Write Kick@ss User Research Goals
Learn the Recipe for Goal-Setting Throughout Your Research Process
👋 Hey, Nikki here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free article ✨ of User Research Academy. Three times a month, I share an article with super concrete tips and examples on user research methods, approaches, careers, or situations.
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One of my favorite things to talk about is user research goals because I truly believe they are the foundation of successful user research projects.
When I first started as a user researcher, I had no idea how important goals would be to my research projects. Over time, I realized and recognized that they are (to me, at least) one of the most important indicators of success in a research project.
However, I also quickly learned that writing effective user research goals can be difficult. It took me a lot of practice to feel comfortable writing research goals in a way that made sense to me, the team, and for the overall study.
Why are Goals Important?
So many times, I have sat down to determine what should be in a research report, survey, dashboard, share out or…
And this is also a constant question in my membership.
I often find that whenever I am stuck, I haven’t fully defined the goals of whatever I’m trying to do. I also see this happen so much with other researchers I have worked with.
I can be easy to get deep into a project, making it so difficult to see the forest for the trees. You get stuck trying to find an answer, and it can be almost impossible to see that you need to take a step back and look at what you are trying to accomplish. One of my members, Harmony, and I talk about this very conundrum in a podcast episode about tooling.
I faced this very situation when I was trying to find research tools for my organization. I spent hours upon hours Googling different tools, comparing features, and writing up summaries of each platform. At the end of this process, I felt overwhelmed and dissatisfied. I hadn’t come up with some magic answer through my research and, instead, created more questions for myself.
In the end, I realized I had dove straight into researching the tools and hadn’t sat down to really think about the goals of this initiative. What was I trying to accomplish? What was the expected outcome? Once I asked those questions, not only was I able to narrow the scope of the initiative, but I focused on what I needed to make more informed decisions.
Goals give our projects and initiatives forward momentum and help us whenever we feel stuck at a certain point. When I started using a goal-first approach, I recognized a huge shift in my work:
My studies were more aligned with what stakeholders needed and everyone knew what the outcome of the study would be (fewer surprises or disappointments)
Stakeholders came to my presentations excited to learn because they knew what to expect
My research sessions were significantly more focused because I knew the information I needed to get from participants (while still leaving room for unknown unknowns, of course)
My workshops were extremely successful, and colleagues took action after them
Colleagues used my insights because they were directly related to a decision they were trying to make
I no longer had paralyzing doubt when trying to decide on the direction I needed to go on certain projects or deliverables
There was no longer this dread I could feel during my research projects when I was unsure if the outcome was what the stakeholders needed
When I truly consider and think about my goals, there is so much less head-banging and spinning my wheels. Goals make everything clearer and give you a solid direction for moving forward.
How to Include Research Goals in Your Process
I quickly learned (and was thrilled to understand) that defining goals goes beyond just user research studies. You can apply this goal-first mindset to almost every single part of your user research process, and it will help you ensure you are doing or including whatever you need to accomplish in an efficient and effective way.
As I mentioned above, I used this goal-first approach to help me with my user research tool initiative, and it didn’t stop there. I’ve become rather obsessed with always starting with the goals of something (even in my business!) and always reminding people that whatever they do, they can focus and get answers by defining goals.
Since I discovered the power of user research goals, I have used them in many different circumstances to help me feel confident about my decisions. In this article, I’ll walk you through a few different ways to incorporate goals into your process so you can benefit from this wonderful approach!
Research Studies
My research studies were the first and most obvious place I started thinking about goals. In the past, I conducted several projects in a row that led to relatively disappointing results — either the methodology didn’t get us the information we needed, or the research outcome wasn’t effective in helping teams make better decisions.
I thought this was just a painful part of the research process for a while, but something felt off. It didn’t seem like getting the right information should be a toss-up, and I was tired of disappointing my colleagues. I had done so much work trying to prove the value of research, and I didn’t want anything to undo that.
So, I investigated what might be going wrong to lead to such a mismatch. After some whiteboarding and stakeholder conversations, I discovered that my lack of goals (poorly written goals) hindered our research projects. Because this step in the process wasn’t as well-planned, we struggled to get the exact information we needed from the study.
As soon as I realized this, I started to think much more deeply about defining research goals in my studies. Not only did this lead to better alignment on the project, but I was also able to more confidently choose participants and proper methodologies.
P.S. Want to learn more about writing user research plans? Check out this super-detailed article.
Presentations or Reports
There were so many times when I asked myself the type of information I should include in a presentation or report; it is also a question I get asked often by my members and mentees.
Before I started to think about the goals of my reports and presentations, I would spend hours going around in circles, trying to guess which information to include and what to leave out.
