elements of a ux research plan

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How to write a ux research plan that actually works: 7-step tutorial, saviour egbe, august 29, 2023.

A UX research plan is like a map that will help you navigate the complexity of running a research project. It will help you define your goals, choose the right methods, and collect the data you need to make informed design decisions.

But UX research plans don't have to be boring. In fact, they can be quite funny. For example, one UX researcher I know has a section in his plan called " The Things That Make Me Cry ." This is where he lists all the things that he's learned about his users that make him sad, such as the fact that they often have to deal with frustrating interfaces or unhelpful customer service.

But the primary use of a research plan of course is to make  sure that your research is effective. So, while it’s helpful to have a sense of humor, you also need to be serious about your research.

In this article, we'll consider:

• What a UX research plan is and why it's important
• How to create a UX research plan 
• An example of a well-structured UX research plan and
• A template for a UX research plan you can use to get started

So, whether you're a UX newbie or a seasoned pro, read on for everything you need to know about UX research plans!

What is a UX Research Plan?

A UX research plan is a document that outlines the goals, methods, and timeline for your research. It's a roadmap that will help you stay on track and ensure that your research is productive.

A good UX research plan should include the following:

• A clear statement of the research goals: What do you hope to learn from your research? What are the specific questions you're trying to answer?
• A description of the target audience: Who are the people you're designing for? What are their needs and pain points?
• A selection of research methods: There are many different research methods available, so it's important to choose the ones that are right for your goals and target audience.
• A timeline and budget: How long will your research take? How much money will it cost?
• A plan for data analysis and presentation: How will you analyze your data and communicate the findings to others?

Why is a UX Research Plan Important?

A UX research plan is important for several reasons. It helps you:

• Stay focused and avoids wasting time and resources.
• Ensures that your research is relevant to the needs of your users.
• Get buy-in from stakeholders & align on the goals for the project.
• Provides a framework for organizing and analyzing your data.
• Helps you communicate the findings of your research to others.

How to Create a UX Research Plan

Creating a UX research plan is an important step in ensuring that your product or service is user-friendly and meets the needs of your target audience. Here are the essential steps to create a research plan that drives meaningful insights and successful user experiences:

Step 1: Alignment & Requirements Gathering

Research rarely will happen in a vacuum. Usually you are working with a team—product, engineering, design, for example. 

When the need for a research study arises, the first thing you want to do is meet with your team to understand the questions they're trying to answer.

Depending on how formally set up your research practice is, you may even want to supplement this step with a Research Request document where stakeholders can explain the key questions they'd like to answer, why they're important, and any constraints (budgets, timelines) they're working with.

Step 2: Define Your Goals

Once you've gathered your data, the next step is to clearly define & write out your goals. What do you hope to learn from your research? What specific questions are you trying to answer?

Here are some things to consider when framing your goals:

• What are the business objectives for your product or service? Are you trying to grow active users? Or reduce churn? What should the final results of this research project help you do?
• Who are your target users? These are the people you’d like to learn more about.
• What do you want to learn about their behavior and preferences? This will help you determine your research questions. Ideally the answers to these questions should also tie to your business goals so there’s a clear line between what you’re trying to learn and what that learning will do for the company.

Once you’ve thought about and drafted the answers to these questions, make sure to follow the below steps before starting interviews:

i. Assess Internal Data and Identify Research Needs

Before you start collecting new data, take some time to assess any existing data you have. This could include analytics, customer feedback, or previous research findings. This will help you identify any gaps in your knowledge and determine what areas need to be explored further.

Sometimes you’ll find you already have the answer to your research question in-house—saving you weeks of research effort and thousands of dollars of investment!

If you’re trying to build a repository to help you do this more effectively, check out this definitive guide on research repositories .

ii. Link Research Goals to Business Objectives

It's also important to link your research goals to the business objectives of your organization. This will help you justify the time and resources that will be required for your research. By demonstrating how your research will help you achieve your business goals, you'll be more likely to get the support you need.

As a bonus, once your research is complete, you can go back and track its impact against these business goals. This will help you build a case for your own work and the research practice at your company.

As you proceed through Step 1, keep in mind that your research goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). This framework will help you ensure that your goals are well-defined and actionable.

Step 3: Identify Your Target Audience & Plan a Recruiting Strategy

Knowing your audience is essential for creating a UX research plan that delivers relevant and actionable insights. In this step, we'll talk about how to define your target audience and plan a recruiting strategy for this set of users.

The target audience you’re considering this research study may overlap with your standard target users, or you may want to speak with a subset of this group.

For instance, if you’re doing a research study on why users churn, speaking to a regular active user won’t help. You’ll need to define and recruit users who can actually answer your questions well—in this case it could be “users who have churned in the last 2 weeks”.

When defining the audience for this study, think about whether your target user falls in a specific category based on one of these characteristics:

• Demographics:   This includes basic characteristics, such as age, gender, location, and occupation.
• Behaviors and habits: Are you interested in users who have or have not conducted certain actions on your product? For research on how well your Slack integration works, you may want to speak to users who have already installed it, for example.  
• Needs and use cases: Sometimes one product can have multiple use cases. For example, a transcription product could be used by researchers, or journalists, or students trying to capture their class notes. Which use case or needs are relevant to your research study?  
• Payment type: In today’s world products may have free, freemium / trial, or paid users and each of these groups may behave differently. Think about whether you need one or all of these user types as part of your research.

Now that you know who you need to reach, you also need to think about how to reach them.

Recruiting, as we all know, is a major pain point for (most) researchers. There are some ways to speed it up though.

If you’re running research for a B2C product or an easy to find B2B cohort, you may want to turn to an external recruiting software like UserInterview.com or Respondent.io. There are also local agencies to help you find more local audiences in international markets. 

If you are trying to recruit via an external paid channel like this, make sure to budget it in your research plan. These channels are very quick to set up research calls with, but they do come with an added cost.

If you’re running research with a niche B2B audience or are defining your audience based on behaviour on your product (e.g., user who churned in the last 2 weeks), you may need to use internal recruiting methods. This means reaching out to your own users via email, intercom, or via your sales / support team.

If you are recruiting existing customers, make sure to budget in the time it takes to recruit these users. It may take a few days to weeks to gather the relevant user emails and schedule calls, although paid incentives for research help this move much faster.

If you are planning to recruit your own customers, use our Ultimate Guide to Recruiting Your Users for Interviews and Usability Tests . This article has templates for outreach, incentive payment options, and many tactical tips to help you streamline internal recruiting.

Remember, the accuracy and relevance of your research findings depend on the quality of your participants. Take the time to identify and engage users who genuinely reflect your intended audience. This will help you create a research plan that generates insights that drive impactful design decisions.

Step 4: Choose Your Research Methods

Choosing the right research methods is necessary for getting the most out of your UX research plan. Before kicking off your study, make sure to review the possible ways you can answer your research question as well as any constraints you face regarding time, money, or tooling.

If you’re not sure which methods exist, read through this article on UX Research Methods . This article provides an overview of the different methods, so you can choose the ones that are right for your project. It covers everything from usability testing to card sorting, and it includes practical advice on how to conduct each UX research method effectively.

When you’re actually selecting the right method out of the available options, here are the key questions you need to ask yourself: 

• Your research goals: What do you hope to learn from your research? The methods you choose should be aligned with your specific goals. For example, if you need to deeply understand user motivations, a user interview is much better fit than a survey.
• Quantitative vs. qualitative: Do you want to collect quantitative data (numbers and statistics) or qualitative insights (in-depth understanding)? Different methods are better suited for different types of data. If you need to know the percentage of users using Zoom vs GoogleMeet, a 5-person user interview won’t get you that data but a 100 person survey with a representative sample might.
• Resources and time: How much time and money do you have to spend on your research? Some methods are more time-consuming or expensive than others. For instance, an ethnographic study where you travel to see your users is obviously more expensive and time-consuming than a 30-minute remote user interview.

By considering these factors, you can choose a combination of research methods that will help you understand your users better.

Step 5: Define your timelines & budgets

Now that you know your target audience (and therefore recruiting method) and your research methods, you can define the timelines and budgets your stakeholders care about.

• Timelines: How long will it take to conduct your research? This will depend on the methods you choose, the number of participants you need to recruit, and the amount of data you need to collect. For example, user interviews can typically be conducted within a few weeks, but usability testing can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the number of participants and the complexity of the product or service being tested.
• Budgets: How much money will you need to conduct your research? This will depend on the methods you choose, the number of participants you need to recruit, and the cost of data collection and analysis. For example, user interviews can be conducted for a few hundred dollars, but usability testing can cost several thousand dollars, depending on the number of participants and the complexity of the product or service being tested.

Step 6: Identify your assumptions

Sometimes without realising it, our research study comes packaged with a set of assumptions about who users are and what they want.

Before kicking off your study, it’s important to identify these assumptions in writing and align on them with your team.

For instance, if you’re running research on how to improve a Slack integration, your in-built assumptions may be:

• Users already use this integration
• It’s worth improving this integration further

Once you’ve laid out these assumptions in advance of your research, you can check them against existing data and keep them in mind when you’re reviewing your research findings.

For example, if analytics data shows that no users use your Slack integration, it may call into question the research you’re running today or change the audience you speak to about it.

Instead of speaking to existing Slack integration users, your audience may need to be companies that have Slack but have not downloaded your Slack integration.

Your research questions may also shift from “Why do you use the Slack integration?” to “Why not? ”

In general, taking a moment to review research assumptions helps you be more aware of them throughout your research study.

Step 7: Define the research questions

This is a pivotal phase in the UX research process. It's when you define the questions that will guide your data collection efforts. These questions will be your compass, directing your research toward meaningful insights that drive product improvements.

Here are some tips for crafting and structuring your research questions:

• Make sure each question is aligned with your overall research objectives. This will ensure that your findings address the core goals of your project.
• Make your questions clear, concise, and specific. Ambiguity can lead to varied interpretations and muddy insights.
• Frame your questions from the user's perspective. Use language that aligns with your target audience to ensure your questions are relatable.
• Avoid leading questions. These are questions that nudge participants towards a particular response. Aim for neutrality to get real insights.
• Use a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions allow participants to provide detailed responses, while closed-ended questions offer predefined answer choices.
• Structure your questions logically, moving from broader inquiries to more specific ones. This will help participants to follow your thought process.
• Limit the number of questions. You want to get comprehensive insights but don't want to overwhelm participants with too many questions.
• Cover the core areas relevant to your project. This could include user pain points, needs, preferences, expectations, and perceptions.
• Pilot-test your questions with a small group of participants. Their feedback can help you to identify unclear or misleading questions.
• Make sure your questions are relevant to the research methods you will be using. For example, usability testing may focus on task-oriented questions, while interviews explore broader experiences.

Here are some examples of well-defined research questions:

1. Usability testing:

• How easily can users navigate the Looppanel account setup process?
• What challenges do users face when uploading their recorded calls to Looppanel?
• How intuitive is the process of setting up Calendar integration on Looppanel?

2. Interviews:

• Can you describe a recent experience you had with the Looppanel customer support?
• What motivated you to sign up for Looppanel for your user research needs instead of other platforms?
• In your view, how does the platform assist in taking your user interview notes effectively?

By carefully defining your research questions, you can ensure that your data collection efforts are focused and meaningful. This will help you to gather the insights you need to improve your product or service and deliver a better experience to your users.

Step 8: Align with your team

Now that you’ve thought through the basics, it's essential to get buy-in from your team and stakeholders on the final plan.

A lot may have happened between your first requirement-gathering meeting and when your plan is finalized. Take the final plan to stakeholders and make sure they are aligned:

• The research question you’re going to answer
• How your study ties to business goals
• Which users you’ll be engaging with
• Which method you’ll be using
• What your timelines look like
• What your budget looks like (if applicable)

This step is really important because if there’s a lack of alignment between you and your key stakeholder, you may end up with findings nobody is going to act on.

Example UX Research Plan

Here is an example UX research plan for improving the onboarding experience of a mobile app. Use this example as a guide to help you create your own plan!

Psst… we also have a template below that you can copy and use!

Project Title: Research study to improve onboarding experience on DuoLingo 

Business Goal: We want to increase the activation rate of new users on the app.

Project Goal(s) :

• Identify key drop-off points on the onboarding flow
• Identify why users are dropping off at these points

Target Users: People from the 15-40 age group in North America who have not used Duolingo before.

• MixPanel analytics data to identify existing drop-off points for users
• Usability testing with the think aloud protocol to understand why users are dropping off at those points

Timelines: The study will run for 4 weeks:

• Week 1: Analyzing existing analytics data & recruiting participants
• Week 2: Running usability tests
• Week 3: Analyzing results
• Week 4: Presenting findings

Budget (if applicable): Anticipated spend of $500 on recruiting.

Key Research Questions These are the research questions we’ll be gathering data on :

• At which point(s) in the onboarding process are users most likely to drop off?
• What are the common reasons users cite for discontinuing the onboarding process?
• How do users perceive the clarity of instructions during the initial setup stages?
• Are there any specific usability issues that lead users to abandon the onboarding flow?
• How do users' prior experiences with language learning apps impact their expectations of DuoLingo's onboarding?

UX Research plan template

We’ve also created a UX Research plan template you can use easily duplicate and use for your own work.

Click here to get Looppanel's UX Research Plan template.

This template contains sections for:

• Project Title
• Business Goals
• Project Goals
• Target Users
• Research Methods
• Timelines & Budgets
• Key Research Questions

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Creating A User Research Plan (with Examples)

UX research helps to test hypothesis you have about users prior to design. Sadly, not every UX design project starts with user research, and that’s because it takes a lot of time to recruit participants, run UX research projects, and sumamrize findings.

Good research, nevertheless, ensures that your product team doesn’t build the wrong functionality that would cost you valuable resources and make you vulnerable to losing customers.

In this article, you’ll see how you can use UX research plan to get stakeholder’s buy-in and create research reports that’s full of valuable advice for product design. Let’s go.

At the end, when you have your research complete, launch the right tool for your design process. For that, try UXPin, an end-to-end design tool for interactive prototyping that brings design and product development together.

Designers can create a powerful prototypes, show them to product managers who can interact with the design instead of just looking at it. Then, they give the design to engineers who can get all the specs and some code to kickstart front-end design with.

Since with UXPin you work faster, you have ample time for UX research before UX design. Try it for free .

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What is a UX Research Plan?

A UX research plan helps to set expectations and document the essentials you need to communicate to stakeholders and clients. Your company needs a strong business case for every user research session, complete with research objectives, goals, methods, and logistical needs for the study.

UX Research Plan Elements

Every UX research plan should start with a solid outline. That’s where templates come in handy. They help you structure your UX research project in a way that team members and stakeholders see value in completing research process.

Master templates are the best way to create a successful and effective UX research plan. Using a template as a starting point makes planning and writing easier and helps you and your team stay focused on the who, what, why, and when of research. Read on for tips and examples for how you can build a user research plan that works.

UX Research Plan Background

The background section should offer your clients and stakeholders a few sentences on why you are creating a user research plan and what it will accomplish. It should orient readers to the needs and expectations behind the purpose of the study. It should also include a problem statement, which is the primary question you’re setting out to answer with your research findings. 

Example Background

The purpose of this study is to understand the major pain points users experience in using our website/app and how these contribute to issues such as cart abandonment, returned items, and low customer loyalty. 

We will be using usability testing to follow the user’s experience of our website/app and the obstacles they encounter leading up to the point of purchase. We will also be using generative research techniques to better understand the customer’s experience of our brand and the challenges and needs they face in making a purchase. 

UX Research Plan Objectives

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of your user research plan, you first want to focus on your research objectives. This step outlines the reasons you are conducting a UX research plan in the first place. Why are you carrying out this research? What are the end goals you have after completing all the work?

Seeking out answers to these questions should be a collaborative effort between you and your stakeholders. It’s also helpful to consider discussions and learnings from past clients and projects to create metrics for your UX research plan. 

Objectives and Success Metrics

Research objectives will be different for every project, but they should always be actionable and specific. 

Example Objectives

• Understand how users currently go about tracking orders on our website
• Understand what actions customers take when they consider buying a new [product we offer]
• Learn about competitor websites/apps customers are using to buy [product we offer]
• Evaluate pain points customers are experiencing in using our website/app

And here are some examples to help you determine the success of your UX research plan.

Example Success Metrics

• What information are we trying to collect about users?
• What scales/documents/statistics do we intend to create?
• What decisions will these materials help to make? 

UX Research Plan Methodology

This step should be a short and sweet description of the research methods you will use to answer the research objectives. It should include both secondary and primary methods. Generative methods, such as user interviews and open-ended questions, help uncover motivations or more general insights, while UX testing helps to evaluate the usability and experience of your product. 

Research Scope & Focus Areas

Clearly outlining the research scope and focus areas helps to facilitate efficient user research planning. The more you’re able to hone in on the specifics of what information you are wanting to collect, the less overwhelmed you will be in the process. It also helps avoid inundating your clients with unnecessary information. 

To keep research-focused, this section should include:

• 3-6 question topics (e.g. How do users spend their time on a website?)
• Design Focus Components, including interface qualities (e.g. Usability, Training, Efficiency, Satisfaction)
• Primary User Scenarios (e.g. Scenarios in which pain points are most problematic; scenarios you have the least information about, etc.)

Example Methodology

For this study, we’re conducting a 30-minute usability test to evaluate our user’s experience of our app/website. A secondary method will be to conduct one-on-one generative research interviews to better understand our customers and empathize with their needs. 

UX Research Plan Participant Profiles

Once you’ve defined objectives methodology and focus areas, it’s time to outline the participants you’ll need to get the required insights. Participant profiles help you determine who you want to recruit, or an approximation of your users, to optimize recruiting efforts. Here are a few examples of how to ensure you’ll get the best participants for your study. 

Define your target user by collaborating with internal stakeholders, marketing, sales, and customer support. With their help, you can create approximations about who your users are. This is a great starting point for finding the right participants for your study. 

Compare yourself to your competitors and create participant profiles based on their audiences. Recruiting people who use a competitor’s product can be an excellent way to glean insights into how to further improve your product. 

Outline a screening process. Participant profiles should include any relevant information concerning your target audience, including behaviors, needs, demographics, geography, etc. Including the right criteria will help you evaluate whether or not to include certain individuals in your user research plan. 

This Nielsen Norman article offers some great information about defining and recruiting the right participants for your study. 

UX Research Plan Timeline

This is optional, but many UX research plans include a timeline that offers clients and stakeholders a general overview of how long the research will take. It helps to set expectations for the final results as well as allowing you to create a schedule for research sessions, debriefing, follow-up, and deliverables. 

Timeline Example: 

Approximately 6-8 weeks for identifying objectives, creating participant profiles, recruitment, in-person meetings, qualitative research, and analysis. 

Try an End-to-End Design Solution

UX research plan templates are essential tools for executing a successful project. Having a master template helps you to remember what the process entails, communicate essential information to the right people, and stay on track throughout the user research plan.

UXPin, besides being a great prototyping tool, makes creating such research templates fast and easy. Especially since each project will be a little different and plans will need tweaking in terms of structure and content. Try UXPin for free .

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How to create an effective UX research plan (2024)

Last updated

23 January 2024

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

You wouldn’t build a home without a solid architectural plan. The plan ensures what you create fits the brief and will delight future residents. The same level of planning is needed when it comes to research.

Think of your research plan as the building blocks of your UX research , helping to streamline the process, firm up your goals, and ensure the results are reliable and actionable.

Let’s take a look at what a UX research plan is, and how to create one.

• What is a UX research plan?

A UX research plan outlines the research problem, objectives, strategies, participant profiles, budget, timeline, and methodology. It serves as a guide for researchers, designers, and project managers to understand the scope of the project and carry it out efficiently.

There’s no one format for UX research plans––they may be compiled into a slideshow, a simple document, or a more comprehensive report. The important thing is not the format, but that the plan covers all the essential elements of the research your team will perform.

In some cases, a UX research plan could also be required to secure funding or approval for the project.

• What's the difference between a research plan and research design?

A research plan and research design are two related, but distinct concepts. A research plan includes a summary of the intended research design.

Research plan

This outlines the goals, methodology, and strategies of the research. The research plan is typically compiled into a document or slideshow.

A research plan outlines the goals of the project while providing an overall structure.

Research design

This is the specific method by which the research will be conducted. It includes the UX research methodologies and tools that will be used to conduct the research, the sampling size, and the data collection process .

The focus of research design is to decide which research techniques will be used, how the information will be gathered, and how the analysis will be conducted.

• What are the benefits of using a UX research plan?

Having a solid foundation, or specific outline, for any UX research you wish to conduct can make the process much faster, more accurate, and more specific.

The UX research plan helps teams to firm up their goals, set clear research questions , decide on the research methods they’ll use––ones that will be most effective––and consider how the results will be analyzed. This process allows teams to consider contingencies and differing methods, and to make adjustments accordingly.

An effective research plan can also save organizations money by providing a clear path to success, highlighting potential challenges, and helping a team gather all the elements for success.

Some key benefits of research plans include:

Problem definition: having a research plan helps you clarify the problem you’re solving. A well-defined problem statement can firm up the focus and direction of the research, outlining specific issues and challenges you’ll look to address.

Goal clarity: all research projects should begin with clear goals. This ensures your research is relevant, useful, and measurable for your team’s needs. Creating a UX research plan can help you not only create goals but also consider if they are feasible and relevant for the business and the user.

Stakeholder alignment: creating a detailed UX research plan can help align all key stakeholders. This guides everyone toward the same goal, provides clarity for objectives, ensures teams don’t work in silos, and helps the whole organization work together to improve the customers’ user experience . It can also be useful to collect questions and requirements from stakeholders to keep them engaged with the research.

Method choices: through the process of defining the UX research goals, strategies, and data-collection process, it can be simpler to see the right research method for your project. Potential issues or roadblocks will become clear, allowing your research to be conducted more effectively.

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• What should a UX research plan include?

While there is no one way to create a UX research plan, the most effective plans include a few core elements.

Some of the most essential aspects of a UX research plan include:

Challenges: identify challenges that users and the business may encounter. These may be fluctuations in revenue, friction in the user experience, insufficient information, or issues related to customer service. Addressing these challenges ensures the research aligns with the pertinent issues from user and business perspectives.

Research questions: pinpoint the specific questions that will be asked during the project to check they align with the overall project goals.

Methodology: note the UX research methods that will be used during the project. These should also be relevant to the overall goals and challenges.

Timeline: clarify timings so teams won’t complete research that’s too big for the budget or time available. Timings will impact what can be researched and even the results.

Participant selection : as part of UX research, usually participants are required to answer questions or complete exercises. Choosing the right number of relevant participants can be challenging. Having a plan in place for this can streamline that part of the process and prevent teams from getting bogged down by delays.

Data-collection methods: make sure your team knows how the data will be collected and analyzed. Having this as part of your plan can ensure the data collection aligns with the project goals and access to your team’s resources.

Budget: include your research budget to help you allocate resources, estimate overall costs, and prioritize activities. A clear budget will support the approval process, aid in risk management, and increase accountability for teams.

