User research is one of the most powerful activities a UX team can do. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most time-consuming ones.
There’ll always be more research to do, more assumptions to validate, and more insights to discover than you’ll even have the capacity to.
Because of this, ensuring that you focus on the most important research initiatives is as important (or perhaps even more important) as properly conducting the research itself.
Let’s dig into how to make sure you work on what truly matters
When it comes to UX research, there are two reasons that make prioritization even more critical than in other fields.
Everything changes rapidly, from the market to users to the product itself. Today’s most crucial pain point might not exist in a couple of months. The “nice to have” of today might be a must-have expectation tomorrow.
That’s why it’s essential to prioritize initiatives that you can act on immediately. You need to align your research roadmap with the experimentation roadmap so that you can turn insights into action within days, not weeks. Otherwise, you end up wasting resources on research that becomes obsolete before you even notice.
UX teams still struggle with getting resources and buy-in from stakeholders. Many companies treat UX and research as secondary activities.
That forces UX teams to deliver results fast. If you don’t deliver tangible outcomes within a few months, people start romanticizing about taking your budget for “more important” things like getting more developers.
Brutal as it is, you often still need to prove the value of research at every step.
There are five main criteria to consider whenever deciding what to research next:
What are your users’ biggest unsolved needs?
The more widespread and painful the problem you solve, the higher the chance that solving it will move the needle for the key product metrics.
Your research initiative should always be tied to current business priorities.
If the company’s main priority is to boost user acquisition, you should prioritize solving user problems that can help boost that acquisition, even if that means putting other equally important user needs on hold for later.
Good user research delivers actionable insights within a week or two. If you’re working on a truly complex problem, you can break it down into smaller subproblems if necessary.
Four focused research projects that last two weeks each will almost always beat a single project that lasts two months.
Once you get insights from the research, how fast can you actually implement changes in the product?
There might be a serious user problem tied to key business needs, but if you already know the dev team won’t be able to fix it within the next couple of months, don’t bother. These insights will become obsolete by then.
Focus on what you can realistically get a buy-in to improve in the product in the next couple of weeks.
The more up-to-date evidence you already have, the lower the need to research the topic again.
Focus on topics that you have less knowledge about. These have a higher chance of delivering a breakthrough insight or fixing gaps in your knowledge than researching a topic that you already have strong knowledge about.
To prioritize research initiatives, I usually score the five aforementioned criteria from one to five, with a higher score indicating a stronger reason to prioritize.
I then sum up the scores and arrive at a prioritization score between 5 and 25. The higher the score, the more important the initiative:
You can use our Google Sheet template to quickly rank up your initiatives. However, I don’t take the results at face value but rather use them as a conversation starter.
For example, if the highest-ranking initiative has immediate actionability ranked at 1, then there’s no point in conducting the research initiative now, even if other criteria say otherwise.
When it comes to prioritization, it’s even more important in the case of UX design than in other areas. UX designers have to deal with two brutal facts: research insights get outdated quickly and business stakeholders often don’t see as much value in research as they should.
A few failed research projects are often enough to get your resources taken away from you, so prioritize accordingly.
The criteria that I find most important in prioritizing research are:
I then score them 1-5 in a prioritization template to get a high-level sense of priority. It gives a good starting point for deciding what to focus on next.
In your context, the criteria might differ slightly, or you might put different weights on different criteria. That’s perfectly okay. Just make sure to work with key business stakeholders, not only UX teams, to define these criteria. It’ll make getting further buy-in significantly easier.
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