I would get stuck in this cycle trying to figure out the information I needed to include in these presentations or reports and spend hours endlessly contemplating this. In the end, I guessed, and I often felt nervous walking into those meetings. Did I strike the right balance? Did I include what I needed to? Or did I include too much? Or maybe I missed something?
And my biggest question: how did I get people to care about the things I was talking about in these presentations?
Sometimes, I nailed it, but sometimes, my reports fell flat. It was the inconsistency that really frustrated me. So, similar to what I did with my research studies, I tried to figure out how to improve my reports and came to the same conclusion: defining the goals and outcomes.
Once I started thinking about the goals and outcomes of my reports and presentations, I felt more confident about what I presented and saw the difference in engagement. People actually cared more about what I spoke about, and I had more active discussions that led to action.
Deliverables
There are many deliverables, from personas to journey maps to dashboards to flows. It can become exhausting trying to understand which deliverable to choose and, on top of that, what information to include in said deliverable.
I used to employ the “go-with-the-flow” approach, where I simply picked a deliverable or created the deliverable stakeholders asked for. The problem with this was that there was very little (or no) intention behind the deliverable. That ultimately meant the end result fell flat and was rarely used in people’s work.
This happened to me several times before I realized I was facing the same problem as before. I would spend so much time and effort creating personas or journey maps only for colleagues to look at them once or twice and then leave them to the wayside. Something was missing from them, but I had no idea how to get people to use these deliverables.
Since I couldn’t avoid creating them forever (I tried, trust me), I had to fix this problem before I continued to lose confidence in my skills. Instead of moving forward with a certain deliverable without thinking about it, I started to define why I was creating it and what I wanted to accomplish with it. Then, I started asking my stakeholders the same thing.
With this approach, I gained insight into the goals behind the deliverables and the outcomes we all expected from them. Armed with this information, I could create deliverables that aligned with stakeholders’ needs that they actually wanted to use.
Workshops
Workshops are fundamental to activating your insights and helping your teams go from the problem to the solution space. I didn’t think about my workshop goals for a long time. I just ran them because I was supposed to run them.
But, as you might imagine, this was disappointing for everyone. When people came to my workshops, they weren’t clear on the goals or the outcomes of the workshop, and my sessions lacked focus. In the end, there wasn’t a clear resolution.
People stopped coming to my workshops because they felt unstructured, and I got feedback that they were a waste of time. I was devastated. Workshops are a key soft skill for researchers, and I was terrified this would hold me back from leveling up in my career.
I went back to the drawing board and took the time to plan why I was running my next workshop. At first, I blanked, unsure why I had ever run workshops — I wasn’t used to thinking about this. However, I started to ask myself what I was trying to accomplish, what I wanted participants to get out of it, and what I wished the outcome would be. These helped me define my why and create more effective and impactful workshop sessions.
How to Write Research Goals
Writing goals takes practice and patience, especially if you haven’t deeply thought of them in the past. I remember trying to develop goals for different parts of my process, and I felt overwhelmed. I started to question everything, including my skills. Why did I do anything? Why this method? Why that report structure? Why, why, why?
Eventually, I took a deep breath and started asking myself different questions, and on top of that, I asked other people these same questions. With this mindset shift, I could better define goals without completely giving up on my user research career and becoming a bookstore owner (something I still want to do, though!).
I don’t want you to feel the same overwhelm (and, quite frankly, despair) I went through, so I will walk you through how I write goals for the different parts of my research process.
Avoid the Guessing Game
It’s really funny because, as researchers, we value asking questions so incredibly much. However, I frequently forgot to ask the most important people questions. And those were my stakeholders. I see this happening to other researchers as well. We tend to forget that our stakeholders are our users as well.
Instead, we try to guess and read minds, asking ourselves what we believe our stakeholders might want or need. I had to laugh out loud when I realized I was doing this. I’d spent years telling my stakeholders not to assume or guess what users were thinking only to understand I was doing the same exact thing!
So, from there on out, I started to include my stakeholders in this process, asking them questions that would help me define and align (what a great rhyming mechanism!). Depending on what I was doing, I tailored my questions for each part of the process. These questions include:
Information-gathering
What information do you need at the end of the project? Why?
What information do you need in the presentation/deliverable/report? Why?
What are the top three questions you need to be answered? Why are those your top three questions?
What is your number one gap in knowledge?
Decision-making
What decisions do you want to be able to make by the end of the project?
What decisions do you want to be able to make based on the deliverable?
Who will use this presentation/deliverable/report?
Expected outcomes:
What is the ideal outcome of this project?
What is the ideal outcome of this presentation/deliverable/report?
What is the number one thing you will do with the information?
Tracking success:
What is your definition of success for this project?
How does this project relate to any organizational/business goals?
What metrics are you using to define the success of this project?
How would you describe the success of this deliverable/report/presentation?
