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Ready to 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 find and schedule dog walkers.

We need to find out if the main user experience, finding and

scheduling a dog walker, 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 dog walker 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 and book a dog walker in the app?

And what can we learn from the user flow or

the steps that users take to book a dog walker?

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 dog walker.

So the KPI would be the percentage of users who book a dog walker.

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 and schedule a dog walker 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.

In addition, 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 are dog owners with

full-time jobs and who go out for activities more than once a week.

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.

To show you what I mean, let me tell you a true story.

In the 1936 United States presidential election,

Republican Alf Landon challenged the Democratic incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Literary Digest, one of the most respected magazines of the era, conducted

a poll of 2.4 million people to predict who would win the election.

With that large of a sample size,

you'd think the results would be pretty reliable, right?

You'd be wrong. The Literary Digest predicted Landon would beat Roosevelt,

with Landon taking 57% of the vote and Roosevelt taking 43%.

But on election day, Roosevelt scored a decisive win.

Landon gathered only 38% of the vote and Roosevelt took 62%.

So why was the Literary Digest prediction so inaccurate?

The problem was something called sample bias.

The Literary Digest selected its participants from contact info they found

in car registrations and telephone directories.

Can you spot the problem?

Let's break it down.

The majority of people who owned cars and telephones in 1936 were wealthy.

And at that time, many wealthy people tended to vote Republican.

That means that the sampling was biased in favor of Republicans.

So the prediction that Republican Alf Landon would win reflected that

sample bias.

So what does this teach us?

When conducting research, we need to choose study participants who

are representative of all our users, not just a select group.

You'll learn more about different types of biases later on.

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 book a dog walker in the app?

Now you know the seven elements of a research plan.

Coming up, we'll continue our journey and

dive into each of the seven elements in more detail.

We'll start by focusing on the first three elements: project background,

research goals, and research questions.

Let's cruise on over.