Ethical considerations : ethics are important in any research, whether or not it involves humans. UX studies typically involve participants, so it’s important to consider a range of critical factors. Personal privacy, potential for harm, and persuasion are just a few areas to be aware of.

Risk: all projects have the potential for risk. Considering what those risks are before the project starts can help the team consider potential contingencies.

• How to create a UX research plan

Creating a UX research plan doesn’t have to be intimidating. By following a framework and including essential elements, you’ll streamline the research process and reduce work down the line.

Let’s look at some best-practice steps.

1. Define the challenge 

UX research seeks to understand the pain points, wants, and needs of your customers so you can develop better products and services. Before beginning UX research, you need to understand what challenge you are looking to understand, and solve, for your business and customers. Here are three examples:

We seek to uncover the root causes behind the significant drop-off rates at the shopping cart, aiming to identify user behaviors and potential barriers to retention.

Our focus is on understanding and evaluating the factors influencing user behavior to transition from free to paying platform members, aiming to optimize our conversion rate.

Our current challenge is to identify functionalities and features for our B2B fitness coaching app that will drive conversion and revenue.

Before diving in, it’s important to know what the challenge is, and therefore, what the UX research will be focused on.

2. Set your goals 

Once the challenge is clear, it’s essential to set your specific goals for the research. The goals you set at the start will define the entire project, so this aspect is worth spending time on.

There may be several areas that your team would like to research, but, for the best results, keep things simple. Set a small number of goals that relate to the core challenge. You can order your goals by priority to select the most essential ones for your project.

An example of a goal could be:

To decrease shopping cart drop-off rates by 25% by identifying and solving the challenges our customers experience.

3. Select your research method 

Based on the goals you’ve set, choose a relevant research method. With many research methods to choose from–– customer interviews , focus groups , user testing , A/B testing, surveys , diary studies , analytics, and more––choosing the right method is important.

First, consider whether quantitative or qualitative research (or a mixed approach) will be most helpful for your project. Then select a method that aligns with your project objectives.

To discover why users are abandoning their shopping cart, for example, a range of methods may be relevant. These include:

User testing: users could be tasked with adding items to a shopping cart and completing a purchase while being observed by researchers. This may reveal moments of friction or difficulty in the checkout process.

Surveys: users could also be asked to provide feedback immediately after using the shopping cart. This would help researchers gain insights into customers’ feelings and frustrations directly after interacting with the product.

Heatmaps: some tools show where users are clicking and using their cursor. This can help identify areas where users pause, suggesting they are challenging or confusing.

A/B testing: presenting users with two different options for the shopping cart could help teams refine what elements, design features, and interfaces work better for conversion.

4. Identify participant sources

Once you’ve chosen your method or methods, determine how you’ll select participants. Don’t select them merely based on demographic factors; also focus on key behavioral patterns. This can be a challenging aspect of UX research, and it’s helpful to include it in your UX research plan to make the process more efficient.

Your current customers can be an ideal source of participants. Other ways to attract participants include reaching out to recruitment research agencies, putting a callout on social media, sending an email to customers, or using incentives. Pop-up surveys on your website and app could also prove useful.

5. Run a test

At this stage, it’s helpful to run a test of your plan methodology to check it works effectively. That could mean having a team member try out your survey or trialing a usability test within the team to spot any issues.

By running a test, and ironing out any issues that may arise, you’re more likely to have fewer challenges when conducting the actual research.

6. Analyze the data

Deciding how the data will be collected and analyzed––including how those results will be shared with the broader team, is an essential aspect of a UX research plan.

Keep in mind that the data you collect and analyze should link back to your goals and the overall challenge your team is looking to solve.

• Tips for your UX research plan

To save time and make your UX plan as effective as possible, here are some best-practice tips:

Set clear goals: to get the best results from your research and ensure your UX research plan is comprehensive and effective, insist on clarity in your goals. Clear goals lead to cohesion among stakeholders, useful results, and addressing of business and customer challenges.

Understand your target market: your UX research should speak to your target market, solving their problems. Deeply understanding your market will direct you to the right type of research to keep delivering better products and services.

Set out an accurate timeline: to keep your project on track and ensure you have the appropriate resources to complete it, an accurate timeline is essential. The timeline should be well thought out, taking into account potential roadblocks and challenges.

Allow for flexibility: as you conduct the research, you may discover unexpected data or new insights. Some degree of flexibility in a UX plan, and your timeline, can be useful to allow for these potential diversions.

• Examples of a good UX research plan

To help you get started with your UX research plan, we’ve created this UX research plan template for your next project.

Feel free to use this as a guide, adding or removing elements as you see fit.

This example covers a UX team wanting to boost resubscriptions for their dog-sitting app.

50% of users are not renewing their app subscription.

To understand why some users are not renewing their app subscriptions and use this information to increase app resubscribes by 20%.

Research questions

What areas of the app are causing friction for users?

What aspects of the app provide the most value?

How can the app be streamlined for a boosted user experience?

How do user preferences and expectations align with the current offerings of the app, and are there opportunities for adjustments to better meet user needs?

How does the app compare to competitors in terms of subscription models, features, and overall user satisfaction ?

Methodology

Surveys: conduct surveys with a relevant number of participants [the number you survey will depend on the population size, confidence level, and margin of error you are willing to have] who have just failed to renew their app subscription. Understand from these users what areas of the app caused the most friction and where more value could be added.

Usability testing: perform usability testing with a representative user sample to identify any usability issues that might be contributing to the drop in subscription renewals. Observe users interacting with the app and gather feedback on the user interface , navigation, and overall user experience.

Analytics: assess the analytics of customers who decide not to renew their subscriptions against those who do. Look for any differences in demographics, the way they use the app, and more.

Participants

[Choose existing or recent customers as participants so their insights are relevant to the project.]

Week 1: establish participants

Week 2–3: perform surveys and usability tests

Week 4: gather key analytics

Week 5: perform analysis

Week 6: collate and share results

Stakeholders and responsibilities

[Identify key stakeholders including project managers, product owner, vice president (VP) of product, researchers, UX managers, designers, data engineers, and more.]

Risks and mitigation

Some potential risks include:

Low participant turnout: ensure a sufficient number of participants complete the survey so that the results are valid. The use of incentives may be necessary to boost completion rates.

Data challenges: there may be challenges when collating customer analytics. To ensure this is seamless, use a platform where all data can be housed in one place. And use an experienced engineer who can solve challenges if they arise.

Success metrics

Deeply understand what customers value in the app and what areas cause friction

Use the information gathered to make changes to the app to provide more value and less friction

Increase app resubscriptions by 20%

• What's next after your user research plan?

Rather than diving straight into the research once your plan is in place, make sure your team validates your research plan. This will help you yield the results you are hoping for.

The plan should engage the relevant stakeholders to get them on board. Some research plans may also need to be approved by a funding body before further steps are taken.

Once all relevant parties are in agreement, the next step is to get started in line with the agreed timeline.

• An effective UX research plan

Good pre-planning helps your UX research meet your goals and pleases your customers.

While it might be tempting to jump into UX research, having a solid plan in place will ensure you take the necessary steps at the right time, you won’t overlook key aspects of research, and all stakeholders are aligned before the research begins.

Ultimately, a good plan can help your team perform effective UX research that benefits those who matter the most––your customers.

What are the key questions for UX research?

The questions you ask in UX research will be unique to your project goals and objectives. Some example UX research questions include:

User questions:  

What are our user’s demographics?

What problems do people seek to solve with our app?

What are our user’s key pain points ?

Satisfaction:

How satisfied are our users with our product offering?

Would our users recommend us to a friend?

Efficiency:

Are our products providing efficiency?

Are our products giving a streamlined user experience?

What is a good UX research process?

A beneficial UX research process is one that ultimately improves the product experience for users. Typically, the process includes:

A specific challenge: rather than researching too generally, understand the challenge or challenges the research is looking to understand better.

Clear goals: have clarity in your UX research goals, otherwise the data will not necessarily benefit the end user.

Relevant methodology: the right research method, which aligns with the goals and overall challenge, will ensure you gather relevant data.

Deep analysis: once you have amassed your data, analyze it to ensure insights can be found and acted upon.

What are the 5 stages of UX research?

There are five core steps in UX research:

Setting goals

Selecting participants

Choosing a relevant research method

Data analysis

Reporting on and sharing the results with stakeholders

How do you plan a UX research roadmap?

A UX research roadmap helps to keep a team on track when working toward the overarching goals and objectives.

When creating a UX research roadmap, it’s helpful to:

Establish the strategy: that’s the challenge you’re looking to solve and the goals you’ve set.

Choose an effective tool: a tool for tracking the entire project—not just timings, but all the key steps—can save time and act as a source of truth for all parties to reference.

Define key check-in points: to keep a team on track and working toward the key goals, it’s essential to have check-ins. This will help establish progress across different members of the team and provide a chance to change tack if needed.

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Detailed Guide On Developing UX Research Plan

When you decide to travel to a country you’ve never visited before, you’ll probably start with a plan. You need to check the price of the tickets, transfer options, find somewhere to stay and what places to visit, and probably learn some basic phrases in the local language just in case. Without planning, there’s a chance that your trip will turn into a real challenge, and you won’t enjoy it at all.

The same goes for UX research – without a clear plan, you’ll waste time and money and won’t be able to align your business goals with a research strategy. Think about UX research as the starting point of your product development, and always start with a problem, never an idea. When you understand what issues users have, you can come up with a solution more easily.

At IntelliSoft, creating UX research plans has been one of our main tasks for more than 16 years of working with clients, so we know how nuanced this process is. Fortunately, this experience now allows us to guide our clients through the process of UX research and help them build a base for their future products.

If you want to learn more about research planning and how to become a master in it, keep on reading.

Table of Contents

What is a UX research plan?

Planning ahead is the key to conducting usability testing or user research. A research plan is a detailed description of the steps you will take during your UX research. Think of it as a roadmap and guide that helps you conduct research easier and faster because you have everything outlined in front of you in a document.

A UX research plan usually includes details about the methodology of the research, types of studies, and information about the timing, scope, and respondents.

Don’t confuse a UX research plan with a strategy – they are two separate things. A strategy contains goals, expectations, vision, and business goals, while a plan explains how a team will achieve those goals. A strategy is a guide, but a plan is what helps put it into action.

When to use UX research plans

Research plans are useful if you want to have a clear outline of your project scope and know what steps to follow. It also helps teams answer questions regarding customers’ needs and who the target audience is. Moreover, it helps companies identify whether their current design works for customers or needs to be altered somehow.

A detailed plan also helps researchers to:

• Clarify ideas, research approaches, and issues that need to be solved
• Identify what works for stakeholders
• Keep stakeholders invested in the research results

With a plan, there’s less chance that everyone will switch the research goal in the middle by mistake, or get lost in all the details. Moreover, plans allow researchers to ensure that all set goals will be met in the most efficient way and according to the timeline.

What are the benefits of having a UX research plan?

You can’t start any research without having clear goals in mind, so having a UX research plan is incredibly beneficial for your product’s success and your business as a whole. Let’s take a look at the main benefits of creating a detailed plan.

Helping you stay focused on the goals

Setting goals is one of the primary aspects of creating a research plan. You need to know what you’re moving towards and how you’ll get there. A research plan helps you stay focused on those goals and not get distracted. When you have goals outlined in a document, your entire team is constantly reminded of the end goal and works towards it. With a clear plan, all your goals become measurable rather than vague and unachievable. Moreover, you can turn it into a UX research plan template and reuse it for future projects to save time.

Engaging stakeholders in the process

A written plan is an awesome way to engage your stakeholders in the project and ensure that they are on the same page regarding the timeline, scope, and goals before you start working. When you align all the details of your research in one document, updating stakeholders on the progress of your project and the achieved goals is a piece of cake. Your stakeholders need to see your achievements and that your project is going somewhere, so a research plan will help you keep them invested.

Keeping track of the results

You can’t keep track of your UX research results in your head because it will explode. A plan will serve as a handy roadmap of everything that has already been done and what’s in the process, keeping all data in one place and structuring it efficiently. You also need this plan to monitor your progress or see what areas require improvement.

Save time by avoiding rework

If you don’t have a clear plan, the chances are you’ll have to redo certain tasks, fix usability issues, and waste a lot of time. With a plan, you can make changes during the design or prototyping phase, which is far less expensive and time-consuming. Once you launch your product, making even small alterations can cost you a fortune and affect the usability of the product. Moreover, when your team has a plan in front of them, they know what direction to take in their research, so it positively influences the use of resources.

What should a UX research plan include?

Your plan is a detailed guide that will help you follow the steps you need to go through during research, and ensure that your study is more effective. This is what a plan should include:

• Background information about the project, reasons for the study, and information about internal stakeholders
• Research goals and what the team wants to learn
• Data about research participants, who they are, sample size, and how people will be recruited
• Research methodology , the way the research is conducted, and explanation of why you chose the specific test methods
• An interview guide/template and list of questions
• A list of expectations , including deliverables, type of results, and timing
• Resources that can help the team, such as scripts, previous studies, etc
• The test set up and/or guidelines such as screening questions, scenarios, and duration of pilot tests
• When and how the results will be presented
• Estimations about costs or requests to go over budget

How to create a UX research plan

Now that you know exactly why you need a research plan, it’s time to explain all the hows. Here is a detailed guide on how to create a plan that you can later use as a UX research plan template.

1. Define the problem statement

You need to start with the problem. Identify what exactly you want to solve and what you want to achieve with your research. Don’t do it by yourself, though. You can sit with the stakeholders and brainstorm, looking at the problem space. You can also perform team sessions, analyze customer feedback, or interview your stakeholders to better understand what issues might need solving. The problem statement is all about defining the research scope and understanding the deliverables and end goals.

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2. Identify your objectives

After you have identified the issue, move on to identifying the objectives. The research objectives should align with the UX strategy and your business goals as well as meet the targets you have set for the research. Your plan should include information about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you expect from the UX research.

These are the research plan example objectives:

• Improve customer loyalty
• Discover what technology your competitors are using
• Prioritize new features and learn how people use them
• Understand why people spend a specific amount of time on your website and (don’t) return to your web page/app
• Learn when people interact most with your web page/product

If you don’t set valuable objectives, you can suffer from scope creep and let your stakeholders ask any types of questions they want, leading your research in a wrong direction. When you set objectives, they influence the type of questions asked, giving your research more focus.

To help you identify the objectives, ask yourself and your research team these questions:

• What do you plan to do with this information?
• What decisions will it influence?
• How are you going to use these insights?

3. Involve stakeholders

It is essential that you involve stakeholders at the earliest stages of plan creation. Your goal should be to ensure that everyone is on the same page about the goals of the research. Moreover, involving stakeholders helps you gather more context, make adjustments based on their feedback, and focus on what matters the most to them.

Identify key stakeholders and present the plan to them, aligning the scope of the research and letting them know when and how you will present the research findings. Moreover, this step helps you broaden your vision and take into account stakeholders’ opinions on the product. Listen to what they have to say, analyze this information, and use it to your benefit. Your stakeholders should be participants, not just viewers.

4. Choose the research method

There are numerous research methods to choose from, but you need to go back to your research goals first. The method of research will also depend on the stage of product development, your resources, constraints, and the timeline of the project. You can also mix different research methods to get a clearer picture of the issues you need to solve.

For example, performing user interviews or field studies is a great way to generate new insights about your target audience at the early stages of the design process. If you have already created a new design and want to see how people use it, you can run usability tests and gather feedback.

Let’s look at the list of UX research methods you should consider:

• Five-second testing: It helps you gather insights about what information users take away and what their impression is within the first five seconds of viewing the design. The participants view the design for five seconds and then answer some questions, usually about the purpose of the page, the main elements that a person can recall, or whether the design looks trustworthy.
• User interviews: This is a fast and easy way to gather user feedback and learn about users’ perceptions of your design. You need to set a goal for the interview, prepare a list of questions, and ask follow-up questions based on your research goals.
• Surveys: Surveys allow you to collect both qualitative and quantitative insights from users. They should be conducted across all customer journey stages to identify what is blocking users from progress.
• Tree testing: This research method is used to evaluate the hierarchy and findability of topics in a website/app. It consists of category or text labels that are organized hierarchically. The goal of this method is to answer the question of whether the user can easily find what they are looking for. It also helps identify gaps in navigation, see whether the content is grouped logically, and identify how easily users can access specific functionalities.
• Field studies: When using this research method, you observe people in their natural environment to gather insights about their behavior, obstacles, preferences, and so on. This method helps identify how digital products or services can be better integrated into the daily lives of users.
• Card sorting: Card sorting helps you see how users categorize information, making your UX more user-oriented and competitive. During card sorting, people are asked to group labels according to the criteria that make more sense to them. As a result, you can learn more about peoples’ domain knowledge and meet their user expectations with your app/website design.
• Diary studies: Diary research is used to collect qualitative data from users’ diaries where they collect their thoughts and feelings while using the product. Users should report data during an extended period of time, allowing you to understand the user experience better and what influences it. This research method functions as a window into the real way people interact with the product.

5. Recruit participants

Your plan should always include data about the participants and the way you will recruit them. You should identify who your perfect candidate for the research is by revisiting your goals and the list of questions you need answering. Build a target user persona based on this information, including the demographics and use cases.

These are the questions you need to answer during this step:

• Do you already have a user base you can collect information from?
• What is your recruiting budget?
• Is there a need to hire external participants?
• How many users do you need to interact with?

You should have several target personas, so keep that in mind when recruiting participants. This means that you should recruit people who are your target base and those who aren’t, but will still interact with the product. Moreover, if you create an app for different devices and OSs, recruit people for testing it, too. Some participants will use your app on iPhones, while the other group will test it on Android phones.

Always reward your participants for their time and effort. That’s why you need to plan your budget ahead and take into account this spending. If your budget is limited, run moderated or unmoderated research.

6. Prepare the brief

The next step is preparing the brief for your research session. The type of brief will depend on your research method, but if you choose to conduct user interviews, focus groups, or field studies, you need to outline the questions you will ask and create a script.

Your script should cover the following:

• Introduction: A message you will say to the participants before the session. This will help you start the conversation, set the tone for the meeting, and explain the purpose of the research.
• Interview questions: Always include the list of questions you will be asking. You can include pre-planned questions or test tasks for your participants to perform.
• Outro message: Finally, you should inform your participants about the next steps, ask if they are open to future research, and thank them for their time.

7. Establish the timeline

Even though it’s challenging to estimate objectively how long the project will take, it is essential to determine an approximate timeline at least. You should set deadlines for the project and findings review and present this timeline to the stakeholders. Moreover, this step will allow you to manage their expectations better. You can also add milestones to indicate your progress and see how much time each activity takes.

8. Decide how you’ll present your findings

Presenting your findings to the team during UX research is one of the key steps. The format of the presentation matters because you should present the findings in a concise and easy way so that everyone understands how the research will influence the design and development of the product.

You can present your findings in the following ways:

• A PDF report (either physical or digital) with key takeaways and statistics
• A digital whiteboard
• An interactive online report
• A presentation with information about the results

UX research plan template

If you want to create plans quickly, you can either use an existing UX research plan template or turn your previous plan into one. Either way, a UX research plan template should consist of the following:

1. Background

This first section should include information on why you decided to initiate this research. Think of it as a brief explanation for anyone wondering why you’re doing this.

You can break this section down into 3 paragraphs:

1 – What led to the research? What needs to be explored? 2 – What has already been done prior to this research? 3 – What insights will this research bring? How will this data be used and what decision can be made based on it?

2. Objectives

Your plan should cover two types of data: business/product objectives and KPIs, and research success criteria.

The business/product objectives and KPIs section should cover information about what your stakeholders/teams are trying to achieve. Some of the objectives might include customer loyalty, revenue growth, customer growth, or efficiency.

The research success criteria usually consist of the following:

• What qualitative and quantitative data about the users will be collected?
• What documents should be created?
• What decisions should be made with the insights generated during the research?

3. Research methods

Next, you should list all research methods you will use, both primary and secondary. You should also include brief explanations of each method for your stakeholders if they are not familiar with some of them.

4. Research scope & focus areas

In this section, write down approximately 6 topics of questions (can be less) and rank them by importance. Next, design focus components that include interface qualities. Finally, include primary user scenarios. All this will help identify the research scope and not get overwhelmed while collecting information.

5. Research participant profiles

Include information about user segments, where and when you will recruit them, and information about the criteria used to screen them.

6. Appendix

This is the final part of the plan. It should include the information discussed prior to creating the research plan. For example:

• Highlights of meeting notes
• Initial hypotheses
• User ecosystem map

A UX research plan is what lets you breathe out and be sure that the research process will go smoothly and without unpredictable issues. Once you have the plan in front of you, you know what to focus on, how to talk to the stakeholders, and manage your team. It’s one of the easiest ways to align everyone’s expectations, gather feedback, and ensure that everyone knows exactly what to do during the research. If you have never created research project templates and need guidance, Intellisoft is there to help, just contact us .

What’s the difference between a UX research plan and a UX research strategy?

The plan and strategy cover different levels of scope and detail. A plan is a document that guides UX research projects, while a UX research strategy outlines more high-level goals, expectations, and the demographics of the discovery.

What should you include in a user research plan?

Here’s what you should include in your UX plan:Problem statement Background information Research goals Data about research participants Research methodology An interview guide A list of expectations Resources The test set up Estimations about costs

How to write a research plan for UX design?

The first thing you need to do is create a problem statement and outline your objectives. Then, you choose the research method or several methods, recruit participants, brief them, and establish a timeline for the project.

What are the 7 elements of the UX plan?

The 7 elements of a plan includeProject background Research Goals Research Questions Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Methodology Participants Script

What are the four key things to include in your research plan?

You should answer these 4 questions: What do you intend to do? Why is the work important? What has already been done? How are you going to do the work?

What are the six 6 steps in implementing the research plan?

The 6 key steps are: Identify the opportunity Develop a plan Collect the data Analyze the data Present the results Incorporate findings

What is a UX research brief?

A brief is a document that outlines your research goals, important milestones and dates, key contributors, and timelines. It can also cover budget information, recruitment details, and access to past research.

What are UX research goals?

UX research goals are the things you want to achieve with your research, and the reason why you’re conducting your research. The goals are the driving force of the research and every task you assign to the team.

What are the UX research deliverables?

UX research deliverables are the tangible outputs and documentation that result from conducting user experience research. Common UX research deliverables include a research plan, a user recruitment screener, a discussion guide, user interviews, personas, user journey maps, wireframes and prototypes, and actionable insights.

How do you write a good UX research objective?

To write a good UX research objective, you first need to clearly identify the purpose and goals of the research study. You need to understand the context of the problem you’re addressing, define the scope, identify the research goal, specify the research questions, consider your audience, and keep it focused and realistic.

