Research is an essential part of the UX design process. And a UX research plan helps us understand our users better and design better solutions to problems they face.
But conducting UX research is also quite challenging.
Research requires time and resource investment, which many stakeholders are skeptical of. In agile development, requirements and research needs change on the go based on what you learn. In short, there are many things to manage properly.
A good UX research plan makes managing everything much easier.
UX research plans vary in complexity, ranging from one-pager outlines to multi-page detailed plans. However, given the dynamic world we live in, I am a big proponent of small, adaptive guidelines.
A UX research plan should outline, at a high level, the type of research conducted, how it will be done, and why it’s necessary.
Even a simple outline can help you with:
An effective UX research plan must balance being short and concise (otherwise, no one will read that) yet detailed enough to be valuable.
You can achieve that by focusing on the most critical components.
Title and author
Nothing too fancy. Just ensure the title is enough to answer what was done and why.
Stakeholders detail
Who is engaged in the research? What is their role? It’ll help facilitate communication during the research project.
Purpose and background
What’s the reason to conduct the research in the first place? It should give enough context so that no stakeholders doubt why you are using up resources for the research initiative.
Problem statement
Synthesize all background information and the purpose of the research into a single problem statement. One research project, one problem statement. Otherwise, your study won’t be focused enough to be truly valuable.
Research questions
What questions does your research initiative have to answer to help you address the problem you defined? These will define the people you recruit, your methods, and the interview questions you ask.
Participants
What’s the ideal user persona you should talk to to answer the research questions? Whom are you gonna invite?
Methods and procedure
What research methods do you believe are best suited to answer the research question?
Timeline
When do you plan to conduct the study?
Relevant documents
Include any additional documents, reports, input files, diagrams, etc. The research plan itself should be a brief overview, so anything more meaty or detailed should be an attachment, not a part of the research plan itself.
The order in which you build your research plan is essential. There’s no point in discussing methods and participants if you don’t have clarity on your research objective, so make sure not to skip steps.
The most important thing is to define a problem statement. Spend 90% of your time on this if needed.
Whenever I conducted or participated in a poorly done research project, we could almost always tie it back to a poorly defined problem statement.
Now that you have a problem statement, what are the 1-3 main questions you need to have answered to truly nail the solution?
What would you like to know if you had a magic wand today?
These are your research questions, and the whole objective of your research project is to get answers to these.
Based on your research questions, develop an ideal user persona from which to get answers.
For example, to discover why people churn after one day, you should talk to people who have recently churned rather than to heavy users.
Defining more than one user persona is OK if your research questions require different participants. But if you end up with a few completely different user personas, revisit previous steps to validate if your research questions tie to your problem statement. If you have a well-defined problem statement, your target user personas should be roughly similar.
Based on your research questions and target persona(s), decide what tools you will use to get the answers.
Broader research questions (e.g., what makes people churn) require more exploratory methods, such as
More focused questions (e.g., would a discount prevent people from churning?) require more validation-oriented methods, such as:
Moreover, if you have a lot of data on your participants, you can also embrace some quantitative research methods, such as:
Remember to conduct the research as quickly as possible when planning the actual timeline and dates.
Plan to spend two weeks obtaining results, even for the most complex problem statements. You can always run a second and third research cycle if you don’t get enough insights.
Long research projects that last weeks or months often get outdated before completion. A half-baked but speedy research that reacts to the needs on the go is better than a perfectly conducted research that gives you answers in a quarter.
By planning your research for a week or two, odds are you won’t have to pivot dramatically, so just stick to the plan.
Still, you don’t need to wait until the research ends to share insights. You can do that on the go. The faster you share an insight, the faster the team can act.
We usually share insights on Slack after every interview/test and prepare a brief PowerPoint presentation (a few slides) summarizing all related interviews after the end of the cycle.
You can copy the transcript into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize three key ideas. This method works surprisingly well.
I’m not a big fan of extensive summaries and reports. Few people read them; if they do, they usually scan them once and never return.
Instead, do a brief recap (e.g., a few slides or a one-pager document), and then focus on updating your key UX artifacts, such as user personas and journey maps, to reflect the latest changes.
A few well-maintained artifacts beat a hundred research reports.
Use our simple UX research plan template to plan your next research quickly.
Keep it simple and concise. It just needs to serve two purposes:
Don’t make the mistake of writing whole books.
One of the main reasons I champion short, focused research projects is the ability to iterate and learn what works best for you. The proposed structure of the research plan and how to approach it are good starting points, but as you prepare a few research plans, you’ll notice which parts add value, which is just a chore, and what needs to be added.
The ultimate goal isn’t to have a perfect research plan. The goal is to have a tangible artifact that allows you to review past projects and see what common patterns your most insightful researches have.
Creating documents just for the sake of creating documents is pure waste, so adjust your approach to research plans to create docs that you’ll want to review and learn from in the future – even if they deviate significantly from what I proposed in this article.
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