Defining a good UX research flow and balance in terms of Effort VS Value
Problem space
The handbook page on UX research and the handbook page on ux-researcher-training does not yet give a good and guided overview of how to walk through the UX research flow as a Product Designer, Product manager, or UX researcher.
When we look at the Product Development Flow it documents this process in only a few lines for the problem validation phase and similarly for the solution validation phase:
- PM fills out a customer interview guide with a draft list of interview questions. You can find a good guide here.
- PM reviews customer interview guide and opportunity canvas with UX peers. UX Research can help craft interview questions and recruit candidates for interviews: request their help by following the UX research request process.
- PM and UX together conduct at least 5 interviews with target customers. Interview notes should be logged as an issue in the user interview project and labeled with relevant stages. (training video coming soon)
- PM and UX synthesize customer feedback using affinity mapping or other techniques.
When looking at what the process actually involves there is a related discussion to be found at ux-research#508 (comment 241710128). The following graph roughly displays which artifacts are to be generated at each step.
As you can see there are a lot of steps involved and artifacts to create/manage. This makes it so that doing research is not perse an easy process where we can quickly get results.
The experience level with UX research execution differs from person to person. Possible shortcuts and improvements which might be obvious to some are not that obvious to others.
Proposal
I propose the following:
- Documenting our UX research workflow in a guided manner similar to Product Development Flow will help to set PD's, PM's, and UX Researchers up for success in a standardized way.
- When we have this process documented we should look for ways to optimise, discover opportunities to make UX research lower in fidelity, higher on ROI, and eventually easier to do and more effective.