About Kosta Mitrofanskiy

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UX Research 101: A Complete Guide to User-Centered Design

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How to Create a Solid UX Research Plan in 7 Steps

The importance of user experience is pivotal for your brand’s perception. Hence it is pretty evident that you seek a well-defined UX research plan before starting a project. The plan would ensure everyone is on the same page and clearly define the goals of your project. The idea behind user research is to examine how a system, service, or product is utilized by its users to learn more about their needs, behaviors, and goals. The research is helpful in designing and developing the product to improve its usability and user satisfaction. The plan will clarify that the design choices are based on user insights, resulting in services and products that meet user expectations. So objectives and deliverables should be sorted out before initiation. UX research also lets you learn about your target audience's preferences, requirements, and behaviors. This article will tell you how a well-defined research plan will benefit in better designing a project and what are the essential tips to create a solid user research plan. Let's dig in!

What is a UX Research Plan?

A research plan could be in document or spreadsheet form that serves as an overview and aids in initiating a project. It should be co-created and shared with essential stakeholders to ascertain that everyone on the product team knows what to expect. This means it shouldn't exist in just one person’s head but should be mutually constructed. Being employed at the research project's beginning means that such plans provide a clear-cut summary of the who, when, what, and why. This guarantees that your research remains connected to addressing the initial primary research questions.

What Benefits Can a User Research Plan Bring to Your Team?

The biggest question that arises while making UX research plans is considering perspectives. After all, how can you anticipate what users might require, say or desire? It's crucial to make an effort because random activity rarely results in progress toward your goals. Also, making changes as you proceed with your plan is okay.

Let's pinpoint some of the benefits a UX research plan provides

• Encourages Alignment Such plans are mutually orchestrated. The same objective is defined, and all stakeholders agree to follow procedures leading up to that objective. The plan also sorts issues related to conflicts of interest that could develop later during the project.
• Stakeholders involvement If the plan is unclear, stakeholders are more likely to lack motivation and behave as observers rather than engaged participants in the research. Hence an effective UX research plan can make stakeholders connect properly with the study and its findings.
• UX Goals Set are the Goals achieved A carefully crafted UX research plan will specify the desired results and the milestones that will be used to gauge progress. These serve as a benchmark for evaluating how the plan is developing and determining whether revisions are necessary to keep the plan on track.
• Increased Effectiveness A research plan will aid you in streamlining the procedure for conducting research and eliminate pointless or redundant efforts. This is done by keeping the precise research methodologies and activities to be carried out in check.

Now that you have checked out how an effective UX research plan has many benefits. Let us highlight the components that every UX research plan should have.

How can you tell when to begin a user research project?

Before indulging ourselves, get into the mechanics of making a plan for user research. It's crucial to think about when user research is most beneficial. Ensure you're devoting time to research where it will be most helpful. ‍ Let's discuss the conditions when UX research becomes a priority. It may be time to give UX research priority.

• You need more innovative concepts for features or other projects that address user needs.
• You recently launched a highly successful or unsuccessful product effort. Now you're still determining what lessons may be drawn from the event for further development.
• Your team is divided or needs more information regarding the most pressing user needs.
• When developing a new flow or feature, you might wonder what the perfect user experience would be

It might not be the time for UX research.

• You need more time to refine whatever product aspect you want to study.
• Your existing inquiries about your users are driven more by curiosity than desire.

Conducting user research makes sense if you have a valuable justification to complete the study and establish actionable insights. Let's assume you've given this some thought and are now prepared to begin. Here is the step-by-step guide to creating a solid UX research plan.

What Every UX Research Plan Should Include

“A problem well stated is the problem half solved.”

Highlighting the Problem statement at the beginning of your research plan would deem highly influential during the study. Along with the problem statement, the details of your objectives, technique, brief, and reporting should all be included in your strategy. In addition to assisting you as a researcher, a research plan helps stakeholders align and ensures everyone knows the project's timeframe, objectives, and scope. ‍ Researchers are ensured that they have an established path and structure for their investigations by including these crucial components in a UX research plan. The strategy acts as a road map, directing the research procedure and assisting in generating insightful data.

How to Write a UX Research Plan

There are only so many best ways to develop a UX research plan, as every company is unique. The teams performing in the company could be in charge of achieving various business objectives. ‍ We'll outline the steps to consider when designing your plan in this section.

• Presenting the problem statement.
• Objectives behind the study
• Research Techniques
• List of Participants
• Test Strategy
• Timeline of the procedures
• How will you be presenting your research?

Let's understand all these one by one.

Step 1: Presenting the Problem Statement

As with most plans, you should begin by stating the issue you're trying to tackle in as much detail as possible. The same applies to a UX research plan. Your problem statement must be precise, clear, and provide enough information to the stakeholders. In this way, they can comprehend the study's core issue. ‍ Problem statements do not appear out of thin air. Your customer service team, often dealing with client issues, your customer service team is an excellent place to seek inspiration. Building a solid UX research plan begins with knowing what data is available and what information is still needed. Once you are done presenting your problem statement, It's time to specify your objectives.

Step 2: Objectives behind the study

You will represent a much clearer picture if you define your objectives via

• What you’re doing
• Why you're doing
• What you hope to learn

Every task you give and question you pose to research participants should be motivated by your established objectives. This implies that “being specific” is crucial. You can specify the project scope and the questions you must pose to participants to gather the data you need by setting explicit objectives. Anything and everything becomes a research question if the scope is narrow enough, which is challenging to manage. Begin with a problem statement, and specify your objectives to achieve the goals. Then develop tasks and questions that will ask participants the right questions to elicit the correct information.

Step 3: Research Techniques

Based on the pre-determined objectives, the next step is to select the research methodology to help you reach your stated goals. Broad issues must be addressed before delving into particular research techniques or UX research strategies. What types of UX research are there, then? Although we won't go into great detail here, the following methods are widely used and accepted in research studies.

• Qualitative research methodology
• Quantitative research methodology

Brief difference between qualitative and quantitive research Although qualitative vs. quantitative research may seem intimidating, the ideas are simple. Whether you call it research or something else, most business professionals desire to learn about their customers. First and foremost, it is false to imply that qualitative and quantitative research are incompatible. Even though quantitative research is the approach that receives the most credit, the two complement one another. Together they can provide a more comprehensive understanding of a situation or problem. Both are important for gauging your customers' experiences.

Quantitative Study The process of gathering and interpreting numerical data is known as quantitative research. Presenting data as numbers seeks to identify trends and averages, make forecasts, examine causality, and extrapolate findings to larger groups. Crucially, quantitative research differs from qualitative research in that it uses numbers. This is thus because numbers and statistics are the results of quantitative studies.

Qualitative Study Qualitative data differs from quantitative data in that it focuses on the why and how of human behavior in a particular scenario. It is obtained by examining participants in their natural surroundings. It works particularly well for learning about people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. At UserTesting, contributor observation and interviews are used to get qualitative data.

Step 4: List of Participants

The correct participants (and the appropriate number of them) are one of the most crucial components of a successful UX research plan. The number of participants you should include in your UX study is a topic of discussion. The best answer will depend on the questions you're seeking to answer. You'll require a larger sample size if you're looking for user trend information. This will assist you in establishing quantitative data so you can make a stronger argument to your stakeholders. In addition to participant count, you should consider how closely study participants should resemble your target audience. There are two schools of thought about selecting your participants. Either get super specific or go for a wider reach and general audience. There are, of course, instances in which one will be better suited to your research needs than the other. Hence, You must revisit your established objectives and unanswered questions to determine who your participants should be.

Step 5: Test Strategy

Making a fantastic test strategy requires a certain level of skill. Yes, it can take some getting used to. Test plans can come in various forms, from moderated user interviews to unmoderated usability tests to prototyping. You're in luck since our team has created a user-friendly course for creating test strategies. Benefits of Usability testing For the majority of businesses, user testing is always an essential phase. Following random ideas is preferable to having a solid usability test plan. With a project plan, you can save time and money on practical endeavors. You run the additional risk of releasing a product that needs to meet client demands or expectations. The benefits of developing a usability testing plan are as follows:

• It makes it simpler to incorporate UX testing. Your project team may benefit most from UX research if you know how and when to do it.
• It enables you to get the most out of user research. With thoughtfully organized UX testing, you will obtain the high-quality information required for the success of your project.
• It facilitates and expedites the analysis of UX data. You will find it simpler to analyze the data you gather if you are clear about the objectives you want to pursue.

Step 6: Timeline of the Procedures

Scheduling is essential to negate delays. Yes, making a UX research plan requires determining your study's schedule. Any project must consider the research project's duration and the anticipated release date of the results. Even if it isn't accurate, establishing an approximate schedule will help you control stakeholders' expectations of the procedure and the outcome. A timetable should be easy to create if study techniques and participant numbers have been chosen. How long ought should UX research last? The size of each project determines the duration. Our experience has shown that research often takes between one and five weeks. Think about the following elements while estimating:

• Time required for data collection and analysis
• the number of team members you can have participated in user interviews and other research activities
• time for recruitment
• Considering the human element. People might cancel or show up late for an interview.

Many researchers avoid setting deadlines or scheduling as it can become tricky. But developing a timeline to get a fist of things is always stressed upon.

Step 7: How will you be presenting your research?

The findings of your project will be compelling and implemented throughout the organization if you plan how you'll present them from the beginning. If you establish this understanding immediately, you will successfully engage stakeholders. Ultimately, it's crucial to pick a presentation format appropriate for your main stakeholders for the sake of your UX research plan. It doesn't matter if you communicate the information to stakeholders through a report, a slide deck, or a PowerPoint presentation. You would want to do it in a way that makes them feel at ease and encourages their openness.

Appendix in research plan (Optional)

In this section, you can list any other resources pertinent to your UX study. It might consist of the following:

• Exclusive document links
• Meeting summaries
• Stakeholder feedback

You can record anything that has been discussed before or throughout the UX research study in this section to preserve it all in one easily searchable location.

UX Research Plan should be Ethical

One thing that is integral to any UX research plan is ethical considerations. However, it is much too frequently forgotten in user research plans. When we ask specific individuals to interact with an app and share their experiences, should we pay extra attention to ethics? Whatever your stance, it is always preferable to go overboard regarding ethical considerations than not go far enough. Ethical considerations need to be kept in mind when conceiving the research plan.

• Obtain approval to record or film the procedure.
• Obtain consent to use the data for research (specifically stating if it is required for publication is required)
• Explain the entire UX research process to the participants.

It can be annoying, and many researchers believe it is unnecessary to explain the history of the study, the methodologies, and the study's objective to every participant. However, people must be aware of what they give and receive. Create a Research Participation Agreement (RPA) to secure the ethical issues and save time on justifications. The document is optional to be lengthy or written short.

Key Takeaways

Following these steps will ensure you in creating an effective UX research method. It's well worth your time, even though it may seem tedious. A significant accomplishment that will be recognized and valued by everyone involved. A robust research plan can ensure a solid research project, whether it actively directs your interviews or provides an active framework for organizing your thoughts. So, orchestrate an excellent research plan by signing up for UX courses today.

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How to Create a UX Research Plan in 6 Steps (with Examples!)

Cori Widen currently leads the UX Research team at Lightricks. She worked in the tech industry for 10 years in various product marketing roles before honing in on her passion for understanding the user and transitioning to research.

Get the most value out of your research project from day 1.

If you’re a Product Manager without a user research team, are you out of luck? Absolutely not. Though dedicated researchers are truly the dream (I’m biased, as I lead a team of them myself), a user-centric PM can create and execute a UX research plan that answers some of the most crucial questions about users during the product development and product design process.

I’ll walk you through exactly what to do and how to do it—let’s dive in.

How do you know when it’s time to start a user research project?

Before we get into user research tools and the specifics of how to create a user research plan, it’s important to reflect a little bit about when it’s most helpful to conduct user research. Particularly if you’re not a full-time researcher, you’ll want to make sure that you’re investing time in research where it’s most worthwhile.

Here’s a handy chart to guide your thought process about whether or not it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some research.

Overall, doing user research makes sense when you have a practical reason for doing so and when you have sufficient time to do research and define actionable insights. It also bears noting that skipping user research means running the risk of developing a poorly-designed product .

Now, let’s assume that you’ve put some thought into this and you’re feeling ready to get started. Next is your step-by-step guide for creating a solid user research plan.

Creating a UX Research plan, step-by-step

If you do a quick search, you’ll see that the world is full of many different UX research podcasts , resources, and approaches when it comes to creating a research plan. In my role as a User Research Lead, I’ve found that a short, to-the-point one-pager is the best way to both plan your research in a way that all stakeholders can understand and to leave enough time to, you know, actually do the research. Here are the steps to follow when you go about creating your one-page plan.

Step 1: Align with your team on your research goals 

It’s often tempting to start the conversation about user research with methodology—“we’ll do some interviews” or “we’ll conduct a survey.”  The truth is, though, that you can’t know what methodology to use, or even whether you want to use a quantitative or qualitative methodology, until you work with your team to define your goals. 

Once you’ve defined your goals—in other words, what you want to learn and why—and your whole team is aligned, you’ll be able to start drafting your research plan.

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My Recommendation:

Get together the smallest, most relevant group of colleagues whose work will be directly impacted by your research. Often, this group includes other product managers, the UX or product design team, product marketing managers, and a representative from senior management on the product team.  

Think about what makes sense given your product development workflow and organizational culture and get everyone together.

Consider this meeting a brainstorming meeting where you’ll have the ability to get outside of your own head and hear from other colleagues about what they’d like to learn. Ultimately, since you’re creating the research plan and owning the UX design research process , you’ll decide what makes it in and what doesn’t.

Not only does this brainstorming session with your colleagues give you practical information to include in your research plan, but you’ll find that it’s easier to get buy-in for the research process when your colleagues feel that they’re genuinely involved.

When brainstorming with your team, challenge everyone who puts forward a question about users to explain how answering that question will help them make important product decisions. This is a helpful way to whittle down your research goals to the things that will actually have practical, tangible value in the foreseeable future.

Step 2: Write the Story section of your one-page research plan

Now that you’ve brainstormed with your colleagues, and you have all of the information that motivated you to start planning research in the first place, you’re ready to start drafting your plan. 

The first section of your research plan should be what is called The Story.

The Story is anywhere from 3 to 6 sentences explaining briefly, in words, what you’re doing and why. The goal of this section is to craft a short narrative such that anyone who reads it knows why you’re doing research and what the expected impact of your knowledge will be.

Let’s look at an example to help you get started.  Imagine that your company has a mindfulness app and is planning to build a community feature where people who are interested in mindfulness can interact with each other in a meaningful way.  A sample Story may look something like this:

Story Example

This quarter, the product team is beginning an ambitious project to create a mindfulness community within the app. Our goal is to provide genuine value to our users, and we’ll be using metrics in the realm of conversion rate and community engagement to measure our success.   

Before we begin creating the product roadmap for the community, the team is going to conduct user research in order to learn more about our target audience and the ways in which our future community can best serve them.  This research will allow us to kick off the project by understanding user needs related to the community more in-depth so that we can begin brainstorming product solutions. 

Notice that in the Story section, you’re being fairly general in order to give context and background—in the next section, you’ll write out your concrete research goals.

Step 3: Define and write the Scope section of your research plan

After the story, you’ll create your Scope section, which is the section of the research plan where you’ll define your specific research questions. Simply put, this is where you write out, usually in a bulleted list, what exactly you want to learn from your research.

Continuing with our mindfulness community example, a Scope may look something like this:

Example Scope

• Do members of our target audience currently involve others in their mindfulness practice? Why/why not? How?
• Do members of our target audience currently belong to any communities centered around mindfulness? If yes, what are the primary value propositions of these communities? What are these communities lacking, if anything?
• Do members of our target audience have goals related to mindfulness? If yes, how do they articulate them? What’s challenging about reaching those goals? What helps them work toward their goals?

The scope can be longer or shorter than this example, and you can use the syntax that makes the most sense for your team—but the overall idea is that anyone who reads the Scope section of your UX research plan will know exactly what your research questions are and what type of information you’re looking to learn.

Next up, you’ll use your Story and your Scope to decide which research methodology you’ll be using…

Step 4: Define your research methods and write the Methodology section of your research plan

Once you’ve defined your Scope, you can decide which research methods will best help you to answer the research objectives that you’ve defined. There are a lot of decisions to make here, and you’ll likely be asking yourself questions like:

• Should I be doing qualitative research or quantitative research?
• I’ve done usability testing before, but I’m not sure if that’s relevant to the goals of the research – how do I know?
• How many methods should I use? How many research participants do I need?

These are all great and relevant questions—and it’s certainly true that a hugely important part of the research process is choosing the appropriate methodology. Even the most commonly used methods—interviews, surveys , usability testing, and so on—give very different types of information.  

The good news is that—even if you’re not yet knowledgeable about which UX research methods to use and when—there are a ton of good user experience research resources out there that can give you some guidance.  This guide is a great place to start when it comes to understanding which research techniques will help you with your specific research project. 

To understand more about the number of participants to recruit, or how many research sessions to do,  for each stage of your UX research project, this article does a great job at defining what to take into account.

Once you’ve defined your methodology, write it out in your research plan. Title the section Methodology and include one bullet point for each method – and yes, it’s definitely possible that you’ll use more than one research method in your research project.

Make sure to define the target research participants for each method.

Here is an example of what bullet points under the Methodology section may look like:

• 10 User Interviews {Current power users who have at least 2 sessions per week for the past month}
• 10 User Interviews {Users who use XYZ competitor app at least twice per week}

You can include other relevant details in this section if you think they’re important to state. For example, will each method be conducted in-person or virtual? Do you want to link to your list of interview questions for transparency about what you’ll ask users if you are doing interviews? As long as the core information is here, you can add details that you think your team needs to align on and/or be aware of.

Step 5: Define and write your Timeline and Budget

Ask any user researcher and they’ll tell you that anyone who gets wind of a user research project will immediately want to know how long it’s going to take. At the end of your one-page research plan, give a target date for when your research deliverables will be ready. Simply, this means: when will you have your research insights and product recommendations ready to present to other stakeholders?  

You may want to specifically define your timeline as approximate in your research plan since actually executing research can be somewhat unpredictable. For example, your project timeline may need to be altered depending on how long it takes you to recruit participants, which you can’t always anticipate precisely in advance.

In addition to your Timeline, think about whether it makes sense within your organizational culture to make explicit your Budget for the project in your research plan. If your manager will need to approve your plan and expenses such as paying research participants for their time, it’s a good idea to include it in your plan.

Step 6: Share your research plan for feedback and final alignment

Congratulations! You’re finished with the first draft of your UX research plan. It’s one page, it gives all of the necessary context, and it lays out exactly what you’re going to do and when. Just to recap, your very basic UX research plan template is something like this:

Story : Give the general context for this research

Scope : Give a bulleted list of what you’d like to learn from this study

Methodology : List which research methods you’ll use and with whom

Timeline : Give an approximate timeline for your research and tell everyone when you plan to deliver your results

Budget : If needed, define your budget here for approval

The next and final step is to share the main stakeholders with the draft of your plan. Allow comments, and use your judgment as to which user feedback to incorporate (or not). Once you feel that you and your colleagues are reasonably aligned, you’re done! You have your research plan and you’re ready to start doing your user research project. 

Executing your research and beyond

Whether this is your first time implementing a user research plan or you have some experience, it’s worth taking a little bit of time to reflect on some best practices right before you get started. 

Here are some tips and tricks to keep in mind as you move forward:

• Never Stop Learning: Remember that if you’re unfamiliar with a specific method, there are a ton of online resources. Carve out some time in your calendar to fill in knowledge gaps as needed throughout the research process.
• Over-Communicate: Update your team from time to time as your timeline evolves. It’s inevitable that something won’t go precisely as planned, and that’s usually fine as long as you communicate any timeline changes to the relevant stakeholders.
• Don't Fear Change: I'm not referring to jumping on a hip new UX design trend —I'm talking about the need to pivot when your research isn't going as you hoped. Don’t forget that your research plan can be altered. If you start doing research and realize that you aren’t achieving saturation with your current sample size, or that you need to add an additional research method in order to get the insights that you need—that’s totally fine! Most user researchers experience this from time to time. Do what you need to get the job done.
• Focus on Value: The format of your deliverables depends on your organizational culture but ultimately, everyone wants actionable insights to come from every user research project. Good research is research with practical value, whether it’s delivered as a research report or a presentation. 

User experience research is transformative— lean into it!

It can feel overwhelming to initiate and execute user research projects among all of your other tasks, but hopefully, now that you’ve drafted your one-page plan, you feel that it’s more manageable. Most product and UXR professionals who have leaned into user research and integrated it into the product development process describe it as transformative for themselves, the product, and their team members. It’s invigorating to learn from your users and to use your research findings as a starting point for key product initiatives.

As your user research journey continues, be sure to subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter , which is one of my favorite sources for new and timely advice when it comes to user experience research.

Happy researching!

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How to create a UX research plan

Steven Carr

The concept of research planning can be met with mixed emotions. Some may say that planning delays action. However, a good plan should really do the opposite by providing a clear guide for action and deliverables. In this post, we’ll detail how a well-conceived UX research plan will help streamline your research and foster understanding and engagement from all stakeholders involved.

What is a UX research plan?

A UX research plan can take many forms. It can be a document, spreadsheet, set of slides, or anything else you can imagine as long as it acts as an overview for kicking off the project.

While a UX research plan doesn’t have to be a formal document, it shouldn’t only live in the mind of a single person. Consolidating ideas, milestones, and deliverables together in one, accessible place allows for a guided conversation that has major benefits on the outcomes of a set of research.

What are the benefits of building a UX research plan?

When it comes to user research, it may seem daunting to be too prescriptive when building your UX research plan. After all, how can you account for everything a user might need, say, or want? Nonetheless, it’s important to try, because making progress on your goals is rarely made through random activity. And, there’s nothing wrong with making adjustments as you go. 

Even when faced with uncertainty—often compounded by the everchanging world we live in—effective planning facilitates progress.

The benefits of a UX research plan are numerous, but some include:

• Fosters alignment : Rarely does UX research involve a single stakeholder. With a written UX research plan, you can ensure that all team members involved are on the same page, marching toward agreed-upon goals. Not to mention, a plan allows you to spot conflicting interests before you’re too far down the line.
• Engages stakeholders : An effective UX research plan ensures stakeholders are properly engaged with the study and its results. Without a written plan, there’s a greater chance that stakeholders won’t feel invested and may become observers of the research rather than active participants.
• Ensures UX goals are achieved : A UX research plan should clearly map desired outcomes as well as mileposts to define progress. These provide a standard for assessing how the plan is progressing and if adjustments need to be made to keep the plan on track.

Every organization is different, so the teams within them may be responsible for different business goals. This means that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a UX research plan. 

In this section, we’ll provide an overview of steps to consider when creating your plan.

A well-oiled UX research plan should include:

• A clear problem statement
• Objectives for the research
• The research method(s) needed to execute the research
• An overview of the participants
• A test plan
• How you’ll present your findings

Let’s get started.

1. Craft a clear problem statement

As with most plans, you should start by clearly identifying and stating the problem that you’re trying to solve. A UX research plan is no different. Your problem statement should be clear, specific, and give enough detail that stakeholders understand what the research is trying to solve.

