Chapter 5: The Research Plan

Overview

Never research in a vacuum. Every piece of user research is part of an ongoing research program, even if that program is informal. Making it formal provides a number of advantages: it provides a set of goals and a schedule that stretches limited user research resources; it delivers results when they're needed most; and it avoids unnecessary, redundant, or hurried research. You should start working on a research plan as soon as you've decided to do any research at all, even if it's only a tiny usability test or some client visits. A well-structured research plan is also a communication tool that lets others in your company work with your schedule. It educates your colleagues about the benefits of user research and provides a forum for them to ask questions about their users and an expectation of the kind of knowledge the process can produce. But even if you don't show it to anyone, it will still prove invaluable in helping you figure out what to research when.

Note

These instructions present a somewhat idealized situation that starts with a blank slate as far as user experience product goals are concerned. This isn't the case for many projects, which may work with preexisting goals and processes. It's easier to enumerate goals in such projects, but it may be more difficult to create a unified vision of how research should be integrated with existing processes. Deborah J. Mayhew's The Usability Engineering Lifecycle and Hugh Beyer and Karen Holzblatt's Contextual Design describe a completely iterative development environment that thoroughly integrates experience research.

A research plan consists of three major parts: why you're doing the research (the goals), when you're going to be doing it (the schedule), and how much it's going to cost (the budget). These are in turn broken up into practical chunks such as report formats and timetables.