After asking these questions, I then ask them to fill out this mad-lib exercise:
I need [information] to understand [proposed research goal] to make [decision] that will impact [team/organizational goal]. Then, by the end of the study/workshop, I need [ideal outcome].
By gathering all this information up-front, you are ready to create goals that get everyone what they need and give clear focus to your study.
For Research Studies:
When it comes to writing goals for research studies, it is especially important to include your stakeholders whenever possible by asking them the above questions. Including them ensures you get the outcome they need and also helps you immensely with choosing the correct participants and methodology.
For research studies, I break up the goal-writing process into two parts:
A research statement
Research goals
A research statement is what you are trying to learn about users at a high level. Here is a model you can use:
We want to better understand how users [think about/make decisions on/interact with] [subject of research/ product] to [create/improve] [product/website/app/service].
This statement gives one or two sentences that describe what the overarching project is about. It is important to solidify this statement because it helps you to create your research goals.
Research goals directly relate to your research statement because they are the more in-depth areas you want to explore in your research statement that will help you answer what you are trying to learn. Your research goals should address what you want to learn and how you will study the research statement.
These goals are the things you want to be able to gather information about by the end of the study. They aren’t posed as questions, but you want to be able to “answer” them in the sense of getting enough data to feel comfortable making decisions. Below are some models you can use for creating research goals.
Common generative research goals:
Discover people’s current processes/decision-making about [research subject], and how they feel about the overall experience.
Learn about people’s current pain points, frustrations, and barriers about [current process/current tools] and how they would improve it.
Understand what [research subject] means to people (how they define it) and why it is important to them.
Common evaluative research goals:
Evaluate how people are using a [product/website/app/ service].
Evaluate how people are currently interacting with a [product/ website/app/service].
Uncover the current tools people are using to [achieve goal], and their experience with those tools. Uncover how they would improve those tools.
These definitely aren’t all the goals you could have, but they can give you a structure and a jumping-off point for writing your research goals. If you’re having a hard time creating research study goals, you can ask yourself and your stakeholders these questions:
What do we want to learn about [research topic]?
What type of experiences do we want to learn about?
What information do we want at the end of the study?
What decisions are we trying to make by the end of the study, and what can help us make those decisions more confidently?
Research Study Goal Examples
Here are two examples of research study goals:
Example one:
Research statement: We want to understand better how users currently find content through the Merchant Portal in order to understand how to improve the experience for them (through a search functionality or otherwise)
Goals:
Discover how users currently search through content within the Merchant Portal
Uncover users’ pain points when it comes to finding content within the Merchant Portal
Identify how users think about search and their unmet needs when it comes to finding content within the Merchant Portal
Example two:
Research statement: We want to understand better how users interact with sustainable choices within our platform to create an experience that aligns with their needs and mental models
Research goals:
Evaluate how participants interact with the sustainability prototype
Uncover any pain points or confusion participants encounter when interacting with the prototype
Uncover other current tools participants use to understand their sustainability when choosing travel options
I recommend, for each study, having no more than three goals. I’ve found that going over three goals increases the scope and makes it hard to get in-depth information on each goal.
For Presentations or Reports
It used to take me hours just to figure out what to put in my user research reports or presentations. I used to want to scream, staring at a blank page for what felt like ever, constantly asking myself what I could do to get people to care about my report.
After some time, I decided to take a step back and assess my research reports, like a retrospective on how I put them together. I mainly did this because I felt my reports had become dull and dry, causing people to yawn or disengage. This was the last thing I wanted. I needed colleagues to be engaged and get excited about my research findings, not take a snooze during my presentation.
I returned to the basics and asked myself, “Why should they care about this presentation/report?”
My simple answer was that it should help them make decisions.
That was an ah-ha moment for me. I used to organize my reports and presentations by themes (which I still occasionally do), but I decided to try a slightly different approach. I went straight to answering the research goals aligned on at the beginning of the project. The incredible impact of this structure was that it directly answered what the stakeholders needed to know.
Let’s say the research goals were to:
Understand people’s current mental models around deciding on where to travel next
Discover pain points behind deciding on where to travel
Identify the tools people currently use when getting inspired and deciding on where to travel to next
So, instead of grouping by themes, I would structure it like:
Research goal one title
Finding one directly related to the research goal
Evidence of finding one
Finding two directly related to the research goal
Evidence of finding two
Finding three directly related to the research goal
Evidence of finding three
Whenever I use this structure to present my reports, people tend to be more engaged because the information in the report is directly related to what they care about and what can help them make better decisions.
If you aren’t necessarily presenting to a specific team or presenting a research report, you can ask yourself (and your audience) the following questions to help you define your presentation goals:
Who is the audience?
What do they care about?
What decisions are they trying to make? What are the top three pieces of information to help them move forward in that decision?
What is the number one thing you want them to take away from the presentation?
What is the number one thing you want them to do after the presentation?