Problem statements don’t just stem from nowhere. Some great sources for inspiration might be your support team which deals with customer issues on a daily basis, customer reviews on your website, or feedback from social media. Understanding what data already exists—and what you still need to know—is a fantastic starting point for building a strong UX research plan. Let's take a closer look at some of the steps involved in creating a great  problem statement:

Defining the problem:

Begin by articulating the issue in a manner that is concise yet comprehensive. A well-crafted problem statement should communicate the essence of the issue succinctly, making it immediately apparent to all stakeholders what the research will address. It’s important that this statement avoids generalities and is rooted in specific user experiences or observed difficulties. For example, instead of saying "improve website navigation," specify "users are struggling to locate the search function on the homepage, which is impacting conversion rates."

Gathering preliminary data:

Before formalizing your problem statement, gather preliminary data to understand the context better. Chat to your customer support team to identify common complaints or challenges users face. Review customer feedback collected through surveys, feedback forms on your website, or direct interactions. Social media platforms can also be a goldmine of user opinions and issues, often providing raw, unfiltered feedback on what users like or struggle with regarding your product or service.

Analyzing existing data:

Analyze the data you’ve gathered to detect patterns or recurring themes. This analysis might reveal that users feel a particular feature is too complicated or that there are barriers to completing a purchase. Such insights help refine your problem statement by focusing on specific user challenges that your research needs to address.

Crafting a detailed problem statement:

With a clear understanding of user challenges, refine your problem statement to reflect these specifics. Ensure it encapsulates the user's perspective, focusing on their experiences and the difficulties they encounter. For instance, if users find an application form daunting due to its length and complexity, your problem statement could be, "Users are abandoning the application form because its length and complex questions create a perception that the process is tedious and time-consuming."

Communicating the significance:

Ensure your problem statement communicates why addressing this issue is crucial for the business or product. Link the problem directly to business outcomes, such as improved user satisfaction, increased sales, or reduced customer churn. This not only highlights the importance of the research but also aligns it with broader business goals, facilitating stakeholder buy-in.

Seeking feedback:

Once you have a draft, share it with key stakeholders—include team members from design, development, marketing, customer service etc. This will help provide new insights, validate the problem’s relevance, and make sure it resonates across all areas of the business. This feedback might prompt revisions that make the statement more inclusives and more robust.

Finalizing the problem statement:

Once you've used that feedback to refine your problem statement, you'll have a well-defined statement that will lead to powerful and useful reseaarch insights. 

Once you’ve put together your problem statement, it’s time to define your objectives.

2. Define your objectives

Think about defining your objectives as telling the story of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what you expect to learn from your  UX research . The objectives you set should be the driving force behind every task you assign and every question that you ask research participants.

This means it’s important to be specific. Setting clear objectives will help you define the project scope and the questions you have to ask participants to get the information you need. If the scope is too broad, anything and everything becomes a research question—which becomes overwhelming to manage.

If you like to think visually, consider this chart.

Avoiding the rabbit hole

A well-defined objective keeps you from falling into the rabbit hole of scope creep. Without specific targets, your project can easily grow unwieldy, trying to cover too much ground and diluting the impact of your findings. To avoid this, break down large goals into smaller, focused tasks that you can tackle effectively. For instance, if improving website navigation is your goal, you could focus specifically on enhancing the visibility of the main menu, reducing clicks to reach key content, or improving search functionality.

Using SMART goals

To make your objectives really work for you, frame them using the SMART criteria—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Here’s how you might apply these to a UX project:

• Specific : Nail down exactly what you want to achieve. Instead of a broad "improve website usability," aim for something like "cut down the time it takes users to complete a purchase by 20%."
• Measurable : Set up ways to measure your success. You could track the average time it takes users to check out before and after you make site improvements.
• Achievable : Keep your objectives realistic, considering the resources and time you have. If user access is limited, opt for in-depth feedback from a smaller user group instead of surface-level input from many.
• Relevant : Tie your objectives to your broader business goals. If increasing online sales is the target, streamlining the checkout process is a no-brainer.
• Time-bound : Put deadlines on your goals to keep the project moving forward. Plan out when you'll conduct phases of research, analysis, and implementation.

Iterative review and adaptation

Objectives aren’t set in stone. As you dive into your research and start gathering data, be ready to tweak and refine your objectives based on what you learn. UX research is inherently iterative, and being flexible allows you to pivot as you uncover new insights or face unexpected challenges. Regularly revisiting your objectives ensures your research stays relevant and aligned with both user needs and business priorities.

By keeping your objectives clear and focused, you make sure that your UX research is effective, impactful, and tightly connected to enhancing user experience. This isn't just about sticking to a plan—it's about making the plan work hard for you, every step of the way.

Start with a problem statement, define the objectives you need to address the problem, then build out tasks and questions that will uncover the necessary information from your participants. 

Once you have a clear understanding of what your problem is and how you’re going to aim to solve it, you’ll need to choose the right research method for your plan. 

3. Selecting the right UX research method

Next, you'll have to choose the research method that will achieve your stated goals—based on the objectives you've already identified. Before we jump into individual research methods, or the tactics used for conducting UX research, there are big-picture questions that need to be addressed first. And that’s: What types of UX research are there?

We won’t dive too deep into this here, but here’s some additional reading that might help you understand the type of research you’ll need to conduct:

• Qualitative vs. quantitative research : Qualitative methods are all about the 'why' behind user behaviors, giving you insights through interviews, observations, and open-ended interactions. Quantitative methods crunch the numbers—you’ll get stats, percentages, and graphs that show what users are doing at scale.
• Attitudinal vs. behavioral research :  Are you looking to find out what users say they do or what they actually do? Attitudinal research focuses on opinions, preferences, and beliefs, often gathered through surveys or interviews. Behavioral research, on the other hand, observes the real actions users take, often in usability tests or through analytics.
• Generative vs. evaluation research : Starting fresh and need ideas? Generative research helps you understand problems and identify new opportunities, perfect when you’re at the drawing board. Evaluation research is your go-to when you’ve got something to test, checking if your designs are hitting the mark or missing it by a mile.

Choosing a method that fits

Now that you’ve got a lay of the land, it’s time to match your research method to your project goals. Here’s how you can ensure the method you pick will deliver the goods:

• Match the method to your objective : If your goal is to understand how users feel about a new feature, a survey might give you broad quantitative data, but in-depth interviews could unveil deeper insights about their feelings and reactions.
• Consider your resources : Some methods, like extensive field studies, can be resource-heavy. Have a think about what’s realistic in terms of time, budget, and available tools.
• Think about the outcome : What kind of data do you need at the end? Numbers that prove a point, or stories that give you direction? Choose a method that aligns with the kind of evidence that will best inform your design decisions.

Mix and match for best results

Often, no single method will tell the whole story. Consider using a mix of approaches to get both the depth and breadth of insights you need. For instance, you might start with a survey to get a general sense of user satisfaction and follow up with interviews to dive deeper into specific issues highlighted by the survey results.Once you understand the types of results you're trying to achieve, make sure that the research method you choose delivers the evidence you need to make informed decisions.

Related reading:  The UX research methodology guidebook

4. Select your participants

One of the most important factors that contribute to a successful UX research plan lies in choosing the right participants (and the right number of them). There’s some debate out there over how many participants you should include in UX research, and the right answer depends on what you’re trying to learn.

Figuring out the right number of participants Let’s unpack this a bit:

• The rule of five : Research shows that five test participants will  uncover 85% of a product’s usability issues . This is particularly handy when you’re looking to iron out kinks in a prototype or an existing product.
• Looking for trends? Go bigger : If your mission is to catch broader user trends or get data that you can really hang your hat on, you’ll need a bigger crowd. This means pulling in more folks to get that robust quantitative data that’ll make your stakeholders sit up and listen.

Selecting the right participants is more than just filling seats—it’s about ensuring that every voice you hear from can directly contribute to richer, more actionable insights. So take your time, think it through, and choose wisely to make your UX research as impactful as possible.

Ensuring a good fit

Finally, make sure they’re a good fit for what you’re trying to learn:

• Screen effectively : Develop screening surveys or questions that help you verify that potential participants really do match the profile you’re looking for.
• Keep it balanced : Try to maintain a balance in your participant group to avoid skewing your data. If you’re only hearing from one type of user, you might miss out on insights that could be critical for another segment of your audience.

Recruiting the right participants

Finding these people and convincing them to take part in your study is next on the agenda. Here are a few strategies:

• Leverage existing data : Start with what you know. Use your app’s analytics to identify users who fit your criteria, or sift through customer service logs to find people who’ve faced relevant issues.
• Consider your reach : Depending on your resources and the scale of your project, think about how you’ll reach out to these potential participants. Email blasts, social media calls, or leveraging a professional recruiting service can all be effective, depending on your needs and budget.

Matching participants to your target audience

But it’s not just about numbers. Who these people are matters a ton. Here’s how to get the right mix:

• Broad vs. specific : You’ve got two paths here. Either you go broad, casting a wide net to gather a diverse range of insights across a general demographic, which is great for more exploratory or generative research. Or, you get laser-focused, targeting a very specific group of users who represent your core audience or a particular user scenario. This approach is fantastic when your research goals are tightly defined.
• Align with your objectives : Circle back to what you’re aiming to learn. If your goal is to improve the check-out process for a shopping app, your best bet is to zero in on users who’ve abandoned their cart recently. That’s your goldmine for insights.

Defining who your participants should be will require you to go back to the goals you’ve set and the questions that need answering.

5. Build your test plan

There's a certain art to crafting a great test plan. Admittedly, it can take a bit of practice. From moderated  user interviews  to unmoderated usability tests to prototyping—test plans can take many different shapes and sizes. Lucky for you, our education and research teams have come together to build out this outstanding resource for building test plans.

Check out all of our articles on the UserTesting Knowledgebase for building a  test plan . 

6. Lock in a timeline

Establishing your research project’s timeline is an essential step in creating a UX research plan. Estimating how long the research project will take place and when the findings could be expected are necessary considerations in any project.

Even if not exact, determining an approximate timeline (e.g., 2-3 weeks) will enable you to manage stakeholders’ expectations of the process and the results.

Let’s dive into how to effectively map out the time your research will take and when you can expect to roll out the findings.

Planning your research timeline

Here’s how you can approach it:

• Start with the end in mind : Think about when you need the results and work backward from there. Are there product development deadlines or marketing launches that your research needs to feed into? Pin these dates down first.
• Break it down : Segment your research into phases like planning, recruitment, execution, analysis, and presentation of findings. Assign realistic time frames to each phase based on the complexity of the tasks involved.

Be realistic and flexible

While it’s great to have a timeline, it’s also important to stay flexible:

• Allow for buffers : Research can be unpredictable. Participants might cancel, or you might stumble upon a vein of insights that requires deeper exploration. Build in buffer days to accommodate these uncertainties without throwing off your entire schedule.
• Continuous updates : Keep your stakeholders in the loop with regular updates. If timelines shift, communicate this early and clearly, explaining the reasons and the new expected dates.

Managing expectations

An accurate timeline helps in setting and managing expectations:

• Transparent scheduling : Share your timeline with everyone involved in the project. This transparency helps manage expectations and allows team members to align their schedules and responsibilities accordingly.
• Prepare for adjustments : Be prepared to adjust your timeline based on feedback from interim findings or logistical hiccups. This flexibility can be crucial for maintaining the quality and relevance of your research.

Locking in a timeline isn’t just about sticking to dates. It’s about creating a structured approach to your research that allows for informed planning, anticipates adjustments, and aligns with the broader goals of your project. By taking the time to map out each phase and communicate this effectively, you ensure that your UX research delivers valuable insights in a timely and efficient manner.

7. Present the results

Finally, determining how you’ll present the findings of your project from the start ensures they will be impactful and implemented across the organization. Setting this understanding from the beginning will also determine if all of your stakeholders have been properly identified. It can be frustrating to find out that you need to  present to an executive  halfway through a project.

Ultimately, for the purpose of your UX research plan, it’s important to choose a presentation medium that’s appropriate for your key stakeholders. Perhaps it’s a UX research report , a set of slides, or even a Jira ticket for your product team; the point is, you want to deliver the information to stakeholders in a way they’re comfortable with—and will be most receptive to.

Using a UX research plan template

So now you’ve built a UX research plan from scratch. While it may seem like an arduous process, we can assure you that it’s well worth your time. Being able to confidently embark on a project with clear deliverables, milestones, stakeholder buy-in, and a plan for presenting results is a major feat—one that will be recognized and appreciated by all of those involved.

Nevertheless, time is money. So once you’ve gone through an entire UX research project, we encourage you to hold a retrospective meeting to identify all the ways you could improve the process. Once you uncover what went well and what can be improved, turn your UX research plan into a template for you and your peers to leverage within your organization. 

Need some inspiration for your next UX research project? Check out our list of curated  test templates  to get you started.

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The User Research and Insights Tool for Design and Product Teams

How to Create a UX Research Plan [Free Template Inside]

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”. While Benjamin Franklin wasn’t talking about UX research, the statement applies. 

Many researchers fail to plan because they assume they understand user research well enough to create a budget, timeline, process, and more. They conveniently forget that planning is the cornerstone of a successful project and expertise is never enough to see anything through. 

Creating a UX research plan allows you to leverage multiple perspectives from project stakeholders and teammates.  Stakeholders can help you understand where techniques might not work, timelines may be too tight, or budget insufficient to execute a research project. 

Research planning prevents surprises that may come up along the way. It reduces cost and helps you determine how each step of the UX research will be executed to ensure success.

In this guide, we’ll lead you through the steps of creating a UX research plan. You’ll also get a free template so you can create your first research plan immediately.

What Is UX Research?

UX research is the study of user interaction to obtain insights that improve the design process. UX researchers study a group of target users to collect and analyze data that leads to user-friendly products. 

The primary goal of UX research is to build products for the end-user based on real data not what you think the user wants. When you conduct UX research, you can give your audience the best solutions because you know what they need.

As a UX researcher, you could begin with qualitative research methods to collect data and understand the user’s needs and motivation. Next, you use quantitative measures such as usability testing to test your hypothesis and results.

What Is a UX Research Plan?

A UX research plan is a document that sets expectations and highlights the most important information you need to communicate with stakeholders in a research project. It is usually a collaboration between all stakeholders to ensure it meets the goals and objectives you’ve laid out.

A user research plan acts as a starting point to help you write easily and keep your team focused on the who, what, why, and when of a UX research project.

What Are the Benefits of Planning User Research?

Show Project Sponsors and Senior Executives the ROI of Your Research

In most scenarios, project sponsors do not care about the process or the user research techniques you choose. They want to know what your research will achieve and how much it will cost to execute. A brief research plan lays out the objective of the research and how it will benefit product design.

Engage Stakeholders

A written research plan is also a great way to engage stakeholders and ensure they’re involved with the research project and the results. You’ll also be leveraging the experience of team members who’ve conducted similar research in the past.

Keeps You Accountable

When you write something down, it looks different from what you pictured in your head. It eliminates the risk of missing steps in the process, going above budget, or losing sight of your research objectives. Think of a research plan as a list of checkpoints to make sure you’ve achieved each goal in your research.

Easier to Plug Holes in Your Process

A research plan helps you to learn what works or doesn’t work and questions you need to be asking. As you write down your plan and process, you can find holes and improve your research plan. It makes it easier to focus and prepare for the study.

How to Create a User Research Plan? 

1. Write the Background of the Research

The background section should be brief. Tell stakeholders and clients about the recent history of the project, why you’re conducting the research, and what you’re going to accomplish. In a few sentences (no more than five lines of text), everyone should understand the purpose of the study.

The background section should also include the problem statement. A few ways to identify the problem statement include interviews with stakeholders, a deep analysis of the current data, or team sessions to brainstorm.

2. What Are the Objectives of the Research?

You must have an objective before getting in a room with users. The research objective drives all the research questions you’ll be asking participants during the user interview process.

Why are you conducting user research? What problems do you hope to solve? What is the end goal after completing the research?

Getting answers to these questions should be a collaborative effort between stakeholders and team members involved in the project.

3. Define Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders that will benefit from the results? Research project stakeholders could be employees in sales, customer support, C-level executives, or product teams.

When you’ve listed everyone you think should be involved, set up a meeting to brainstorm ideas and collect input. It’s easier to deliver the right insights when you’re involving the right stakeholders in your project.

4 . Study Existing Solutions

Have any studies been done on this topic in the past? Perhaps your competitors or in-house teammates have published previous findings that will work as the basis of your research? The answers will help you determine where to begin.

If your team uses Aurelius as a research repository , you’ll be able to easily search through past research projects to quickly find information and make Cross-Project Insights and recommendations from past research with your current project.

5. Recruit Participants

After defining the problem and objectives, it’s time to create a participant profile. Choosing the right participants is one of the most crucial parts of a project. 

When creating participant profiles start with characteristics such as occupation, age group, geography, and level of engagement with the product. Next, determine the number of participants to recruit for each UX research method. 

We advise internal collaboration with all stakeholders such as sales, marketing, and customer support teams to brainstorm a hypothesis on who your ideal user is. Analyze your competitors to see what type of users they have in their audience.

If you have a database, consider looking inwards to customers who already know your product. If you don’t, use a research recruitment platform to find participants. 

When recruiting externally, use a screener to hone in on your ideal participant. Is there a particular behavior you’re looking for? A qualifying action they must have taken within a specific timeframe? Do they need to be a certain age? Screeners ensure you’re bringing in the right users for your research.

6. Establish KPIs and Metrics of Success

How will success be determined?  What criteria will you use to check milestone achievements? Examples of success metrics include:

• Time on task
• Specific information about the user 
• Decisions that the collected data will help you make 
• Statistics you intend to create

7. Outline Scope and Focus of Research

Outlining the focus areas leads to efficient research planning. The deeper you’re able to hone in on the specific information you want to collect from the research, the more clarity you’ll have. 

8. Write Research Questions

This is the section where you’ll write down the research questions to ask during user interviews. Start by examining what you already know about the problem such as insights from previous research . Find the knowledge gaps and create questions to answer them.

When brainstorming research questions, it’s important to determine if the goal is to create a new design or to fix an existing design. 

If your objective is to build the right design, then your questions will focus on observing user behavior and leveraging mental models.

If the goal is to fix an existing design, then you’ll ask questions about usability to improve the current design. Whatever the goal is, aim for open-ended questions.

Here’s a comprehensive list of questions to ask when conducting UX research interviews

9. Determine Your Budget 

Budget plays a role in the amount of data you gather and how you conduct research. More budget equals flexibility to outsource to a dedicated recruitment service, run paid campaigns to attract more people, or even increase the incentives for participants.

More money also makes it easier to choose the right UX research methods that translate into quality insight. Conversely, with a small budget, you have to think of ways to stretch your funds such as using zoom over in-person meetings, limiting the number of research participants, or choosing inexpensive research techniques.

10. Establish Project Timeline

Having a timeline for executing the research plan lets stakeholders and clients know how long the research will take. There might be different expectations between what you think the timeline should be versus the client’s expectation. 

When establishing a timeline consider the following:

• The scale of the project
• The time needed to collect data for research analysis
• Time for recruiting research participants
• Number of teammates to engage in research activities
• Unforeseen circumstances such as participants showing up late or needing to reschedule for another day

11. Develop Research Protocols

The research protocol is a list of questions and tasks you’ll cover during in-person sessions. It also includes a list of research methods you’ve chosen. 

A common practice is to write down the opening and closing statement of your UX interview. It begins with an explanation of the product, research objectives, and how long each interview session will take. In the end, you thank the participant for their time and answer any questions they might have.

Make sure you get feedback from stakeholders on the research questions as well as the following:

• The duration of each session
• Tasks each research participant will complete during usability testing
• A script to guide each session
• How to record interviews and protect participant data

12. Determine the Research Methods

In this section, you’ll discuss the UX research methods you’ll use during the research and explain why you’ve chosen these techniques.

While there are dozens of research methods to choose from, your choices should be informed by your research questions. Some, like A/B tests and surveys, are suited for quantitative research while others like user interviews and contextual inquiries work best for qualitative research . 

Learn more about how to choose a UX research method plus options to choose from during user research

13. Choose UX Research Tools 

Similar to research protocols, the research tools you choose should be based on your research objectives and questions.

When choosing UX research tools, consider the following:

• Are you recruiting participants internally from your database or externally?
• Is it going to be a usability test?
• Will you conduct interviews via video conferencing?
• How will you store and analyze research data ?
• Are you going to A/B test certain elements for conversion?
• Will you conduct surveys to collect mass feedback?

There are different tools that fulfill each of these objectives. For example, you can recruit participants from platforms like User Interviews and Userbrain . You can build a research repository to store data and get insights with Aurelius . Tools like Optimizely and Crazy Egg are great for A/B testing.

Get a comprehensive list of UX research tools to complete each stage of the research process in this article

14. Draw Insights and Present your Research Findings

This is the final stage when creating a UX research plan. The insights will be determined by the goals of the research. Is the goal to improve an existing product or create a new product? Which stakeholders will need access to the result?

Make sure you document your process and include details about setbacks you faced along the way, methodologies used, and session materials. This way, your team can have an overview to look back on when conducting the next research project.

To get insight from your research data, use Aurelius to analyze dozens of notes, audio/video recordings as well as spreadsheets.

Create a new project in Aurelius, import your data from anywhere, find information quickly with Tags, search for patterns with Keywords, highlight major findings with Key Insights and make suggestions with Recommendations.

Aurelius turns your recommendations and key insights into shareable reports that you can customize as you like. You can share or present your research findings via email, a PDF, or a live link to your report.

Learn More About How Aurelius Can Help You Improve the Research Process 

Asides from having a plan of action for research issues, you must have a plan for working with research participants. 

A few things to do during the first interaction with research participants include:

• Inform users about the background of the research and what they’re signing up for
• Tell them how you plan to store their data
• Ask for permission to record the process
• Ask for permission to use their data for research purposes only
• Share details about the UX research process
• Tell them the methods you’re using to collect data 

If you feel like it’s too much information, remember that it’s better to overshare than to not give sufficient information.

Use a Template to Streamline UX Research Planning

Templates help you create research plans quickly. Think of it as a starting point for your research project. It includes all the essential elements you need to conduct research and communicate your findings.

Go ahead and download our free UX research plan template. Then, use the tips above to fill out the template.

Download our free UX research plan template

UX Research Plan Template

Create a strong business case for UX research and streamline your process with the UX research plan template.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the UX Research Plan Template

A UX research plan, also known as a user research plan, is a brief reference document that outlines your research project’s goals, key contributors, important dates, and timelines.

Think of your research plan as a UX-focused  kick-off document  for your project. The plan offers an overview of the research initiative, encourages well-defined and agreed-upon goals, and acts as a written guarantee that the research will meet these goals.

What is a UX research plan?

When conducting usability testing or user research with a goal in mind, researchers need to plan. UX researchers often present their findings to stakeholders, like product managers, developers, marketers, and executives, to act on those results.

You should present your UX research plan in plain language with a single document. Keep your findings clear, collaborative, easily accessed, and digestible to get buy-in for your research and your team’s next steps.

A user research plan typically has up to seven segments:

Project background: Reasons for the study and internal stakeholders involved.

Research goals and objectives: What your teams want to learn, or their ideal research outcome.

