In the world of user research, planning isn’t just a vague concept – your studies require a clear, written plan. This serves as a compass that guides you toward uncovering valuable findings and insights for improving products, services, or experiences. 

At the heart of your research plan lies a crucial component: your user research goals. These goals drive the entire research process, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives and paving the way for meaningful outcomes. 

In this article, I share top tips on how to plan for successful user research studies, including setting goals, and asking effective research questions.

Planning user research

Below is the simple but highly-effective approach I take when conducting studies, and that I teach in my courses and team training sessions.

1. Hold a stakeholder kick-off

Engage key stakeholders in a collaborative discussion to gather context, understand their existing knowledge, identify related research, and prioritize key questions. Including stakeholders is key, as it ensures sure their commitment, buy-in, and subsequent actions based on the research findings.

2. Draft your research plan with solid goals

Leverage the valuable takeaways and context gathered from the kick-off to inform the initial draft of your research plan, including some variations of the research goal you discussed. Then, get feedback on these nuanced goals. When drafting goals, it's crucial to collaborate with stakeholders to make sure everyone is aligned.

The research question always comes first, and the research method follows.

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Setting effective user research goals

When formulating your research goals, keep the following characteristics in mind. Research goals should be:

• Specific: Clearly defined and focused.

• Actionable: Designed to drive action and inform decision-making.

• Ethical: Upholding ethical standards in research practices.

• Answerable via user research: Attainable through appropriate research methods (e.g. make sure this isn’t a market or marketing research question, or a question better suited for other sources or approaches).

• Complex enough to explore: Encouraging in-depth investigation rather than seeking a singular or simple answer.

• Right-sized: Neither too broad nor too narrow in scope.

• Passes the "who cares?" test: Promising to reveal interesting and valuable learnings that will be acted upon.

• Supports core business goals: Aligned with the organization's strategic objectives.

• Linked to key metrics or goals: Tied to the organization's success indicators such as OKRs, KPIs, or other metrics.

Successful research goals should also be user-focused, addressing both how and why questions related to the topic you’re exploring. They should aim to uncover learnings that have practical implications for product or service improvements.

Here are some examples of effective research goals:

• To identify why some people find it difficult to get started in X in order to identify roadblocks and opportunities for improvement.

• To explore how and when X and Y are used, to clarify messaging and market the differences and benefits of these two features.

When defining research goals, the verb "understand" is often used to express a desire for deep comprehension of a topic or issue. However, it's typically too broad and lacks the specificity needed for a clear, actionable goal. Instead, consider using more precise verbs such as "identify," "explore," "test," or "compare" to create focused and effective research objectives.

Crafting user research questions

To craft effective research questions that align with your goals, consider these key factors:

• Frequency: Focus on the daily or regular activities of prospects and users and how these behaviors inform your question.

• Goals/KPIs: Identify elements that directly or indirectly influence your key goals or KPIs, as well as areas where opportunities may arise.

• Unanswered questions: Explore areas where knowledge is lacking and you want to learn more about specific user groups or behaviors.

Avoiding bad research questions

Here are examples of poor research questions and why they fall short. 

"Will you/would you buy this product/service?" 

This question assumes a positive response and doesn't allow for honest, unbiased feedback. It can also seem pushy or sales-oriented. Additionally, asking about future behavior often leads to inaccurate answers, as people's intentions and predictions rarely match their actual actions due to changing circumstances, external influences, and personal biases.

Instead, your research should focus on understanding current behaviors, needs, and experiences to inform actionable insights and improvements.

"What features do you want in our product/service?"

This question places the responsibility of product design on participants, even though they lack the necessary context and expertise. Most participants are not product designers and aren’t familiar with your strategic goals, roadmaps, or competitive positioning. They also haven’t spent significant time thinking about the problem space, making their feedback less valuable.

Decision-making regarding product features should be based on a combination of inputs including user feedback, business goals, technical feasibility, staffing and resources, the competitive landscape, etc. 

"Are you satisfied with our customer service?"

This question is too simplistic and doesn’t explore the reasons behind satisfaction or dissatisfaction. To gain actionable insights, you need to ask follow-up questions that dig deeper into the specific aspects of the customer service experience.

"Do you like our product/service?"

This broad question lacks specificity and won’t yield useful insights. It’s also prone to biased responses based on personal preferences, rather than objective feedback that can guide improvements.

Asking broad questions is okay in discovery, but not when you’re looking for actionable evidence and insights. This question opens you up for subjective responses about personal preferences. It’s also limiting in that it doesn’t include specific areas of interest or concern, and the vagueness will likely result in general feedback, which typically isn’t helpful and is difficult to analyze. 

Aligning your user research goals and questions

Crafting a strong research question and goal requires a systematic approach, as they're closely linked. Here's how to align them effectively:

• Identify the topic of interest.

• Narrow down the topic focus.

• Explore various questions related to the narrowed-down topic.

• Select a question that aligns with your research goals.

• Draft variations of the question to gather feedback and refine nuances.

• Focus on the selected question to make sure it addresses the core of your research inquiry.

• Clarify why you’re researching this topic and how the findings will be applied.

By following this process, you can effectively plan your user research, set clear goals, align stakeholders, and uncover valuable evidence and insights to drive meaningful improvements.  

This article was authored by Michele Ronsen, Founder and CEO of Curiosity Tank. Michele is a user research executive, coach and educator. She teaches design and user research to people around the world. Her corporate trainings and workshops are inspired by working with Fortune 500s and start-ups for more than twenty years. Fuel Your Curiosity is her award winning, free, user-research newsletter. In 2020, LinkedIn honored Michele with a TopVoices award in the Technology category. She is the first and only researcher to receive this award.

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