team structure like?

🛶 Your script is a guide, so don’t be afraid of “going with the flow”

Since everyone is different, the way people respond or react in the sessions may also differ. It’s ultimately up to your team on whether you need to stick very close to your script or if there’s some wiggle room to veer off into tangents that seem valuable. Though, if the conversation does feel like it’s becoming irrelevant, try to steer the conversation back to the topic at hand.

🙅‍ Try not to ask leading or close-ended questions

Since the goal of a user research session is to get accurate and genuine answers, it’s important to make sure the questions being asked are as unbiased and open as possible — in other words, try not to ask leading or close-ended questions.

A question is leading when it assumes or influences the way a user acted or behaved when that might not have been the case. For example:

Was this task easy?

The question is assuming that the task was easy to accomplish and could influence the user to say it was easy when it might not have been. A better version could be:

How did you accomplish this task?

A question like this opens up the response for the user and gives them an opportunity to tell a story. In this case, ease of use can be inferred based on the response.

A question is close-ended when there are only a finite or set list of answers to choose from, e.g. a yes or no question. For example:

Did you like this experience?

The question only prompts the user to answer “Yes, I liked it” or “No, I didn’t like it”. They may elaborate on their own but a better version could be:

Did you like or dislike this experience? Can you explain why?

or

What did you think of the experience?

Close-ended questions are not bad and can be very helpful for quantitative data, but it is much more valuable to hear and listen to what the user is thinking or feeling, especially if the session is being moderated in real time, because you can ask follow-up questions to interesting things they may have said.

🤔 Ask reflective questions at the end of the session

At the end of the session, feel free to ask questions that reflect upon the experience your participant just went through. This is an opportunity for the participant to express any last minute thoughts they didn’t have the chance to say during the session. If you’re testing a design, you can also get feedback about what the participant would have wanted to change about the design — you’ll likely get this sort of feedback throughout the entirety of the session, but it’s still good to give them this opportunity in case they thought of something else.

Example:

Considering this whole process, if you had a magic wand, what would you change about the experience?

[If testing a prototype] Try to describe this experience in three words and explain why you chose those words.

Do you have any other feedback or questions for me?

🙌 Thank your participants

Make sure to thank your participants for their time and to let them know they can reach out if they have any additional feedback or questions.

Example:

Thank you for your feedback, it was very helpful and informative. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any additional questions or other feedback you think of.

Have any other tips or suggestions? Feel free to leave them in the comments below!

If you’re looking to level up your skills on conducting UX research, take a peep at this Conducting Effective Research 👀. You can also find other articles like this at Sprout Social Design’s publication, Seek Simple.