Research participants: Who they are and how they’ll be recruited.

Method: How you conducted research, and any other information about how the research will be conducted.

Guides: An interview guide or cheat sheet of instructions and questions to follow during the session.

Duration: A rough timeline of how long the research will take and when the team can review the report.

Other helpful information: Additional resources for your team, such as previous studies, scripts, or results, can inform this new round of research.

Research plans keep your team focused on outcomes rather than getting lost in the details or changing the research goal midway through the project. By the end of the project, UX researchers should feel confident that their questions were answered and presented in both the plan and actual research.

When to use UX research plans

UX research plans are useful for teams who need to decide on  questions such as:

What do our customers need? Who is our target persona?

Does the proposed or current design work well for our customers? How can we make it better?

Planning UX research also gives researchers an opportunity to:

Decide what works for your stakeholders, especially the questions they’re trying to answer.

Engage stakeholders and keep them invested in your research results.

Clarify your ideas, problems to be solved, and research approaches.

Treat your research plan as a blueprint for aligning expectations, asking for feedback, or generating enthusiasm and support for increasing the value of user research in your organization.

Create your own UX research plan template

Making your own UX research plans is easy, and Miro is the perfect tool to create and share them. Get started by selecting the UX research plan template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

Give your team or stakeholders a quick project introduction.  You can hop on a video chat with up to 25 team members and remind everyone what you’re trying to achieve. Remember that research proves its value when it satisfies a single objective rather than many. If you seem to have lots of different goals or objectives, avoid overreaching and start fresh: what’s the one customer problem and business problem you’re trying to solve?

Define the user and business problems your research needs to solve.  The default sticky notes are simply for inspiration — feel free to edit each of these to fix your own context. If you want your team to focus on this area instead of skipping ahead, you can select the “problem” frame and  click the “hide frame” (closed eye) icon  that appears in the frame’s menu.

Define your research goals.  Ask your team to brainstorm their top three research goals or priorities. Remember that the best research sessions are chasing a single objective, so out of the two to three you note down, ask your team to vote for their preferences. Try  Miro’s Voting Plugin  to help your team reach a decision.

Draft your research questions.  Pick three to five questions with your team or stakeholders that are most important to your research. Aim for no more than 10. The more focused your questions, the more focused your research will be.

Link to useful supporting information as needed.  Keep this plan to the point in order to get buy-in. For stakeholders who need more detail, there may be other useful data to link to. If you have previous UX research results or relevant studies, link to them on your Miro Board. You can also import survey data, embed  tables and charts , or link sticky notes  to external sources .

Dive even deeper into how to conduct UX research – and see examples – in our expert guide to  user research .

Why should you use the UX Research Template?

Centralized planning: Centralize your UX research plans in one shared space. This ensures that all relevant information, including research objectives, methodologies, and timelines, is easily accessible in one place, reducing the risk of scattered or lost documentation.

Collaborative research: Multiple stakeholders, including designers, researchers, and product managers, can collaborate on your UX research plan template simultaneously, fostering a more inclusive and collaborative approach to research planning.

Visual representation of research steps: Create diagrams, flowcharts, and visual representations of the research process. This visual mapping helps teams better understand the sequence of research activities, identify dependencies, and effectively communicate the overall research strategy.

Iterative refinement: Provide feedback, comments, and suggestions directly on the UX research plan template. Promote continuous improvement, allowing the team to refine the research plan based on insights and changing project requirements.

Integration with user flows and personas: Integrate with other templates, such as user flows and persona maps. By connecting these elements, teams can create a holistic view of the user experience journey. This integration helps align research activities with the overall UX strategy and ensures a more cohesive and user-centric product design.

How can I ensure that a UX Research Plan remains effective?

Regularly review and update the research plan as project requirements evolve. It's crucial to stay flexible and adapt the plan based on the findings and changing project needs.

Get started with this template right now.

Meeting Organizer Template

Works best for:.

Meetings, Workshops, Project Planning

When it comes to ideas generated during a meeting, you want quantity AND quality. So why choose? Our meeting organizer template will maximize your meeting’s chances of yielding lots of great ideas. It will give you a simple, efficient way to design any activity (including meetings and daily planning) and make sure remote teammates know just what the meeting aims to accomplish. And you can give your meeting organizer power by connecting Miro to your favorite apps and services: Atlassian’s JIRA, Google Drive, Slack, Trello, DropBox and OneDrive.

Service Blueprint to the Metaverse

Research & Design

Explore the future of service design with the Service Blueprint to the Metaverse. This template helps you map out service experiences within virtual environments. Use it to visualize interactions, identify opportunities, and plan seamless service delivery in the metaverse. Ideal for teams looking to innovate and expand their services into virtual and augmented reality spaces, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.

App Development Canvas Template

Market Research, Product Management, User Experience

Ever noticed that building a successful app requires lots of players and moving parts? If you’re a project manager, you definitely have. Lucky for you, an app development canvas will let you own and optimize the entire process. It features 18 boxes, each one focusing on a key aspect of app development, giving you a big-picture view. That way you can fine-tune processes and get ahead of potential problems along the way—resulting in a smoother path and a better, tighter product.

UI Flowchart Template

UI, UX, UX Design, Design, Product Design

Our UI Flowchart Template unlocks the potential of seamless design collaboration. Map user flows and product interactions, providing a structured canvas to articulate the intricate journey of users through your digital interface. One key benefit of this template is its ability to facilitate real-time collaboration, ensuring everyone is on the same page and fostering a shared understanding of design decisions. Elevate your design game, enhance collaboration, and bring clarity to your projects with our UI Flowchart Template.

Creative Brief Template

Design, Marketing, Desk Research

Even creative thinkers (or maybe especially creative thinkers) need clear guidelines to push their ideas in productive, usable directions. And a good creative lays down those guidelines, with information that includes target audience, goals, timeline, and budget, as well as the scope and specifications of the project itself. The foundation of any marketing or advertising campaign, a creative brief is the first step in building websites, videos, ads, banners, and much more. The brief is generally prepared before kicking off a project, and this template will make it easy.

Sticky Note Packs Template

Brainstorming, Meetings, Workshops

Use Miro’s Stickies Packs template to facilitate your brainstorming and group sessions. Use them to organize your ideas, collaborate as a team, and encourage participation from everyone involved.

updated on:

UX Research Plan Template. From Objective to Timeline

min to read

Masha Panchenko

Writer at Eleken

UX research is a complex process. To get the most of it, the process has to be organized. Even if your research consists of just a few interviews, you need a plan to make it effective and focused and not to end up with vague conversations.

With a good research plan, all the team will be on the same page, the deadlines will be met, and the research report will be relevant to the objectives.

As a design agency , we do UX research for each project we work on. One thing we can say for sure is that there is no universal template for UX research. Each project needs an individual approach. Yet there are some general steps that help us organize the research and build a structure around it.

So, how to create a UX research plan?

When you think of research strategy, a great guide is the DECIDE framework described in the book Interaction Design by Preece, Rogers, and Sharp. Here are the main steps:

• D etermine the goals .
• E xplore the questions .
• C hoose the evaluation approach and methods .
• I dentify the practical issues .
• D ecide how to deal with ethical issues.
• E valuate, analyze, interpret and present the data .

However, what works great for the user research strategy may not work as well when you have to make a concise UX research plan, short and clear. What is great in this framework is attention to ethical issues. On the other side, in an actual research plan, you might need to focus more on practical issues, such as budget, schedule, user database.

Here we suggest breaking the plan into more practical points.

Study existing situation

First of all, a researcher needs to understand the subject well, conduct interviews with team members, understand how the team is working. At this stage, they can also check the findings and results of previous researches, as well as related studies conducted with other products on the market.

This step may take more time for a product that is already on market, and less for the one that is yet to be developed. However, even in the latter case, there is always a certain background that is important to consider before the start.

When we start working on a product, one of the very first steps of the research is to ask questions to the team, before even talking to users. Here is a sneak peek to our working process with Acadeum, an educational SaaS for whom we did the UI/UX services . Each sticky note is a question that opens new possibilities to the product design.

Defining the user research objectives is crucial to understanding if the research was successful or not.

“Understanding our users better” is a vague objective. Of course, we should not underestimate the importance of empathizing with the customers. Most researchers are inherently directed at this “understanding” and it is awesome. Even if you just talked to your customers and got to know them better, the research can’t be considered “unsuccessful”. However, to get the most out of UX research, you need a more concrete objective.

For example, here is how we did UX research for Gridle , a CRM platform . While the research consisted of just a few in-depth interviews the result was the creation of a whole empathy map, a tangible version of “understanding”. It was short, just a few in-depth interviews, but the result was not just “better understanding”, it was an empathy map. It can also be a customer journey map or a detailed buyer persona profile. These are the things that can be used by other team members and won’t be lost when the researcher will stop working on the project.

The other extreme is too much “KPI-oriented” objective. “Increase revenue”, “improve conversion rates” sounds very concrete and measurable. However, UX research alone can’t fix these issues. It can suggest a certain hypothesis, but after that, the changes have to be made and the hypothesis has to be tested to finally reach those KPIs and improve metrics.

Here are some examples of user research objectives that are both concrete and feasible:

• What are the weak points in user flow?
• What are the main factors of users dissatisfaction?
• What are the a-ha moments of customer journey?

Estimated budget

At this stage, there is no need to define a detailed budget. What we are looking for here is to estimate the amount of money the client is ready to allocate for the research. Depending on the budget, the research methods and the number of users researched will vary. For example, an email survey can be run at a very low cost, while eye tracking requires costly technical resources and software.

At the final stages, the budget needs to be revisited. Only when the plan is done can we estimate the real budget.

Research methods

There are so many different UX research methods, that it is easy to get lost among them. Fundamental research may use all of them, but in most cases combining just a few is enough to get answers to the focus questions.

If you know little about all these UX research techniques, here is a quick guide on choosing the right one for your project:

As you can see, there is no way to avoid talking directly to users. Try integrating elements of an interview in every step of the research where you get access to the users. To learn more options and choose wisely, check out our list of 14 essential UX research methods .

If the product is at the very initial stages of development, generative research with deep interviews and competitors study works great. When the development is taking off, card sorting and contextual inquiry would help. When the product or prototype is ready and needs to be assessed, it is time for usability testing and email surveys.

In any case, a good practice is to combine quantitative and qualitative research, evaluative and generative research.

Choice of UX research techniques affects the tools. This might be even harder than picking the methods, but we’ve got a list of best UX research tools to help.

Participant profiles

Picking the right participants is a key to success. In many cases, you would not have a defined user persona before running UX research. Start with basic characteristics: age group, occupation, geography, and, what is important, the level of their engagement with the product (active users/prospect users/other options).

Some of these characteristics would not be relevant for your case, while others will be important. When you are done with a profile, define the minimum number of participants you need for each research method.

At this step, you should also think of ways to recruit the participants. There are many services and tools that help to find people for UX research sessions. It may be a great choice when you are just about to launch a product and not sure where to look for the participants. If you already have a user database, recruiting some of them would be more efficient than relying on the participants found by a third party.

The research protocol contains specific guidelines for each selected research method. Interview questions have to be phrased correctly and correspond to the objectives.

A good practice is to write down the opening and closing of a user interview. At the beginning it is a short presentation of the product, an explanation of the study and its objectives, noting the amount of time it would take. At the end of the interview, there should be an expression of gratitude for the participation and asking if the interviewee has any questions.

Survey questions have to be planned in a similar way, as well as usability testing and even field research. “Just observe the users” isn’t a very effective approach. It is important to know what you are focusing on and what the questions are, even if there is no direct user interview planned.

Once you have decided on research methods and the number of participants, a timeline should not be a hard task. The problem here might be that the time period that the client has planned for the research is shorter than what a researcher thinks is needed. Maybe hiring a research assistant can help save time. Another benefit of a clear and concise UX research plan is that it allows engaging other people to work, even if they are not familiar with the project in detail.

How long should UX research be? The timing depends on the scale of each project. Based on our experience, research takes on average from 1 to 5 weeks. When making an estimate, consider these factors:

• Time needed for the collection of data and time needed for the analysis
• The number of team members you can engage in user interviews and other research activities
• Time for the recruitment
• Human factor. People might be late, absent, or simply not available for an interview the next few days.

Make sure you plan with some spare time, so you won’t have to do the analysis in a rush: this is the key element of the UX research plan.

Ethics is the last but not least part of the DECIDE framework. Yet it is overlooked way too often in user research plan. Should we give special attention to ethics when we just ask some people to interact with an app and tell their experience? Whatever your opinion is, the rule of thumb with ethics consideration is better to overdo than do not enough.

What are the most common points that you should consider?

• Receive the permission to record/film the process
• Receive the permission to use the information for research purposes (if it is needed for publication, it has to be stated clearly)
• Inform the participants of all the details of the UX research process

Explaining to all the participants the background of the research, the methods used, and the purpose can be annoying and many researchers deem it unnecessary. Yet people have to know what they give and what they get.

The best way to save time on explanations and secure the ethics issues is to prepare a Research Participation Agreement (RPA). The document does not have to be long and there is no need to engage a lawyer in writing it. Follow this RPA template to make sure you inserted all the necessary info.

Budget (again)

Now that all parts of the plan are ready, it is time to check if the final budget fits into the initial one. There is no need to write a detailed budget into the UX research plan when it is just a part of the product design process, but often it is useful for researchers to know the sums to be able to estimate the costs in the future.

UX research plan graphic templates

Now that we are long gone into the process of crafting a UX research plan, and the process is far from any real template… Here are some templates that help you visually organize the plan (or at least the most important parts of it).

Miro UX research plan template. Goals&questions-oriented 

Airtable template. Timeline-oriented 

Milanote template. Brief 

An example of organizing all the user insights in Trello 

This template is more of a how-to instruction. That is because UX research is a complex process that needs to be tailored to each project. Having some guides helps make the planning a bit easier.

If you need professional UX research for your project, contact us and we’ll present you an efficient and realistic plan.

Experienced editor, project manager, and content writer. In collaboration with Eleken's UI/UX designers, created articles on data-driven design and marketing to help SaaS companies grow.

Learn how to use ChatGPT in the research process and explore examples where ChatGPT can be helpful for UX researchers.

Learn what is user experience research, what types of UX research are there, and how much testing is just enough for superior user experience.

Want to get maximum UX insights from user interviews? We cover all whats, whys and hows in this comprehensive guide!

Examine a list of the top 10 UX research tools suggested by experienced designers to make your research a success.

Want to learn how to make the most out of usability tests with limited resources? Read on!

What is A/B testing? How can it improve your business performance? And how do you do it? All the answers in our post!

Learn to carry out the 4-step UX research process to make your product shine bright like a diamond for the target user.

What do UX researchers actually do? What are the best ways to get inside the mind of users? Find out with these simple but efficient UX research methods.

While UX designers are hunting for users’ problems to solve, customer support is sitting on a pile of insights. Learn how you can benefit from these insights.

Learn what concrete benefits customer feedback gives, how to collect it, and what to do after you’ve gathered these valuable insights.

The Complete Guide To UX Research (User Research)

UX Research is a term that has been trending in the past few years. There's no surprise why it's so popular - User Experience Research is all about understanding your customer and their needs, which can help you greatly improve your conversion rate and user experience on your website. In this article, we're going to provide a complete guide to UX research as well as how to start implementing it in your organisation.Throughout this article we will give you a complete high-level overview of the entire UX Research meaning, supported by more in-depth articles for each topic.

Introduction to UX Research

Wether you're a grizzled UX Researcher who's been in the field for decades or a UX Novice who's just getting started, UX Research is an integral aspect of the UX Design process. Before diving into this article on UX research methods and tools, let's first take some time to break down what UX research actually entails.

Each of these UX Research Methods has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to understand your goals for the UX Research activities you want to complete.

What is UX Research?

UX research begins with UX designers and UX researchers studying the real world needs of users. User Experience Research is a process --it's not just one thing-- that involves collecting data, conducting interviews, usability testing prototypes or website designs with human participants in order to deeply understand what people are looking for when they interact with a product or service.

By using different sorts of user-research techniques you can better understand not only people desires from their product of service, but a deeper human need which can serve as an incredibly powerful opportunity.

There's an incredible amount of different sorts of research methods. Most of them can be divided in two camps: Qualitative and Quantitative Research.

Qualitative research - Understanding needs can be accomplished through observation, in depth interviews and ethnographic studies. Quantitative Research focusses more on the numbers, analysing data and collecting measurable statistics.

Within these two groups there's an incredible amount of research activities such as Card Sorting, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Usability Tests, Personas & Customer Journeys and many more. We've created our The Curated List of Research Techniques to always give you an up-to-date overview.

Why is UX Research so important?

When I started my career as a digital designer over 15 years ago, I felt like I was always hired to design the client's idea. Simply translate what they had in their head into a UI without even thinking about changing the user experience. Needless to say: This is a recipe for disaster. An no, this isn't a "Client's don't know anything" story. Nobody knows! At least in the beginning. The client had "the perfect idea" for a new digital feature. The launch date was already set and the development process had to start as soon as possible.

When the feature launched, we expected support might get a few questions or even receive a few thank-you emails. We surely must've affected the user experience somehow!

But that didn't happen. Nothing happened. The feature wasn't used.

Because nobody needed it.

This is exactly what happens when you skip user experience research because you think you're solving a problem that "everybody" has, but nobody really does.

Conducting User Experience research can help you to have a better understanding of your stakeholders and what they need. This is incredibly valuable information from which you can create personas and customer journeys. It doesn't matter if you're creating a new product or service or are improving an existing once.

Five Steps for conducting User Research

Created by Eric Sanders , the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for your user research.

• Objectives: What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
• Hypotheses: What do we think we understand about our users?
• Methods: Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
• Conduct: Gather data through the selected methods.
• Synthesize: Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

1: Objectives: Define the Problem Statement

A problem statement is a concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be improved upon. It identifies the gap between the current (problem) state and desired (goal) state of a process or product.

Problem statements are the first steps in your research because they help you to understand what's wrong or needs improving. For example, if your product is a mobile app and the problem statement says that customers are having difficulty paying for items within the application, then UX research will lead you (hopefully) down that path. Most likely it will involve some form of usability testing.

Check out this article if you'd like to learn more about Problem Statements.

2: Hypotheses: What we think we know about our user groups

After getting your Problem Statement right, there's one more thing to do before doing any research. Make sure you have created a clear research goal for yourself. How do you identify Research Objectives? By asking questions:

• Who are we doing this for? The starting point for your personas!
• What are we doing? What's happening right now? What do our user want? What does the company need?
• Think about When. If you're creating a project plan, you'll need a timeline. It also helps to keep in mind when people are using your products or service.
• Where is the logical next step. Where do people use your product? Why there? What limitations are there to that location? Where can you perform research? Where do your users live?
• Why are we doing this? Why should or shouldn't we be doing this? Why teaches you all about motivations from people and for the project.
• Last but not least: How? Besides thinking about the research activities itself, think about how people will test a product or feature. How will the user insights (outcome of the research) work be used in the  User Centered Design - and development process?

3: Methods: Choose the right research method

UX research is about exploration, and you want to make sure that your method fits the needs of what you're trying to explore. There are many different methods. In a later chapter we'll go over the most common UX research methods .

For now, all you need to keep in mind that that there are a lot of different ways of doing research.

You definitely don't need to do every type of activity but it would be useful to have a decent understanding of the options you have available, so you pick the right tools for the job.

4. Conduct: Putting in the work

Apply your chosen user research methods to your Hypotheses and Objectives! The various techniques used by the senior product designer in the BTNG Design Process can definitely be overwhelming. The product development process is not a straight line from A to B. UX Researchers often discover new qualitative insights in the user experience due to uncovering new (or incorrect) user needs. So please do understand that UX Design is a lot more than simply creating a design.

5. Synthesise: Evaluating Research Outcome

So you started with your Problem Statement (Objectives), you drafted your hypotheses, chose the top research methods, conducted your research as stated in the research process and now "YOU ARE HERE".

The last step is to Synthesise what you've learned. Start by filling in the knowledge gaps. What unknowns are you now able to answer?

Which of your hypotheses are proven (or disproven)?

And lastly, which new exciting new opportunities did you discover!

Evaluating the outcome of the User Experience Research is an essential part of the work.

Make sure to keep them brief and to-the-point. A good rule of thumb is to include the top three positive comments and the top three problems.

UX Research Methods

Choosing the right ux research method.

Making sure you use the right types of user experience research in any project is essential. Since time and money is always limited, we need to make sure we always get the most bang-for-our-buck. This means we need to pick the UX research method that will give us the most insights as possible for a project.

Three things to keep in mind when making a choice among research methodologies:

• Stages of the product life cycle - Is it a new or existing product?
• Quantitative vs. Qualitative - In depth talk directly with people or data?
• Attitudinal vs. Behavioural - What people say vs what people do

Image from Nielsen Norman Group

Most frequently used methods of UX Research

• Card Sorting: Way before UX Research even was a "thing", psychological research originally used Card Sorting.  With Card Sorting, you try to find out how people group things and what sort of hierarchies they use. The BTNG Research Team is specialised in remote research. So our modern Card Sorting user experience research have a few modern surprises.
• Usability Testing: Before launching a new feature or product it is important to do user testing. Give them tasks to complete and see how well the prototype works and learn more about user behaviours.
• Remote Usability Testing: During the COVID-19 lockdown, finding the appropriate ux research methods haven't always been that easy. Luckily, we've adopted plenty of modern solutions that help us with collecting customer feedback even with a remote usability test.
• Research-Based User Personas: A profile of a fictional character representing a specific stakeholder relevant to your product or service. Combine goals and objections with attitude and personality. The BTNG Research Team creates these personas for the target users after conducing both quantitative and qualitative user research.
• Field Studies: Yes, we actually like to go outside. What if your product isn't a B2B desktop application which is being used behind a computer during office hours? At BTNG we have different types of Field Studies which all help you gain valuable insights into human behaviour and the user experience.
• The Expert Interview: Combine your talent with that of one of BTNG's senior researcher. Conducting ux research without talking to the experts on your team would be a waste of time. In every organisation there are people who know a lot about their product or service and have unique insights. We always like to include them in the UX Research!
• Eye Movement Tracking: If you have an existing digital experience up and running - Eye Movement Tracking can help you to identify user experience challenges in your funnel. The outcome shows a heatmap of where the user looks (and doesn't).

Check out this article for a in-depth guide on UX Research Methods.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative UX research methods

Since this is a topic that we can on about for hours, we decided to split this section up in a few parts. First let's start with the difference.

Qualitative UX Research is based on an in-depth understanding of the human behaviour and needs. Qualitative user research includes interviews, observations (in natural settings), usability tests or contextual inquiry. More than often you'll obtain unexpected, valuable insights through this from of user experience research methods.

Quantitative UX Research relies on statistical analysis to make sense out of data (quantitative data) gathered from UX measurements: A/B Tests - Surveys etc. Quantitative UX Research is as you might have guessed, a lot more data-orientated.