What is your ideal outcome of the presentation? What is their ideal outcome?
Why would they care about coming to this presentation?
If I were presenting to high-level executives, some of my goals might include:
Communicate the top three findings that impact the most relevant business metrics they care about
Get an idea of prioritization based on the research findings from a business perspective
Get buy-in for additional research studies and budget by presenting research's impact on teams and the organization
Always think about these goals because they will give you a structure of what you need to include and what you are asking participants to act on during or at the end of the presentation, making it more inspiring and clear.
P.S.: If you are struggling to write insights, look at this step-by-step guide on how to write impactful UXR insights.
For Deliverables
How many times has a stakeholder come to you asking for a particular deliverable? I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been asked to create personas, journey maps, mental models, or Jobs to be Done. And one of the worst things I’ve done is agree and move forward without getting context. It always resulted in the deliverables dying with a dusty cover. Or colleagues looking at the deliverables with confused expressions.
Although I did my best to avoid creating most deliverables for a while (that was interesting and funny), I couldn’t avoid them forever, and eventually, I had to create another set of personas. I didn’t want it to end up the same as before, so I knew I had to approach it differently.
The next time a stakeholder came to me with an idea for a deliverable, I asked:
What decisions are you trying to make with the deliverable?
What type of information are you looking for?
How does the team best digest information?
What’s the ideal outcome of this deliverable?
What kind of visuals/deliverables have been helpful in the past? Why have they been helpful?
Using this combination of information, I created goals that led me to a completely different deliverable than the one the stakeholder had requested. Originally, the stakeholder asked me to create a persona, but when I probed for information, I found they needed:
An understanding of how people thought about a certain process
The areas/gaps where the product wasn’t supporting users in their tasks/needs
The features that we should de-prioritize because they weren’t helping users
With this, I knew a persona inherently wouldn’t help the team with what they needed. Personas are much more geared toward building a deeper understanding of people’s needs, goals, and pain points, and can help us prioritize roadmaps and future work.
Initially, I was stuck. So I took their needs and created them into goals:
Communicate the process people go through when ordering meal kits, including how they feel about the process
Visualize where our product isn’t helping users and the tasks users are doing without our support
Highlight the necessary features of our users and those that aren’t being used in people’s process of ordering meal kits
With this, I quickly realized that a mental model diagram would be the perfect fit for the needs of this project. I then reversed-engineered the deliverable goals into study goals and aligned with the team to make sure this all made sense. It did, and guess what? They loved the mental model diagram.
So, when you are trying to choose a deliverable, always talk to your stakeholders to understand what they need and then use that to create your deliverable goals — it will help save you a huge headache!
For Workshops
Whatever the topic, I always create goals for my workshops and share them with my audience. Whenever I have been super transparent and up-front in my workshops about what people can expect, I’ve got much more out of the session. If people know what you need, they are better equipped to participate in a helpful way.
Whenever I am creating goals for my workshop, I start by asking myself:
What do I want people to get out of this workshop?
What do I want to achieve by the end of the workshop?
What action do I want to have done within or at the end of the workshop?
What is the ideal outcome of the workshop?
For me, workshops typically fall into one of the following themes:
Create or innovate on new ideas based on problem statements from research
Assess current ideas to identify problems before launch
React to research findings or post-launch learnings
Each of these themes has goals that also correspond with different activities.
Create or Innovate on New Ideas
A workshop within this theme would aim to:
Generate a specific amount of ideas to test
Come together to solve complex user problems
Find the unknown unknowns
Gain a deeper understanding of pain points and how to solve them
With this in mind, you would pick activities that would help us achieve these goals. Some activity examples would be:
Empathy mapping
How Might We statements
Crazy 8's
Assess Existing Ideas
You can use theme after the team has created a prototype or concept. The goals for this theme are:
Identify and solve problems in ideas before they launch
Get critical and early feedback from users
Come together to create a better solution
Create a specific number of new ideas to tes
When trying to get feedback on the prototype or concept within a workshop, you can try the following activities:
Method 6-3-5
Usability speed testing
Do, undo, redo
React to Research or Post-Launch Findings
Sometimes, you need a workshop to give your research that extra attention. At least, I know I do. Often, a report is insufficient, so holding a workshop to unite people is a great way to utilize your insights.
Some of the goals for these workshops include:
Maintain launched products (ex: usability issues, customer support)
Gain a deeper understanding of your user
Create deliverables together
For these workshops, there are several different activities you could use based on the goal:
Maintain launched products → Gathering issues across departments and prioritizing them via the RICE model (rather than dot voting) OR reviewing an opportunity gap survey
Gain a deeper understanding of your user → Reviewing research plus How Might We statements
Create deliverables together → Persona generation, journey mapping
P.S.: Check out this article for more in-depth ways to activate your research insights!
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