One of the tricks to making sure that I’ve designed the right study to learn what I need to learn is to tie everything together so I can be clear from the planning all the way through to the results report why I’m doing the study and what it is actually about. User research needs to be intentionally designed in exactly the same way that products and services must be intentionally designed.
What’s the customer problem?
It starts with identifying a problem that needs to be solved, and the contexts in which the problem is happening. This is a kind of meta research, I guess. From there, I can work with my team to understand deeply why we are doing the research at all, what the objective of the particular study is, and what we want to be different because we have done the research.
Why are you doing the study?
When the team shares understanding about why you’re doing the study and what you want to get out of it — along with envisioning what will be different because you will have done the study — forming solid research questions is a snap. You need research questions to set the boundaries of the study, determine what behaviors you want to learn about from participants, and what data you can reasonably collect in the constraints you have to answer your research questions.