If you'd like to learn more about these two types of research, check out these articles:

Get the most out of your User Research with Qualitative Research

Quantitative Research: The Science of Mining Data for Insights

Balancing qualitative and quantitative UX research

Both types of research have amazing benefits but also challenges. Depending on the research goal, it would be wise to have a good understanding which types of research you would like to be part of the ux design and would make the most impact.

The BTNG Research Team loves to start with Qualitative Research to first get a better understanding of the WHY and gain new insights. To validate these new learning they use Quantitative Research in your user experience research.

A handful of helpful UX Research Tools

The landscape of UX research tools has been growing rapidly. The BTNG Research team use a variety of UX research tools to help with well, almost everything. From running usability tests, creating prototypes and even for recruiting participants.

In the not-too-distant future, we'll create a Curated UX Research Tool article. For now, a handful of helpful UX Research Tools should do the trick.

• For surveys : Typeform
• For UX Research Recruitment: Dscout
• For analytics and heatmaps: VWO
• For documenting research: Notion & Airtable
• For Customer Journey Management : TheyDo
• For transcriptions: Descript
• For remote user testing: Maze
• For Calls : Zoom

Surveys: Typeform

What does it do? Survey Forms can be boring. Typeform is one of those ux research tools that helps you to create beautiful surveys with customisable templates and an online editor. For example, you can add videos to your survey or even let people draw their answers instead of typing them in a text box. Who is this for? Startup teams that want to quickly create engaging and modern looking surveys but don't know how to code it themselves.

Highlights: Amazing UX, looks and feel very modern, create forms with ease that match your branding, great reports and automation.

Why is it our top pick? Stop wasting time on ux research tools with too many buttons. Always keep the goal of your ux research methods in mind. Keep things lean, fast and simple with a product with amazing UX.

https://www.typeform.com/

UX Research Recruitment: Dscout

What does it do? Dscout is a remote research platform that helps you recruit participants for your ux research (the right ones). With a pool of +100.000 real users, our user researchers can hop on video calls and collect data for your qualitative user research. So test out those mobile apps user experience and collect all the data! Isn't remote research amazing?

Highlights: User Research Participant Recruitment, Live Sessions,Prototype feedback, competitive analysis, in-the-wild product discovery, field work supplementations, shopalongs.

Why is it our top pick? Finding the right people is more important than finding people fast. BTNG helps corporate clients in all types of industries which require a unique set of users, each time. Dscout helps us to quickly find the right people and make sure our user research is delivered on time and our research process stays in tact.

https://dscout.com/

Analytics and heatmaps: VWO

What does it do? When we were helping the Financial Times, our BTNG Research Team collaborated with FT Marketing Team who were already running experiments with VWO. 50% of the traffic would see one version of a certain page while 50% saw a different version. Which performed best? Perhaps you'd take a look at time-on-page. But more importantly: Which converts better!

Hotjar provides Product Experience Insights that show how users behave and what they feel strongly about, so product teams can deliver real value to them.

Highlights: VWO is an amazing suite that does it all:Automated Feedback, Heatmaps, EyeTracking, User Session Recordings (Participant Tracking) and one thing that Hotjar doesn't do: A/B Testing.

Why is it our top pick? Even tho it's an expensive product, it does give you value for money. Especially the reports with very black and white outcomes are great for presenting the results you've made.

https://vwo.com/

Documenting research: Notion

What does it do? Notion is our command center, where we store and constantly update our studio's aggregate wisdom. It is a super-flexible tool that helps to organise project documentation, prepare for interviews with either clients or their product users, accumulate feedback, or simply take notes.

Highlights: A very clean, structured way to write and share information with your team in a beautiful designed app with an amazing user experience.

Why is it our top pick? There's no better, more structured way to share information.

https://www.notion.so/

Customer Journey Management: TheyDo

What does it do? TheyDo is a modern Journey Management Platform. It centralises your journeys in an easy to manage system, where everyone has access to a single source of truth of the customer experience. It’s like a CMS for journeys.

Highlights: Customer Journey Map designer, Personas and 2x2 Persona Matrix, Opportunity & Solution Management & Prioritisation.

Why is it our top pick? TheyDo fits perfectly with BTNG's way of helping companies become more customer-centric. It helps to visualise the current experience of stakeholders. With those insight which we capture from interviews or usability testing, we discover new opportunities. A perfect starting point for creating solutions!

https://www.theydo.io/

Transcriptions: Descript

What does it do? Descript is an all-in-one solution for audio & video recording, editing and transcription. The editing is as easy as a doc. Imagine you’ve interviewed 20 different people about a new flavor of soda or a feature for your app. You just drop all those files into a Descript Project, and they show up in different “Compositions” (documents) in the sidebar. In a couple of minutes they’ll be transcribed, with speaker labels added automatically.

Highlights: Overdub, Filler Word Removal, Collaboration, Subtitles, Remote Recording and Studio Sound.

Why is it our top pick? Descript is an absolute monster when it comes to recording, editing and transcribing videos. It truly makes digesting the work after recording fast and even fun!

https://www.descript.com/

Remote user testing: Maze

What does it do? Maze is a-mazing remote user testing platform for unmoderated usability tests. With Maze, you can create and run in-depth usability tests and share them with your testers via a link to get actionable insights. Maze also generates a usability study report instantly so that you can share it with anyone.

It’s handy that the tool integrates directly with Figma, InVision, Marvel, and Sketch, thus, you can import a working prototype directly from the design tool you use. The BTNG Design Team with their Figma skills has an amazing chemistry with the Research Team due to that Figma/Maze integration.

Highlights: Besides unmoderated usability testing, Maze can help with different UX Research Methods, like card sorting, tree testing, 5-second testing, A/B testing, and more.

Why is it our top pick? Usability testing has been a time consuming way of qualitative research. Trying to find out how users interact (Task analysis) during an Interviews combined with keeping an eye on the prototype can be... a challenge. The way that Maze allows us to run (besides our hands on usability test) now also run unmoderated usability testing is a powerful weapon in our arsenal.

https://maze.co/

Calls: Zoom

What does it do? As the other video conferencing tools you can run video calls. But what makes Zoom a great tool? We feel that the integration with conferencing equipment is huge for our bigger clients. Now that there's also a Miro integration we can make our user interviews even more fun and interactive!

Highlights: Call Recording, Collaboration tools, Screen Sharing, Free trial, connects to conferencing equipment, host up to 500 people!

Why is it our top pick? Giving the research participants of your user interviews a pleasant experience is so important. Especially when you're looking for qualitative feedback on your ux design, you want to make sure they feel comfortable. And yes, you'll have to start using a paid version - but the user interface of Zoom alone is worth it. Even the Mobile App is really solid.

https://zoom.us/

In Conclusion

No matter what research methodology you rely on if it is qualitative research methods or perhaps quantitative data - keep in mind that user research is an essential part of the Design Process. Not only your UX designer will thank you, but also your users.

In every UX project we've spoken to multiple users - no matter if it was a task analysis, attitudinal research or focus groups... They all had one thing in common:

People thanked us for taking the time to listen to them.

So please, stop thinking about the potential UX research methods you might use in your design process and consider what it REALLY is about:

Solving the right problems for the right people.

And there's only one way to get there: Trying things out, listening, learning and improving.

Looking for help? Reach out!

See the Nielsen Norman Group’s list of user research tips: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/

Find an extensive range of user research considerations, discussed in Smashing Magazine: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/comprehensive-guide-ux-research/

Here’s a convenient and example-rich catalogue of user research tools: https://blog.airtable.com/43-ux-research-tools-for-optimizing-your-product/

Related Posts

How to generate UX Insights

The importance of User Research

How to recruit participants

What is ux research.

UX Research Tools

How to create a UX research plan?

A UX research plan (or a user research plan) is a document used to organize all the most relevant information regarding the purpose, methods, organization, logistics, and timing of the planned UX research.

Creating a User Experience research plan may seem straightforward, but one perfect method doesn't exist.

The existence of many frameworks of UX research plans provides the best evidence that this is a demanding and challenging task.

Every researcher, especially an experienced one, has preferences in terms of structure, content, and level of detail of a research plan, which they use in their studies.

Every UX research novice usually learns about the current templates for creating research plans and modifies them to their own needs and preferences.

Nonetheless, there are standard elements to consider when creating your UX research plan.

What are the advantages of creating research plans? What should a standard UX research plan contain?

What elements shouldn't be forgotten when creating a User Experience research plan? Who is the research plan intended to serve?

How should it be written? What information mustn't be missing in the standard research plan?

You should read this article if the topic of User Experience research is important to you and you're looking for an optimal tool to support the research process.

We cordially invite you to read it!

Do you want to perform UX Research?

UX research plan – what is it?

UX Research  (e.g., usability testing) is becoming increasingly popular, and awareness of the benefits of performing it and investing in it is stronger and more widespread.

However, it should also be noted that the situation is still far from ideal.

Usability testing of web and mobile applications hasn't been met with understanding and proper interest so far.

Valid arguments according to which UX research is a permanent, necessary, and instrumental element of designing, creating, implementing, and developing a product haven't yet fallen on fertile ground.

Meanwhile, without User Experience research and usability testing, it's tough to imagine a highly competitive and rapid market conquest by a digital product .

UX research and UX usability tests are often considered redundant or unnecessarily burdensome to a project budget and, as a result, postponed in time.

In favor of UX research – besides the issues of financial returns and risk minimization – speaks its scientific and academic nature (e.g., UX usability tests).

User Experience and usability research is a field of knowledge constantly being developed in terms of theoretical, analytical, and methodological research within the framework of the broader  HCI – Human-Computer Interaction research.

It's a field of knowledge (studying user behavior) developed in universities, independent institutes, and research companies.

UX research uses the achievements of methodologies developed, among others, on the basis of psychology, sociology, and ethnography.

Techniques, methods, and research tools used (e.g., for usability testing) ensure a high level of credibility of the results and guarantee their reliability and usability (including strictly business usage).

Usability here is understood very broadly as an opportunity to improve the product based on data and research results, gain market advantage, and increase profits.

A UX research plan, which also has this side function, allows you to effectively argue in favor of the benefits of conducting them. However, it isn't the primary purpose of its creation.

The goal of creating UX research plans seems quite clear. The idea is to describe, define, and aggregate research objectives in as much detail as possible so that nothing is overlooked during the study. It helps you to organize your UX research project.

A research plan (used in qualitative and quantitative research ) is a document that's a valuable reference point that reminds us about essential aspects. It organizes the study in a methodological and epistemological sense.

It's a helpful document regarding substance and organization (it allows for selecting an appropriate research method). Therefore, it helps researchers not to overlook anything and control the course of a study according to established assumptions.

Without a good research plan, it's impossible to think of professional usability research.

A plan indicates directions and defines goals that guide researchers. It points out the best measures and methods that guarantee the most reliable and credible results, consistent with the standards of academic research.

Other advantages of creating research plans

As we have already mentioned, a research plan is a tool, and as such, it serves very different purposes.

In terms of merit, it allows you to conduct UX research, UX testing, and target group evaluation research in a structured, efficient, result-oriented, sequential, and controlled manner.

It also provides an opportunity to problematize and to reflect on the following:

• The subject of a study – what we want to learn and the reasons that motivate us to make a research effort
• Results of research – benefits of the research findings and possible fields of their use
• Research values – in the sense of immediate usefulness in a given project and the forward-looking, strategic role of research, aggregation, analysis of results, perceiving deeper trends thanks to it, and discovering invisible relationships
• Influence of a study – on competitiveness, building advantages, and increasing profits
• Research relevance – the ability to test different studies on the same research problem and, thanks to it, obtain a much broader and more complex perspective
• Proportion of profits and costs.

A UX study scenario, which is equally important, is extremely helpful in identifying and posing the most accurate research questions.

It also makes it possible to discover research gaps during its creation and research sessions.

Systematizing knowledge, goals, tools, and methods helps with the following:

• Determining the most optimal time frame for all stakeholders (and this isn't always an easy task)
• Directing user research in the long-term
• Increasing the engagement of stakeholders
• Establishing directions for digital product development
• Obtaining a common, consensual scope of knowledge, goals, expectations, and indicators of success.

Moreover, as the authors of the research guide ( The Ultimate Guide to UX Research ), published on Maze , write, a study scenario makes it possible to communicate its schedule, goals, and research scope to all stakeholders.

In addition, the UX research plan aids with the following:

• Specifying expectations
• Organizing, documenting, and sharing crucial information
• Reasoning and justifying the need for research
• Determining the budget needed to conduct a study
• Structuring the course of research
• Prioritizing goals
• Foreseeing challenges and/or allowing you to be ready for them
• Defining indicators of research success and its various stages
• Identifying roles – specifying "who," "what," "when," and "for what reason" is involved in a research project.

The most anecdotal summary of the benefits of creating a research plan may be a quote by  Benjamin Franklin . Franklin supposedly said that anyone who doesn't succeed, who isn't an enthusiast of planning, is bound to succeed in planning for failure. It's worth keeping this memento in mind.

Creating a UX research plan. Step-by-step UX research plan template

As we've already mentioned, a single, universally used template or canvas for a User Experience research plan doesn't exist.

However, any good UX research plan should include standard elements such as:

• Description and background of a research problem (e.g., customer satisfaction , performance of a checkout in an online store)
• Research goal, or rather objectives that research should aim to achieve
• Identification of stakeholders
• Description of the most appropriate research method (e.g., whether you opt for qualitative research or quantitative research)
• Review, analysis of previous studies (in-house or external) and their results, conclusions
• Creation of research questions
• Definition of participants, creation of a profile for research participants identical to the target audience
• Description of the study's methodology – method of its implementation, guaranteeing the highest credibility of results
• Selection of UX research tools and UX research methods
• Definition of success criteria
• Establishment of a project's schedule
• Determination of the presentation of study results.

Let's look at the various elements of a UX research plan, their content, the role they fulfill for the researcher, and their function in a research project.

Description and background of a research problem

This part of the ux research plan is primarily used to describe, explain, and present to stakeholders the following:.

• Reasons for the study
• Expected research results
• Research problem, its characteristics, and complexity
• Main research question.

In more colloquial terms, the background of a research problem should explain what a project is about. It should present and give access to the most crucial information.

Research objectives

In this section of the UX research plan, the objectives of the UX study should be specified in great detail.

They should explain the following:

• What's going to be done
• The reason behind the desire to conduct a study with users
• Problems that will be solved, thanks to the results of a study.

More detailed research questions will follow from a clearly defined purpose of UX research.

In this section, it's also worthwhile to flesh out the practical dimension of the research, namely to indicate how the results will be used, the scope of their use, and the effect of their use (e.g., what end-users will gain). In other words,  what they'll be used for, how they'll be used, where, and what change they will bring.

Stakeholders

In most cases, the number of beneficiaries of User Experience research is larger than is commonly believed.

Research doesn't only serve UX/UI designers, UX researchers, or end-users of a  digital product .

The results of UX research can also be helpful in everyday work for employees in other departments (e.g., customer service or sales department); these aren't just theoretical assumptions.

A research plan should identify beneficiaries as broadly as possible and support increased involvement of stakeholders representing different specialties, departments, roles, interests, and goals within an organization, not just an entire research team.

Research method

A research objective (e.g., testing forms in e-commerce ) determines the research method.

Methods should be adapted to research objectives, capabilities (e.g., budget capabilities), resources, and the project's stage.

A research method should achieve research goals in the best, most efficient way possible and offer results that are the most useful for decisions based on them.

A general best practice is to combine quantitative and qualitative research.

Here are some examples of UX research methods:

• User interviews
• Card sorting
• Usability testing
• Focus groups

Research review – state of knowledge

The majority of standard research isn't conducted in an epistemic vacuum.

Dynamic development of User Experience research (e.g., website testing) and numerous scientific journals give researchers a chance to learn about the latest findings on a given topic.

A UX research plan should consider this context and define the relationship between the author's studies and those already carried out by other researchers.

Reviewing and referencing research is very useful, as it provides knowledge on the one hand and can be a source of research inspiration (e.g., it helps create tasks in usability tests), methodological guidelines, or research questions.

Research questions

In this part of a UX research plan, it's necessary to write down research questions, the aggregation of which also allows you to see gaps in your knowledge.

Profile of respondents

A UX study scenario should answer what we want to study (e.g., a particular website functionality) and who we want to study.

Proper profiling of respondents, like properly formulated research hypotheses, is crucial to the usability of UX study results.

When profiling respondents, it's necessary to adopt selection criteria that allow choosing candidates of the most representative model group, corresponding to the real users of a digital product.

This section should also specify the number of respondents.

When you are at this step, you should also take a moment to think about how you're going to approach the recruitment of research participants.

The article " Detailed Guide On Developing UX Research Plan " provides a couple of questions that can help you with it.

• Do you already have a user base you can collect information from?
• What is your recruiting budget?
• Is there a need to hire external participants?
• How many users do you need to interact with?

These will help you find out which type of research participants will be the most suitable for your UX research.

When you're at this step, it's also a good idea to determine how you will compensate test participants. That is not just a matter of being fair or maintaining a good company image/reputation. A proper reward for the participant's insight and time also encourages them to give you complete and valuable answers. Adequate compensation should be provided whether the study is done remotely or in person.

Additionally, in the case of testing internationally, you should remember to check that the form of compensation you're proposing works globally.

Research Methodology

Methodology is a description of a procedure, the conduct of a study (e.g., a study of a website), which is supposed to lead to obtaining the most reliable and credible research results.

The description of the research procedure should be concise enough to provide a quick overview of a study and detailed enough not to raise any questions regarding steps taken when a study is replicated in the future.

In this part of a research plan, the necessary information should be provided so that there is no doubt about what was studied, who was studied and in what numbers, how, with what tools and methods, and under what conditions.

Research tools

Research objectives, methods, and questions determine the choice of research tools.

When selecting research tools, it's essential to take into account the following:

• Availability of respondents
• How the results will be used

Here are some research tools that you may want to consider using:

• UsabilityHub

For the full list, we highly recommend taking a look at the article "What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers" on Maze.

Success criteria

Of course, carrying out the UX research alone can't be considered a success. That is why it's necessary to define the criteria for evaluating the information and results obtained during the study as valuable.

Project schedule and budget

Determining the time required for a study, its start date, end date, course, and the time to complete the various stages is an essential part of a UX research plan.

The time needed to conduct a study can vary. It is influenced, among others, by the research methods, the number of study participants, the amount of data necessary to be collected, and the level of complexity of a product or service that you wish to test.

A deadline for a presentation of results should also be defined.

Determining the budget is also crucial. Similarly to the time needed to perform research, the budget is influenced by selected methods, participants, and the cost of collecting data and recruitment. As a comparison, user interviews can be significantly cheaper to perform than usability testing.

Determining time frames for a research project can sometimes be problematic if we don't take into account the following:

• Scale and complexity of a project
• Time-consuming research method, particular methodology, use of specific research tools
• Division of work and working time in terms of a research team
• Random situations and unforeseen circumstances that may prolong the conduct of research.

Presentation of research results

The research results (e.g., the study of a user of a website) should be presented not only in the form of raw data, conclusions, and interpretations but also as a documentation of the entire research process, in which any problems that arose were taken into account.

Documenting the course of UX research, encountered problems, challenges, and even failures is a valuable source of knowledge, which is extremely helpful in designing analogous research or replicating a study.

You can present research results in various ways, starting from a report in a PDF file, digital or physical whiteboard, an interactive online report, and ending with an old-fashioned presentation.

UX research plan and UX research strategy - how do they differ?

According to the article mentioned above on Maze, the UX research plan and UX research strategy differ mainly in the scope of covered details. The UX research plan constitutes a document that allows your team to be on the same page, and it's also a guideline that helps to conduct a single UX research project. In turn, the UX research strategy describes expectations, more significant objectives, and the demographics of the findings.

How to create a UX research plan? Summary of the article

• UX research (e.g., usability testing , researching an Internet platform user) allows you to achieve high competitiveness for your digital product.
• UX research has an academic, scientific character, making it a valuable tool for optimizing and improving digital products.
• User Experience research (e.g., usability testing) is based on methodologies developed in the social sciences.
• The UX study scenario is a document, a tool, used to organize the most critical information about the objectives, methods, organization, logistics, and deadlines of the UX research.
• A research plan organizes a study in methodological, epistemological, substantive, and organizational terms.
• It helps researchers control the course of a study according to established assumptions.
• A UX research plan defines the objectives and indicates the best measures and methods to ensure the most credible results.
• A UX research plan helps discover research gaps.
• It allows all stakeholders to have a shared perspective.
• A UX research plan should define the background of a research problem, objective, stakeholders, research method, state of the knowledge, research questions, respondents, methodology, research tools, success criteria, schedule, and presentation of research results.

Next article

Quantitative research in UX

• How to Write a User Research Plan That Sets Your Project Up for Success
• Creating A User Research Plan (with Examples)
• How to Create a UX Research Plan
• How to create a user research plan
• UX Research Plan Template
• The UX Research Plan That Stakeholders Love
• A One Page User Research Plan
• UX Research Plan Template. From Objective to Timeline
• What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers
• Detailed Guide On Developing UX Research Plan
• How to Write a UX Research Plan that Actually Works: 7-Step Tutorial

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The seven elements of a research plan

Joao vitor trentin

Joao Vitor Trentin

Let’s start our journey through a UX research study, let’s explore the first step:

planning the study.

Like any good explorer, you need to have a plan for where you’re headed. There are seven elements that your plan should include: the project background, the research goals, the detailed research questions, the key performance indicators or KPIs , the methodology, the participants, and the script or questions you’ll ask participants. Let’s break them down.

The first element of your plan is the project background.

The project background answers the question: What led you to conduct this research? You don’t have to provide a long drawn out history, just a few lines is good. You might explain the project background like this: We’re creating a new app to help people choose free animal test products. We need to find out if the main user experience, finding a product, is easy for users to complete.

Next, your plan should include research goals.

Ask yourself questions like, What design problems are you trying to solve? And how will the results of the research impact our design decisions? Use your answers to create goals for your research project. In our example, one research goal might be: determine if the app is difficult to use. We need to consider the ease of use in order to understand why customers join our app and leave or stay. After you determine research goals, you need to develop detailed research questions for your plan. What are the questions your research is trying to answer? For example, our research questions might be, how long does it take a user to find free animal test product in the app? And what can we learn from the user flow or the steps that users take to find the product?

Another important element of your plan is the key performance indicators, or KPIs.

As a reminder, key performance indicators are critical measures of progress toward an end goal. You might ask, how can you measure your progress toward the research goal? For our app, one thing we should track is how many users in the research study complete their search for a product. So the KPI would be the percentage of users who find the product.

The next element of your plan is the methodology.

This is where you document the steps you’ll take to conduct your research. How will you collect data and how will you analyze the data once you get it? To find out if users are able to find free animal products in our new app, we might want to conduct a survey of prospective users. To analyze the survey results, we will use a spreadsheet and identify trends.

Your research plan lists the research participants.

Who will you survey? What characteristics do the participants have? For example, you might want to recruit participants who have concerns about animals. The types of participants you select should be based on your research goals. Also, make sure that participants you select do not bias your results.

