UX Research Strategy & Methodology

Strategy is the approach you take to achieve a goal. UX research strategy is a plan to incorporate various research methods into your design process.

Many product teams don't do any UX research and rely on their "gut feeling," citing budget and time constraints. Others do surveys and interviews of their co-workers, friends, and family, introducing bias to their findings. Such approaches often result in time and money wasted or a project that doesn't satisfy users.

Having a UX research strategy allows you to create a product that users need and save your team's efforts along the way. UX research strategy helps you:

• Reinforce the importance of research and get stakeholders on board
• Set research goals (are you making a new product or trying to improve an existing one?)
• Account for time and budget for UX research during project planning
• Integrate UX research into your design process
• Decide which research methods should be used at each stage
• Successfully implement your research findings

To build a successful UX research strategy, you must understand your research stakeholders — the people your research will impact. While stakeholders can vary from project to project, they can be broadly categorized as:

• Leaders: The people who lead teams that will be affected by the research. For example, the VP of Design might want to know the viability of a new UX flow, or a senior engineer might want to test a new prototype.
• Implementers: The people who will be building the things you learn about through research. For example, a junior engineer who will build a feature or a product designer who will create new designs based on your findings.
• C-level people: High-ranking executives who hold power to authorize or stop the research. They likely have a lot of information on where your company is going and how much money it's willing to spend to get there.

The subject of your research depends on your goals, which could be to:

• Improve a process or workflow
• Better understand customer habits
• Evaluate concepts
• Test usability
• Refine a value proposition^[2]

Each reason requires using different research methods and asking different questions. For example, a shop-along or field study can be used to better understand customer shopping habits for marketing needs, etc.

For the research study to succeed, it's vital that stakeholders trust researchers, budget for it, and consistently consume and use its findings. To understand your stakeholders' needs, conduct stakeholder interviews. This knowledge, combined with your company's current state of research, will help you form ideas about what to research next.

UX strategy follows your product development cycle timeline. A good rule is to always do research early and often. The cost of fixing a problem post-development can be up to 100x that of fixing it beforehand.^[3]

The tests you need to run will differ depending on the stage:

• Discovery: At this stage, you need to learn about the market for your product and its potential users. Consider using methods like generative interviews, diary studies, ethnography, field studies, and focus groups.
• Validation and testing: At this point, you typically have a prototype to test. The goal now is to understand if your design works for users. Key methods to test this include qualitative usability testing, tree testing, first click testing, task analysis, A/B testing, and accessibility testing.
• Post-launch: Once you've launched your product, it's important to keep the research going to ensure that your solution is still working. You can track it with surveys like NPS or your product's analytics.

UX research plan is a document that defines your team’s key research goals and the strategy to reach them.

A UX research plan usually includes:

• Key research goals
• The most important questions you want to answer
• The research method
• The analysis method & research deliverables
• A timeline of when the studies will be executed

Some teams use Gantt charts to create timelines, while others prefer Miro or Figma boards.

After creating the research plan, meeting with your stakeholders and sharing your plan is considered the best practice. This will assure them that you take their needs into account, keep them invested in the outcomes, and get their feedback.^[4]

Lean UX is a collaborative, iterative way of designing and building products used in agile environments. It breaks a project into short, rapid cycles where features are quickly created, tested, and improved.

Lean UX research is a "quick and dirty" approach to traditional UX research. It starts with the assumptions made by stakeholders. Once they agree on a direction, a rough prototype helps validate the idea with customers. This approach doesn’t require many resources.

Some research methods include:

• Guerilla research: Meet your users in their environment (a cafe, a train station, etc.) to test your prototype.
• Online questionnaires and surveys: Collect information from a broad audience for minimal cost.
• Remote usability sessions: This is a great solution for teams with a limited budget or for testing products whose users are geographically dispersed.^[5]

One of the main differences between lean UX research and other research methods is making assumptions. In traditional research, we avoid assuming anything about users. Instead, we study them and present our findings as detailed deliverables. This information determines how the design process will be conducted.

Lean UX is slightly different because the focus is to improve the product here and now. For example, you've noticed that users of an e-commerce site switch back and forth between the product details page and the basket page to edit their selected size, and many leave the website without purchasing.

Start with a problem statement that follows the pattern: "[A user] needs [need] to accomplish [goal]." For example, "A user needs to understand our shoe size system to buy shoes of the right size."

The next step is to get the team together to brainstorm possible solutions — make assumptions. For example, an assumption might be: "Adding a link to the sizing guide to the product details page will solve sizing uncertainty."

To test this assumption, create a hypothesis. "Adding a link to the sizing guide will increase customers' progress from the basket to checkout." Determine what evidence you need to collect to prove your belief is true and start testing.

UX research for a new product focuses on getting users, addressing their problems and pain points, and onboarding them. User onboarding is the system of actively guiding users to find new value in your product. It can either make or break your product.

Duolingo is an example of successful user onboarding. They employ gradual engagement — postponing registration for as long as possible. This allows users to experience the benefit of the product before registering. The onboarding starts with a trial translation exercise that shows users how quick and easy it is to learn a new language. It ends with a signup form at the moment when users are ready to commit.

UX research for an existing product focuses on two main objectives:

• To retain existing customers: Understand where your users get stuck and switch to another brand. This will tell you what you can do differently to meet users' needs and outdo the competition.
• To grow the customer base: Conduct usability testing to uncover how users interact with the product and identify areas for improvement. Use these insights to optimize features. Additionally, run experiments to test innovative changes or new features that could increase the product's value.