The final step in your research plan is to script the questions you ask study participants as they test your product. The script is also known as the discussion guide. Make sure these questions are specific in speaking to the KPIs you’re trying to measure. For instance, you could ask, did you face any challenges when trying to find a animal free product in the app? Now you know the seven elements of a research plan.

You can use this UX Research plan to build a script and start to make your research.

Written by Joao vitor trentin

User Experience Designer / Gold Coast Australia / https://www.uxdesignerjoaovitortrentin.com

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UX Research: How to plan and prepare for discovery research?

When you think about conducting user research to understand their needs, challenges, and motivations, you often don’t think about the planning that goes into this type of initiative. If you are just starting out on the journey of UX research, feeling a little overwhelmed by the process, and wondering how to set up and plan a research project, today’s blog post is for you!

Let’s back up a step. You may be wondering, why is it important to conduct user research? For starters, investing in UX research will save you time and money! (Say no more, right?) By understanding what your customers truly want early on in the process, you can gather feedback and spend your hard earned money and valuable time developing and launching a product or feature users are guaranteed to need and use. Additionally, conducting user research will help to reduce customer churn. When you create a product that’s valuable to your user, they are much more likely to offer their loyalty! You may even develop a product or feature your user didn’t realize they needed, solving a problem they didn’t even know existed. Conducting UX research will also help establish a strong proof of concept and de-risk product launches . We recommend using design research methods like in-depth interviews or observations .

How to start the research planning process?

You’ve received stakeholder buy-in confirming that conducting some research would be a good idea. But where do you start? There is a lot of orchestration that goes into a successful research project. Planning for research typically takes 2-6 weeks, depending on how much research you intend to conduct. During the planning stage, things you’ll want to create include:

A Research Plan (outlining all of the research you plan to do and how you plan to do it) – see below

Interview and Observation Guides , Survey Questionnaires, and more

Recruiting Criteria and Guide (Who you will recruit for research and how?)

To begin, you’ll want to have a few meetings or collaborative discovery sessions with stakeholders to understand the business goals and identify what is known about the research area/topic. Then you’ll want to scope the project and start to identify the types of research methods you’ll use. On Outwitly’s blog , we cover a lot more on the different types of UX and design research, if you’re curious!

Scoping Discovery Research

How do you know how much research to actually conduct? Well… it depends. This also comes with experience, and after having conducted numerous research initiatives you’ll get better at understanding how much is too much, too little, or just right. However, we can provide some of our tips for scoping a discovery research project.

Timeline – How much time do you have to conduct the research? If you only have 1-2 months, you’re going to be limited with how much you can do in that time. So you might decide to stick to only one type of research method, such as interviews. If you have 3-6 months, then you can start to layer in other research methods and more participants.

Budget – Is budget a factor? How much money do you have to conduct the research? This could impact how many hours you can spend on the research, how many participants you can recruit if you are planning to give them each incentives for their time, and it can also impact how many researchers are on the project.

How much is already known about the problem area? If a significant amount of research has already been conducted on the same topic, it may be better to start by leveraging the existing research findings and scoping out a smaller amount of new research to compliment what exists. If not much is known or understood at the outset, you may want to build in more time for research, more methods, and more participants.

Best practices – In general and when possible, we recommend you follow some best practices for conducting research. These are:

Plan to conduct at least two different types of research (e.g. interviews AND observations)

Plan to interview 4-6 participants from the same user group in order to identify patterns in the data (so if you have 3 different types of users you want to understand, then you are looking to interview 12-18 participants in total).

If you’re worried that you are scoping out too much research, or you haven’t gotten the full buy-in/support from your stakeholders, then consider biting off a smaller research initiative to start. This will help to show the value of this type of work and get everyone on the team to understand the process. Then you can start to take on bigger projects! One way to do this is by reducing the number of user groups you are hoping to understand – this will cut down the number of people you need to recruit and make the scope of work smaller.

Elements of a Strong UX Research Plan

While research plans will vary depending on where you work and what research you are conducting, in general a solid discovery research plan will include the following:

Overview – To begin, include a paragraph the answers the following questions: What is this research about? Why has it been initiated? Who is the research for? What will it involve at a high-level?

Research Goals –  We typically list 3-5 core research goals. What are you hoping to accomplish through your research? What insights are you aiming to uncover? How will this research help you achieve a better user or customer experience?

Research Methods – Which research methods do you plan to use? Our favourites are interviews , observations , and diary studies for qualitative research. You may also include your plan to conduct stakeholder or expert interviews, as well as any quantitative research, and secondary research such as literature reviews and documentation reviews. Whatever methods you choose, plan to describe each one in detail. For example, this might include: How many interviews you’ll conduct, how interviews will be conducted (remotely, in-person, over the phone), how long each interview will take, and more. You should also provide your rationale for choosing each method here.

Participants – Your research plan should explain who you plan to research, what high-level user groups are you planning to research, what are their characteristics, how many people you plan to interview or observe, and how you might incentivize them.

Recruitment – Once you’ve explained who you are going to research, you’ll also want to provide an in-depth description of the recruitment methods you’ll use, how you’ll schedule participants, how you’ll screen participants to make sure they are the right fit for the project, and any additional information on the recruiting criteria.

Tools/Technology – What tools or applications will you use to recruit, conduct, and analyze your research? For example, what tools will you use to record interviews or schedule participants? Do you plan to use a phone or camera to take photos and video during observations?

Some of our favourite tools are:

• Miro for workshops
• Zoom for interviews
• Calendly for scheduling
• Aurelius for data analysis

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Data Analysis/Synthesis Methods (how you will analyze the data) – Describe how you plan to analyze your data. For example, will you group common ideas and identify patterns in the data in order to uncover insights?

Deliverables – What deliverables do you plan to create based on your research findings? Some examples include Personas, Journey Maps, or a Research Report. Describe each one and provide examples or explain why each deliverable will be useful in helping them to achieve their goals

Timing/Project Schedule – You should include a research schedule in your research plan. This shows how long each activity will take and when stakeholders can expect to see each of the milestones reached.

Risks & Mitigation Strategies – See below!

Roles & Responsibilities – Who are the team members involved? What will each team member be responsible for throughout the project?

Data Storage & Security – Depending on the nature of the project being conducted, data storage and security may be important to either the project stakeholders or to the participants. This can be in the case of more sensitive topics such as healthcare or the financial sector. It’s important to outline how you will keep participant data safe, where it will be stored, and when it will be destroyed.

Recruiting Strategies in UX Research

Recruiting for research can be one of the toughest parts of the process. We could go into a lot of detail on how to develop recruiting criteria, breaking down the screening and recruitment process, but we’ll save that for a future post! For now, here are the most common methods we’ve used to recruit participants for research:

Existing contact/emails lists – This applies to organizations/companies that have customer lists they are allowed to share for research purposes.

Real-time – Recruiting on-the-go and in-person (aka standing on a street corner asking people to participate, going to a bus stop, or a museum, or a mall).

Partner organizations & community hubs – Asking community centers or partner organizations to recruit participants on your behalf.

Recruiting firms – Paying $ to hire a professional recruiting firm.

Social Media, Crowd-Sourcing, & Forums

Keep in mind that incentive in the form of gift cards can go a long way to helping you attract participants and prevent no-shows!

Common Risks in UX Research & Mitigation Strategies

When preparing to conduct discovery research, whether it be as part of a proposal or as part of the research planning, it’s important to identify possible risks early on and develop mitigation strategies to help alleviate these challenges if they arrive during the course of the project. When we consider risks, we like to create a table that looks at three main elements:

Criticality or Likelihood (Low, Medium, or High) – Essentially how likely it is that this risk happens, and if it were to happen, how would it impact the project and it’s timelines?

Risk – Describe the risk in detail

Mitigation Strategy – For each risk you identify, list 1-3 mitigation measures or corrective actions that you will use if it does happen.

At this point you might be wondering, what are the most common risks when conducting UX research or design research? To help you out, we’ve listed the ones we see most often:

Recruiting – It may be difficult to recruit enough participants that match your target user groups in the timeline. You’ll want to think about alternative methods for recruiting participants or what to do if you can’t find participants who are the perfect fit to your recruiting criteria.

Scheduling – If you’re scheduling internal interviews with busy stakeholders, they might not have time to schedule meetings and interviews, which could cause the overall schedule to slip. Similarly, if stakeholders are unable to provide feedback on key milestones it could also result in timeline slippage. A mitigation strategy in this case could be to ensure their is a governance structure in place. Assign a final decision maker who will ensure they have enough bandwidth/availability throughout the project to provide feedback.

Potential Resource Changes – This is a risk that applies most often to longer term projects, but in the case that someone leaves the team and needs to be replaced, how will you ensure the project runs smoothly and keeps going? Knowledge continuity and sharing is key – keeping files organized early on and documenting as much as possible are both great mitigation strategies.

Scope creep – This is a common risk when you get into a research project! Often times you’ll set out to do a certain number of interviews and observations, but once you start collecting data, you realize you need a bit more research or work to be done. This is where you can get into “scope creep”. Some ways to help this are to pad the project with additional time in the schedule and additional budget. Also, try to make sure that all team members and stakeholders are clear from the beginning on what activities and deliverables are in scope and which fall out of scope.

Finally, we like to put these together in a nice clear table. Share these with project stakeholders prior to starting the research, discuss the mitigation strategies with them, and then add or edit the table based on their feedback. This way everyone is on the same page from the outset, and when these issues come up (which inevitably, they will!) you’ll have already planned for them! This means less drama among team members and stakeholders. Whew!

There are many moving parts in the planning and preparation of conducting discovery research. From kicking off the process and writing a strong UX research plan, to recruiting for research and developing mitigation strategies, there is no shortage of hard work! We hope the details of this blog post make the entire process feel a little less daunting. And trust us, the benefits of properly laying the groundwork for discovery research will become very clear in no time. Happy researching everyone!

Resources we like…

What’s the worst that could happen? Reducing risk through user research

Creating a User Research Plan (With Examples!)

How to Find Things and Do Research in a Discovery Phase

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The 5 elements of UX design explained

The 5 elements of UX design act as a guide for every designer but what are they? And how do we implement them into our work? In our guide, we explain how and why UX designers should include them in their design process.

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The goal of any user experience project is to ensure users have a positive experience with a product. Yet, between the initial idea and the polished final product rests a complex web of decisions that impact the user experience in big and small ways. To provide structure and direction to the process of making these decisions –  and to ensure each decision is made at the appropriate point in the process – the 5 elements of UX design act as a guide for every designer.

These 5 elements of UX design were first introduced to us by innovative user experience designer Jesse James Garrett, who wrote a book called The Elements of User of Experience . In it, he explains the steps user experience projects should go through, as well as the issues UX designers should consider at each step.

Because his book was published in 2002, well before the first smartphone was released, Garrett’s ideas were specific to user experiences designed for websites. However, his elements turned out to align so well with the process of creating smart, well-considered user-centric designs, they can be used as a framework for any project that requires a satisfying, cohesive user experience.

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The 5 elements of UX design

As can be seen in the diagram below, the 5 elements of user experience exist on 5 separate planes, each one stacked on top of the previous one to create an outline of the process UX teams can follow for every new project they design. From bottom to top those planes are strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface. Each one builds on the next as the project goes from abstract to increasingly more concrete until arriving at the finished product. In addition, each plane requires meeting different goals or completing different tasks.

Let’s look at each plane in more detail.

The bottom plane of the model is Strategy. As the most abstract and least constrained part of the project, this is where decisions should be made about what objectives the product should be designed to meet. These objectives should include the goals that both the clients and stakeholders behind the product want to meet and the goals of the users, who will eventually look to the product to solve specific problems for them.

For example, let’s say we’ve been hired to build an app that helps people find charging stations for electric cars. On the one hand, we must be sure to meet the product objectives, which in this case would be goals such as, “Informing electric car owners of the nearest place to charge their cars”.

On the other hand, we need to meet user needs if we want users to come to our app for information. That means we need to understand what goals users would have when using the app, which we can discover through user research . In this case, we might want to learn if users would want our product to provide directions to the nearest charging station, information about how many chargers are available there and how much it costs to charge a car at each listed charging station.

After deciding on the strategy, the scope of the product can be determined and laid out in detail. It’s here that all a product’s features are decided upon, including the information that users can find and the functionality that users can interact with. On this plane, the UX team will create a set of functional specifications that identifies and describes every single feature of the product and a list of content requirements that identifies every single piece of content that will be included.

For instance, in our car charger finding app, on the functional specifications side we might want to include a feature to save previously discovered charging stations in our functional specifications. Meanwhile, in our content requirements we might list information like images of each charging station, maps of their locations, and details about the voltage of each available charger.

[GET CERTIFIED IN USER RESEARCH]

Once the scope of the product has been outlined, it’s time to start working on the structure. This is where each element of navigation will be decided, including where in the product each page can be found and where users can go after arriving at a given page. This involves defining the interaction design and information architecture of the product.

On the interaction design side, we need to decide how users will interact with the site and how the system will respond, including what will happen if errors are made. This can be conveyed through conceptual models that explain each part of the user interface – usually in a flow chart format – that defines what users can do and how the product will react to each potential choice the user makes.

On the information architecture side, we need to structure the content the product offers in a way that makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. This can be conveyed through documents like site maps that outline the hierarchy and pattern of each part of the product.

For example, to convey the structure of our electric car charger finder app, we might create a site map that shows the hierarchy of the product. This could include a home page where users can enter a location to find car charging stations. This could then lead to a list of stations each with a link that takes users to pages for individual stations.

In addition, we could also create a user flow where we show how the system responds after a user enters their location information. It can account for what happens if the system finds nearby charging stations and if there’s an error that prevents the system from successfully understanding the location information provided.

After deciding how the product will be structured, its skeleton can be designed. This entails deciding where the navigation and functional elements from the previous plane will go on each product page. It’s here that UX designers will make decisions about the product’s information design, creating wireframes and prototypes that arrange each part of the product, including the buttons, links, images and text. These are laid out in a way that ensures that users can quickly move through each page to find the information they need, while also understanding which elements of each page are interactive and which are not.

For instance, in our app, if we want to explain what users will see when they navigate to a page that describes a specific electric car charging station, we would create a wireframe that provides a blueprint of where each component of the page would go. Perhaps we have a header with the app logo and navigation back to the complete list of stations. This will be followed by an image of the charging station, followed by a link to a map of the location followed by text providing practical information about the station. This will help visualise each piece of functionality and content that will appear on the page and its placement.

The wireframes and prototypes created on the skeleton plane will be used on the surface plane – the top and most concrete plane – to create the final pages for the product. At this stage, we’re concerned with the users’ sensory experience. This includes how the colours and textures employed in the visual design help them understand how to navigate through and interact with the site, and how the presentation of content draws their eye to key information.

For our electric car charging app, this could mean creating a consistent colour palette and layout, where the logo appears at the top of the page, the most important information appears in a wide column in the middle of the page, and less important information is relegated to each side of the page. This layout anchors users with its consistent visual style while enabling them to easily find the information they’re seeking.

While the diagram above is a neat and tidy way of laying out the 5 elements of UX design, the reality is much messier. In an ideal world the work required for each plane would be wrapped up before tackling the next one. But in real life, you’ll work on more than one plane simultaneously and each decision made on one plane will impact every plane above it. As a result, you’ll want to finish work on each plane before work on the plane above it is completed. This will ensure that the decisions on each plane align with one another.

What does universal design have to do with the 5 elements?

According to the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design : “Universal Design is the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people, regardless of their age, size or disability.”

This doesn’t just mean we should design products, services and environments that take account of the needs of people with disabilities or other special requirements but that we should create designs with the needs of all users in mind so that our designs are accessible to as many people as possible.

The process of utilising the 5 elements is intended to help UX designers systematically consider and account for every user need and functionality requirement of each product. This should include considering the needs and requirements of people of all kinds.

For example, the users of our car charging finder app are owners of electric vehicles, however those owners are likely to encompass a wide range of ages and abilities. As a result, in using the 5 elements as a framework for designing the app, we should consider the wide range of users who might access it. In the process, we will also be practicing universal design.

What does design thinking have to do with the 5 elements?

Tim Brown, the Executive Chair of the design firm IDEO defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success”.

Like the 5 elements of UX design, design thinking is an approach to solving design problems that starts with working to understand the problem and ends with a final product. The intent of design thinking is to enable people to be as creative as possible while keeping the people a product is designed for at the centre of every decision, even as business requirements and the limitations and possibilities of technology are also considered.

In many ways, design thinking dovetails nicely with the 5 elements and both approaches share the same basic goals and perspectives. As a result, implementing the 5 elements is one way to practice design thinking, as long as the designers involved maintain an open-minded, user-centric approach to the design process, something all UX designers should strive for in every project.

Want to read more about UX design? Take a look at the 7 fundamental UX design principles that all designers should know. Or if you’re more into the psychology behind UX design, take a look at our post on UX personas and how to use them.

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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The UX researcher’s toolkit: 11 UX research methods and when to use them

After defining your objectives and planning your research framework, it’s time to choose the research technique that will best serve your project's goals and yield the right insights. While user research is often treated as an afterthought, it should inform every design decision. In this chapter, we walk you through the most common research methods and help you choose the right one for you.

What are UX research methods?

A UX research method is a way of generating insights about your users, their behavior, motivations, and needs.

These methods help:

• Learn about user behavior and attitudes
• Identify key pain points and challenges in the user interface
• Develop user personas to identify user needs and drive solutions
• Test user interface designs to see what works and what doesn’t

You can use research methodologies like user interviews, surveys, focus groups, card sorting, usability testing to identify user challenges and turn them into opportunities to improve the user experience.

More of a visual learner? Check out this video for a speedy rundown. If you’re ready to get stuck in, jump straight to our full breakdown .

The most common types of user research

First, let’s talk about the types of UX research. Every individual research method falls under these types, which reflect different goals and objectives for conducting research.

Here’s a quick overview:

Qualitative vs. quantitative

All research methods are either quantitative or qualitative . Qualitative research focuses on capturing subjective insights into users' experiences. It aims to understand the underlying reasons, motivations, and behaviors of individuals.

Quantitative research, on the other hand, involves collecting and analyzing numerical data to identify patterns, trends, and significance. It aims to quantify user behaviors, preferences, and attitudes, allowing for generalizations and statistical insights.

Qualitative research also typically involves a smaller sample size than quantitative research. Nielsen Norman Group recommends 40 participants—see our full rundown of how many user testers you need for different research methods .

Attitudinal vs. behavioral

Attitudinal research is about understanding users' attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs. It delves into the 'why' behind user decisions and actions. It often involves surveys or interviews where users are asked about their feelings, preferences, or perceptions towards a product or service. It's subjective in nature, aiming to capture people's emotions and opinions.

Behavioral research is about what users do rather than what they say they do or would do. This kind of research is often based on observation methods like usability testing, eye-tracking, or heat maps to understand user behavior.

Generative vs. evaluative

Generative research is all about generating new ideas, concepts, and insights to fuel the design process. You might run brainstorming sessions with groups of users, card sorting, and co-design sessions to inspire creativity and guide the development of user-centered solutions.

On the other hand, evaluative research focuses on assessing the usability, effectiveness, and overall quality of existing designs or prototypes. Once you’ve developed a prototype of your product, it's time to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. You can compare different versions of a product design or feature through A/B testing—ensuring your UX design meets user needs and expectations.

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11 Best UX research methods and when to use them

There are various UX research techniques—each method serves a specific purpose and can provide unique insights into user behaviors and preferences. In this section, we’ll highlight the most common research techniques you need to know.

Read on for an at-a-glance table, and full breakdown of each method.

1. User interviews

Tl;dr: user interviews.

Directly ask users about their experiences with a product to understand their thoughts, feelings, and problems

✅ Provides detailed insights that survey may miss ❌ May not represent the wider user base; depends on user’s memory and honesty

User interviews are a qualitative research method that involves having open-ended and guided discussions with users to gather in-depth insights about their experiences, needs, motivations, and behaviors.

Typically, you would ask a few questions on a specific topic during a user interview and analyze participants' answers. The results you get will depend on how well you form and ask questions, as well as follow up on participants’ answers.

“As a researcher, it's our responsibility to drive the user to their actual problems,” says Yuliya Martinavichene , User Experience Researcher at Zinio. She adds, “The narration of incidents can help you analyze a lot of hidden details with regard to user behavior.”

That’s why you should:

• Start with a wide context : Make sure that your questions don’t start with your product
• Ask questions: Always ask questions that focus on the tasks that users are trying to complete
• Invest in analysis : Get transcripts done and share the findings with your team

Tanya Nativ , Design Researcher at Sketch recommends defining the goals and assumptions internally. “Our beliefs about our users’ behavior really help to structure good questions and get to the root of the problem and its solution,” she explains.

It's easy to be misunderstood if you don't have experience writing interview questions. You can get someone to review them for you or use our Question Bank of 350+ research questions .

When to conduct user interviews

This method is typically used at the start and end of your project. At the start of a project, you can establish a strong understanding of your target users, their perspectives, and the context in which they’ll interact with your product. By the end of your project, new user interviews—often with a different set of individuals—offer a litmus test for your product's usability and appeal, providing firsthand accounts of experiences, perceived strengths, and potential areas for refinement.

2. Field studies

Tl;dr: field studies.

Observe users in their natural environment to inform design decisions with real-world context

✅ Provides contextual insights into user behavior in real-world situations ✅ Helps identify external factors and conditions that influence user experience ❌ Can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to conduct ❌ Participants may behave differently when they know they are being observed (Hawthorne effect)

Field studies—also known as ethnographic research—are research activities that take place in the user’s environment rather than in your lab or office. They’re a great method for uncovering context, unknown motivations, or constraints that affect the user experience.

An advantage of field studies is observing people in their natural environment, giving you a glimpse at the context in which your product is used. It’s useful to understand the context in which users complete tasks, learn about their needs, and collect in-depth user stories.

When to conduct field studies

This method can be used at all stages of your project—two key times you may want to conduct field studies are:

• As part of the discovery and exploration stage to define direction and understand the context around when and how users interact with the product
• During usability testing, once you have a prototype, to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution or validate design assumptions in real-world contexts

3. Focus groups

Tl;dr: focus groups.

Gather qualitative data from a group of users discussing their experiences and opinions about a product

✅ Allows for diverse perspectives to be shared and discussed ❌ Group dynamics may influence individual opinions

A focus group is a qualitative research method that includes the study of a group of people, their beliefs, and opinions. It’s typically used for market research or gathering feedback on products and messaging.

Focus groups can help you better grasp:

• How users perceive your product
• What users believe are a product’s most important features
• What problems do users experience with the product

As with any qualitative research method, the quality of the data collected through focus groups is only as robust as the preparation. So, it’s important to prepare a UX research plan you can refer to during the discussion.

Here’s some things to consider:

• Write a script to guide the conversation
• Ask clear, open-ended questions focused on the topics you’re trying to learn about
• Include around five to ten participants to keep the sessions focused and organized

When to conduct focus groups

It’s easier to use this research technique when you're still formulating your concept, product, or service—to explore user preferences, gather initial reactions, and generate ideas. This is because, in the early stages, you have flexibility and can make significant changes without incurring high costs.

Another way some researchers employ focus groups is post-launch to gather feedback and identify potential improvements. However, you can also use other methods here which may be more effective for identifying usability issues. For example, a platform like Maze can provide detailed, actionable data about how users interact with your product. These quantitative results are a great accompaniment to the qualitative data gathered from your focus group.

4. Diary studies

Tl;dr: diary studies.

Get deep insights into user thoughts and feelings by having them keep a product-related diary over a set period of time, typically a couple of weeks

✅ Gives you a peak into how users interact with your product in their day-to-day ❌ Depends on how motivated and dedicated the users are

Diary studies involve asking users to track their usage and thoughts on your product by keeping logs or diaries, taking photos, explaining their activities, and highlighting things that stood out to them.

“Diary studies are one of the few ways you can get a peek into how users interact with our product in a real-world scenario,” says Tanya.

A diary study helps you tell the story of how products and services fit into people’s daily lives, and the touch-points and channels they choose to complete their tasks.

There’s several key questions to consider before conducting diary research, from what kind of diary you want—freeform or structured, and digital or paper—to how often you want participants to log their thoughts.

• Open, ‘freeform’ diary: Users have more freedom to record what and when they like, but can also lead to missed opportunities to capture data users might overlook
• Closed, ‘structured; diary: Users follow a stricter entry-logging process and answer pre-set questions

Remember to determine the trigger: a signal that lets the participants know when they should log their feedback. Tanya breaks these triggers down into the following:

• Interval-contingent trigger : Participants fill out the diary at specific intervals such as one entry per day, or one entry per week
• Signal-contingent trigger : You tell the participant when to make an entry and how you would prefer them to communicate it to you as well as your preferred type of communication
• Event-contingent trigger : The participant makes an entry whenever a defined event occurs

When to conduct diary studies

Diary studies are often valuable when you need to deeply understand users' behaviors, routines, and pain points in real-life contexts. This could be when you're:

• Conceptualizing a new product or feature: Gain insights into user habits, needs, and frustrations to inspire your design
• Trying to enhance an existing product: Identify areas where users are having difficulties or where there are opportunities for better user engagement

TL;DR: Surveys

Collect quantitative data from a large sample of users about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction with a product

✅ Provides a broad overview of user opinions and trends ❌ May lack in-depth insights and context behind user responses

Although surveys are primarily used for quantitative research, they can also provided qualitative data, depending on whether you use closed or open-ended questions:

• Closed-ended questions come with a predefined set of answers to choose from using formats like rating scales, rankings, or multiple choice. This results in quantitative data.
• Open-ended question s are typically open-text questions where test participants give their responses in a free-form style. This results in qualitative data.

Matthieu Dixte , Product Researcher at Maze, explains the benefit of surveys: “With open-ended questions, researchers get insight into respondents' opinions, experiences, and explanations in their own words. This helps explore nuances that quantitative data alone may not capture.”

So, how do you make sure you’re asking the right survey questions? Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal, says that when planning online surveys, it’s best to avoid questions that begin with “How likely are you to…?” Instead, Gregg says asking questions that start with “Have you ever… ?” will prompt users to give more specific and measurable answers.

Make sure your questions:

• Are easy to understand
• Don't guide participants towards a particular answer
• Include both closed-ended and open-ended questions
• Respect users and their privacy
• Are consistent in terms of format

To learn more about survey design, check out this guide .

When to conduct surveys

While surveys can be used at all stages of project development, and are ideal for continuous product discovery , the specific timing and purpose may vary depending on the research goals. For example, you can run surveys at:

• Conceptualization phase to gather preliminary data, and identify patterns, trends, or potential user segments
• Post-launch or during iterative design cycles to gather feedback on user satisfaction, feature usage, or suggestions for improvements

6. Card sorting

Tl;dr: card sorting.

Understand how users categorize and prioritize information within a product or service to structure your information in line with user expectations

✅ Helps create intuitive information architecture and navigation ❌ May not accurately reflect real-world user behavior and decision-making

Card sorting is an important step in creating an intuitive information architecture (IA) and user experience. It’s also a great technique to generate ideas, naming conventions, or simply see how users understand topics.

In this UX research method, participants are presented with cards featuring different topics or information, and tasked with grouping the cards into categories that make sense to them.

There are three types of card sorting:

• Open card sorting: Participants organize topics into categories that make sense to them and name those categories, thus generating new ideas and names
• Hybrid card sorting: Participants can sort cards into predefined categories, but also have the option to create their own categories
• Closed card sorting: Participants are given predefined categories and asked to sort the items into the available groups

Card sorting type comparison table

You can run a card sorting session using physical index cards or digitally with a UX research tool like Maze to simulate the drag-and-drop activity of dividing cards into groups. Running digital card sorting is ideal for any type of card sort, and moderated or unmoderated sessions .

Read more about card sorting and learn how to run a card sorting session here .

When to conduct card sorting

Card sorting isn’t limited to a single stage of design or development—it can be employed anytime you need to explore how users categorize or perceive information. For example, you may want to use card sorting if you need to:

• Understand how users perceive ideas
• Evaluate and prioritize potential solutions
• Generate name ideas and understand naming conventions
• Learn how users expect navigation to work
• Decide how to group content on a new or existing site
• Restructure information architecture

7. Tree testing

Tl;dr: tree testing.

Evaluate the findability of existing information within a product's hierarchical structure or navigation

✅ Identifies potential issues in the information architecture ❌ Focuses on navigation structure, not visual design or content

During tree testing a text-only version of the site is given to your participants, who are asked to complete a series of tasks requiring them to locate items on the app or website.

The data collected from a tree test helps you understand where users intuitively navigate first, and is an effective way to assess the findability, labeling, and information architecture of a product.

We recommend keeping these sessions short, ranging from 15 to 20 minutes, and asking participants to complete no more than ten tasks. This helps ensure participants remain focused and engaged, leading to more reliable and accurate data, and avoiding fatigue.

If you’re using a platform like Maze to run remote testing, you can easily recruit participants based on various demographic filters, including industry and country. This way, you can uncover a broader range of user preferences, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of your target audience.

To learn more about tree testing, check out this chapter .

When to conduct tree testing

Tree testing is often done at an early stage in the design or redesign process. That’s because it’s more cost-effective to address errors at the start of a project—rather than making changes later in the development process or after launch.

However, it can be helpful to employ tree testing as a method when adding new features, particularly alongside card sorting.

While tree testing and card sorting can both help you with categorizing the content on a website, it’s important to note that they each approach this from a different angle and are used at different stages during the research process. Ideally, you should use the two in tandem: card sorting is recommended when defining and testing a new website architecture, while tree testing is meant to help you test how the navigation performs with users.

8. Usability testing

Tl;dr: usability testing.

Observe users completing specific tasks with a product to identify usability issues and potential improvements

✅ Provides direct insights into user behavior and reveals pain points ❌ Conducted in a controlled environment, may not fully represent real-world usage

Usability testing evaluates your product with people by getting them to complete tasks while you observe and note their interactions (either during or after the test). The goal of conducting usability testing is to understand if your design is intuitive and easy to use. A sign of success is if users can easily accomplish their goals and complete tasks with your product.

There are various usability testing methods that you can use, such as moderated vs. unmoderated or qualitative vs. quantitative —and selecting the right one depends on your research goals, resources, and timeline.

Usability testing is usually performed with functional mid or hi-fi prototypes . If you have a Figma, InVision, Sketch, or prototype ready, you can import it into a platform like Maze and start testing your design with users immediately.

The tasks you create for usability tests should be:

• Realistic, and describe a scenario
• Actionable, and use action verbs (create, sign up, buy, etc)

Be mindful of using leading words such as ‘click here’ or ‘go to that page’ in your tasks. These instructions bias the results by helping users complete their tasks—something that doesn’t happen in real life.

✨ Product tip

With Maze, you can test your prototype and live website with real users to filter out cognitive biases, and gather actionable insights that fuel product decisions.

When to conduct usability testing

To inform your design decisions, you should do usability testing early and often in the process . Here are some guidelines to help you decide when to do usability testing:

• Before you start designing
• Once you have a wireframe or prototype
• Prior to the launch of the product
• At regular intervals after launch

To learn more about usability testing, check out our complete guide to usability testing .

9. Five-second testing

Tl;dr: five-second testing.

Gauge users' first impressions and understanding of a design or layout

✅ Provides insights into the instant clarity and effectiveness of visual communication ❌ Limited to first impressions, does not assess full user experience or interaction

In five-second testing , participants are (unsurprisingly) given five seconds to view an image like a design or web page, and then they’re asked questions about the design to gauge their first impressions.

Why five seconds? According to data , 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website, so it;s essential to grab someone’s attention in the first few seconds of their visit. With a five-second test, you can quickly determine what information users perceive and their impressions during the first five seconds of viewing a design.

Product tip 💡

And if you’re using Maze, you can simply upload an image of the screen you want to test, or browse your prototype and select a screen. Plus, you can star individual comments and automatically add them to your report to share with stakeholders.

When to conduct five-second testing

Five-second testing is typically conducted in the early stages of the design process, specifically during initial concept testing or prototype development. This way, you can evaluate your design's initial impact and make early refinements or adjustments to ensure its effectiveness, before putting design to development.

To learn more, check out our chapter on five-second testing .

10. A/B testing

Tl;dr: a/b testing.

Compare two versions of a design or feature to determine which performs better based on user engagement

✅ Provides data-driven insights to guide design decisions and optimize user experience ❌ Requires a large sample size and may not account for long-term effects or complex interactions

A/B testing , also known as split testing, compares two or more versions of a webpage, interface, or feature to determine which performs better regarding engagement, conversions, or other predefined metrics.

It involves randomly dividing users into different groups and giving each group a different version of the design element being tested. For example, let's say the primary call-to-action on the page is a button that says ‘buy now’.

You're considering making changes to its design to see if it can lead to higher conversions, so you create two versions:

• Version A : The original design with the ‘buy now’ button positioned below the product description—shown to group A
• Version B : A variation with the ‘buy now’ button now prominently displayed above the product description—shown to group B

Over a planned period, you measure metrics like click-through rates, add-to-cart rates, and actual purchases to assess the performance of each variation. You find that Group B had significantly higher click-through and conversion rates than Group A. This indicates that showing the button above the product description drove higher user engagement and conversions.

Check out our A/B testing guide for more in-depth examples and guidance on how to run these tests.

When to conduct A/B testing

A/B testing can be used at all stages of the design and development process—whenever you want to collect direct, quantitative data and confirm a suspicion, or settle a design debate. This iterative testing approach allows you to continually improve your website's performance and user experience based on data-driven insights.

11. Concept testing

Tl;dr: concept testing.

Evaluate users' reception and understanding of a new product, feature, or design idea before moving on to development

✅ Helps validate and refine concepts based on user feedback ❌ Relies on users' perception and imagination, may not reflect actual use

Concept testing is a type of research that evaluates the feasibility, appeal, and potential success of a new product before you build it. It centers the user in the ideation process, using UX research methods like A/B testing, surveys, and customer interviews.

There’s no one way to run a concept test—you can opt for concept testing surveys, interviews, focus groups, or any other method that gets qualitative data on your concept.

*Dive into our complete guide to concept testing for more tips and tricks on getting started. *

When to conduct concept testing

Concept testing helps gauge your audience’s interest, understanding, and likelihood-to-purchase, before committing time and resources to a concept. However, it can also be useful further down the product development line—such as when defining marketing messaging or just before launching.

Which is the best UX research type?

The best research type varies depending on your project; what your objectives are, and what stage you’re in. Ultimately, the ideal type of research is one which provides the insights required, using the available resources.

For example, if you're at the early ideation or product discovery stage, generative research methods can help you generate new ideas, understand user needs, and explore possibilities. As you move to the design and development phase, evaluative research methods and quantitative data become crucial.

Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods.

How to choose the right user experience research method

In an ideal world, a combination of all the insights you gain from multiple types of user research methods would guide every design decision. In practice, this can be hard to execute due to resources.

Sometimes the right methodology is the one you can get buy-in, budget, and time for.

Gregg Bernstein , UX Researcher at Signal

UX research tools can help streamline the research process, making regular testing and application of diverse methods more accessible—so you always keep the user at the center of your design process. Some other key tips to remember when choosing your method are:

Define the goals and problems

A good way to inform your choice of user experience research method is to start by considering your goals. You might want to browse UX research templates or read about examples of research.

Michael Margolis , UX Research Partner at Google Ventures, recommends answering questions like:

• “What do your users need?”
• “What are your users struggling with?”
• “How can you help your users?”

Understand the design process stage

If your team is very early in product development, generative research —like field studies—make sense. If you need to test design mockups or a prototype, evaluative research methods—such as usability testing—will work best.

This is something they’re big on at Sketch, as we heard from Design Researcher, Tanya Nativ. She says, “In the discovery phase, we focus on user interviews and contextual inquiries. The testing phase is more about dogfooding, concept testing, and usability testing. Once a feature has been launched, it’s about ongoing listening.”

Consider the type of insights required

If you're looking for rich, qualitative data that delves into user behaviors, motivations, and emotions, then methods like user interviews or field studies are ideal. They’ll help you uncover the ‘why’ behind user actions.

On the other hand, if you need to gather quantitative data to measure user satisfaction or compare different design variations, methods like surveys or A/B testing are more suitable. These methods will help you get hard numbers and concrete data on preferences and behavior.

*Discover the UX research trends shaping the future of the industry and why the best results come from a combination of different research methods. *

Build a deeper understanding of your users with UX research

Think of UX research methods as building blocks that work together to create a well-rounded understanding of your users. Each method brings its own unique strengths, whether it's human empathy from user interviews or the vast data from surveys.

But it's not just about choosing the right UX research methods; the research platform you use is equally important. You need a platform that empowers your team to collect data, analyze, and collaborate seamlessly.

Simplifying product research is simple with Maze. From tree testing to card sorting, prototype testing to user interview analysis—Maze makes getting actionable insights easy, whatever method you opt for.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about testing methods, head on to the next chapter all about tree testing .

Get valuable insights from real users

Conduct impactful UX research with Maze and improve your product experience and customer satisfaction.

Frequently asked questions

How do you choose the right UX research method?

Choosing the right research method depends on your goals. Some key things to consider are:

• The feature/product you’re testing
• The type of data you’re looking for
• The design stage
• The time and resources you have available

What is the best UX research method?

The best research method is the one you have the time, resources, and budget for that meets your specific needs and goals. Most research tools, like Maze, will accommodate a variety of UX research and testing techniques.

When to use which user experience research method?

Selecting which user research method to use—if budget and resources aren’t a factor—depends on your goals. UX research methods provide different types of data:

• Qualitative vs quantitative
• Attitudinal vs behavioral
• Generative vs evaluative

Identify your goals, then choose a research method that gathers the user data you need.

What results can I expect from UX research?

Here are some of the key results you can expect from actioning the insights uncovered during UX research:

• Improved user satisfaction
• Increased usability
• Better product fit
• Informed design decisions
• Reduced development costs
• Higher conversion rates
• Increased customer loyalty and retention

Tree Testing: Your Guide to Improve Navigation and UX

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Ohio redistricting proposal vs. Iowa plan – some common elements, but also big differences

By: Jo Ingles | Statehouse News Bureau Posted on: Monday, August 12, 2024

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Statehouse News Bureau) — Gov. Mike DeWine has come out against the proposal on the fall ballot to change the way lawmakers’ district lines are drawn. He also touted Iowa’s redistricting process as one that should be used in the Buckeye State.

But backers of Citizens Not Politicians, the group supporting Ohio’s proposed amendment, said elements of that process in Iowa were included in the Ohio proposal.

While announcing his opposition to the redistricting amendment on the November ballot, DeWine asked voters to reject the Citizens Not Politicians amendment. That proposal would replace the seven members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, who are all elected officials, with a 15-member panel composed equally of Republicans, Democrats and independents, selected by judges in a detailed process. Voters passed amendments to allow the Ohio Redistricting Commission to approve maps for legislative and congressional districts in 2015 and 2018.

DeWine promised to work with Republican lawmakers next year to adopt a plan similar to the one used in Iowa.

“I believe the Iowa system provides us with an example of a system that takes politics out of map drawing. Map draws are under the Iowa plan, prohibited. They are prohibited from looking at past voting patterns. The Iowa system is clean. It is simple and has been used successfully to achieve the good government objectives that we all associate with true reform,” DeWine said.

He also warned that if the redistricting issue passes, “it will directly result in the worst gerrymandering we have ever seen.”

A closer look at the Iowa plan

Chris Larimer, professor of Political Science at the University of Northern Iowa, said that state’s redistricting system was first developed in the 1980’s because the previous method resulted in political fights over boundary lines. One of the key features is that partisan data can’t be considered when drawing districts.

Larimer said the process includes a nonpartisan legislative agency that draws maps largely based on population numbers, with an emphasis on compactness – keeping communities together as much as possible. And sometimes, he said, it causes a problem for some politicians.

“You know what happens every redistricting cycle is you get down to those state legislative districts, you have incumbents drawn into the same districts, sometimes incumbents of the same party, and they end up having to run against each other in a primary or they decide to move to another district,” Larimer said.

And Larimer explained that Iowa lawmakers still have the final say because they have to approve the maps or draw their own within certain parameters. But if they can’t agree on maps by Sept. 15, the Iowa Supreme Court creates them.

Redistricting experts weigh in

Independent groups that do research in redistricting widely regard Ohio’s current congressional and legislative maps as some of the most gerrymandered in the nation. Sam Wang is a redistricting expert with the non-partisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

He’s looked into whether he thought any plan like Iowa’s that involved the legislature could work in Ohio, where Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, control all elected statewide offices, and the majority of the seats on the Ohio Supreme Court.

“The temptation is overwhelming to self-deal. And it’s just really hard for any human, including a politician, to overcome that temptation,” Wang said.

“The Ohio plan that’s on the ballot this November comes the closest to being a silver bullet to getting to fair districting,” Wang said.

Simone Leeper is legal counsel on the redistricting team at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan government watchdog group founded by Trevor Potter, former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. Leeper’s group recently conducted a study and determined three factors that produce effective maps. She said the first thing is to remove politicians from the map-drawing process.

“So partisan politicians should not have a role in redistricting in order to ensure the best outcomes. You also will want a commission that has the full authority of redistricting, meaning that it is not an advisory commission where it makes a recommendation to a legislative body that can be ignored or overruled, and you will want to make sure there is a full transparent process where there are sufficient opportunities for public input.”

Leeper says the ballot measure before Ohio voters this November accomplishes those key goals and “it truly hits the mark as the gold standard for a redistricting commission.”

Citizens Not Politicians says amendment came from research

Chris Davey, a spokesman for Citizens Not Politicians, said the writers of the amendment did their homework and researched the existing redistricting plans, including Iowa’s.

“We systematically looked at all of the states that have successfully used a citizens commission model. And what we did was look at the best of what they had and what worked and took the stuff that didn’t work and left it aside and what we have developed here is something new,” Davey said. “It is developed by Ohioans for Ohio and we really think that this is going to become the national gold standard for how to do redistricting.”

Davey said the Iowa plan doesn’t work for one reason – it still keeps politicians in the process. He said his group’s plan would cut politicians out of the map-drawing process altogether. He noted one Democrat and one Republican who served on the redistricting commission that came up with the current maps are running unopposed in November.

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Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained

It is billed as a policy "wish list" for the next Republican president that would vastly expand presidential powers and impose an ultra-conservative social vision on the US.

Donald Trump has disavowed the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, though many of its authors worked for his previous administration.

Links between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 have been highlighted by the former president's critics, and this attack line will likely continue at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this month.

Here's your guide to what the document contains.

Who wrote Project 2025?

It is common for Washington think tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wish lists for potential governments-in-waiting.

The conservative Heritage Foundation first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was about to take office.

It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump won the presidency.

A year into his term, the think tank boasted that the Trump White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals.

The Project 2025 report was unveiled in April 2023, but liberal opposition to the document has ramped up now that Trump has extended his polling lead.

The Republican nominee himself has distanced himself from the proposal.

"I know nothing about Project 2025," he posted on his social media website, Truth Social. "I have no idea who is behind it.

"I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

But the team that created the project is chock-full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president.

Mr Dans left the project in late July, clearing the way for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to take over. He said he was leaving during the presidential election season in order to "direct all my efforts to winning, bigly".

Russell Vought, another former Trump administration official, wrote a key chapter in the document and also serves as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

More than 100 conservative organisations contributed to the document, Heritage says, including many that would be hugely influential in Washington if Republicans took back the White House.

The Project 2025 document sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

Here's an outline of several of its key proposals.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - a controversial idea known as "unitary executive theory".

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a "bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization". It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

What does the Republican party platform say?

The party platform includes a proposal to "declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees", pledges to slash regulation and government spending. But it stops short of proposing a sweeping overhaul of federal agencies as outlined in Project 2025.

Immigration

Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border - one of Trump's signature proposals in 2016 - is proposed in the document.

Project 2025 also proposes dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.

Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.

Not all of those details are repeated in the party platform, but the overall headlines are similar - the party is promising to implement the "largest deportation programme in American history".

What a Trump second term would look like

Climate and economy.

The document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas".

Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and energy security.

The paper sets out two competing visions on tariffs, and is divided on whether the next president should try to boost free trade or raise barriers to imports.

But the economic advisers suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.

The party platform does not go as far as Project 2025 in these policy areas. The platform instead talks of bringing down inflation and drilling for oil to reduce energy costs, but is thin on specific policy proposals.

Abortion and family

Project 2025 does not call outright for a nationwide abortion ban.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post.

The document suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".

On this issue at least, the document differs fairly substantially from the Republican platform, which only mentions the word "abortion" once. The platform says abortion laws should be left to individual states and that late-term abortions (which it does not define) should be banned.

It adds that that access to prenatal care, birth control and in-vitro fertilisation should be protected. The party platform makes no mention of cracking down on the distribution of mifepristone.

Tech and education

Under the proposals, pornography would be banned, and tech and telecoms companies that allow access would be shut down.

The document calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and takes aim at what it calls "woke propaganda".

It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including "sexual orientation", "gender equality", "abortion" and "reproductive rights".

Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on "woke" ideology.

Project 2025's proposals in this policy area are broadly reflected in the Republican platform, which in addition to calling for the abolishing the Department of Education, aims to boost school choice and parental control over education and criticises what the party calls the "inappropriate political indoctrination of our children".

Social Security

Although Heritage has long supported reforming the country's public pension plan, Project 2025 barely touches this third rail of American politics.

The platform says Social Security is a "lifeline" for millions of retired Americans and Republicans will "restore Economic Stability to ensure the long-term sustainability" of the programme.

The plan's future

Project 2025 is backed by a $22m (£17m) budget and includes strategies for implementing policies immediately after the presidential inauguration in January 2025.

Heritage is also creating a database of conservative loyalists to fill government positions, and a programme to train those new workers.

Democrats led by Jared Huffman, a congressman from California, have launched a Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

And many of the proposals would likely face immediate legal challenges from Trump's opponents if implemented.

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