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UX Research Report

In this guide we are going to explain how to create a good ux research report that will help to effectively communicate your findings to the team and stakeholders..

Last update 29.07.2024

The way you communicate your research findings often defines the whole future trajectory of your design process . You need to be informative , persuasive and show the true value of your study in order to actually get the suggested solution to be implemented. And for that, you need a good UX research report.

Let’s take a look at what a UX research report should contain, how to structure it effectively, what best practices to follow, and explore some great examples of user research reports from other companies. 

Key Takeaways:

➡️ UX research reports are an ultimate way to communicate research findings to teams and stakeholders

❗ They should be clear , concise and visually appealing to engage readers.

✅ You should tailor the report to the target audience’s understanding and needs.

🧠 User feedback , visuals , and artifacts enhance the report’s credibility and impact.

💡Templates and tools can streamline the report creation process and generate professional-looking reports.

For a quick summary of the article, check out our video guide: 

What is a UX research report? 

A UX research report is a document that communicates the findings, insights, background and proposed solutions of your UX research study. The primary goal of creating a UX research report is to present your findings in a clear and concise way, highlight critical problems that need to be solved and share your ideas on how to solve them. 

By creating a UX research report you’re ensuring that other teams and relevant stakeholders are informed about the current state of the research and the improvements that need to be done.

That’s why the quality of your report matters so much: it is often used as the main argument for convincing stakeholders to invest in UX .

UX report structure

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word report ? A long complex, almost too-official document that is extremely boring to read? Yes, some reports really do look like that. But it’s not the case for user research reports . 

You want your report to clearly present the key findings and message you want to communicate to your colleagues. That’s why the catch here is to make it as s tructured and straight to the point as possible. 

Here are the main sections your UX research report should include:

In this section you set the context for the whole report. Here you need to introduce the reader to the main problem , explain why the research was conducted and what was the initial state of the product. It’s also the section where you can describe the goals and objectives you’ve set for the study. 

Your job here is to give the reader all the background information about the research situation so that they have a clear idea of what you were trying to find out, how and why. 

Methodology

The next part of your UX research report is describing the research methodology that you chose for the study. Explain what research methods you used to gather information and why. Don’t forget to also briefly describe who were your study participants . 

Make sure to avoid professional jargon and using complex terminology in this section. You want everyone who reads the report to understand how the study was conducted. If any research terms need additional explanation, make sure to include it as well.   

Key Findings

This section should include the key takeaways of your research . What are the most important findings that you want to communicate to your team? Choose wisely and make sure to not clutter this section with unnecessary details and extra information. Make it short, sweet and straight to the point so that the readers remember it and understand the rest of your report.

To make the information in this section more valuable and easily-digestible, include user quotes from your testing, observations, or statistical data , depending on the research method. Supporting your key points with user feedback will help to grab readers attention and generate empathy . 

Opportunities & Recommendations

In this section you need to translate your insights and findings into actuable next steps to present to your product and design team as well as stakeholders. Make sure they tie back to the key takeaways you’ve described earlier and provide a clear path for moving forward with these solutions.

Define clear actions that you believe the team should take. This could be specific product design changes, opportunities or even a question that you need to conduct further research on. Whatever it is, think them through and come up with optimal potential solutions that will be in line with your available resources, time and budget.

How to write a UX research report

Now that you know how the UX research report should be structured, it’s time to put your knowledge to practice and create the report. This may seem frustrating, however, trust us, by following the 6 key steps below, you’ll produce the perfect UX research report to present your findings. 

Here’s how to write a UX research report in 6 steps:

1.) Define your goals

A clear objective does not only provide the roadmap for your research study in the research plan but also much-needed context for your findings. Define what you’re trying to achieve and what problem you’re aiming to solve. What information are you going to focus on in your report and what outcomes are you expecting? 

By figuring out answers to all those questions you’ll be able to avoid clutter in your report and get straight to the point.

2.) Understand your audience

You need to know exactly who is going to read your report and tailor the information accordingly . A report for the development team will look different from the one created for stakeholders with zero to no understanding of UX. 

By tailoring your tone of voice, wording and key information to appeal to the target audience of your report, you ensure that the message you’re trying to communicate will be successfully received and acted upon .

3.) Summarize

Go back to your research and look at the findings. You need to summarize it all in an easily-digestible format and only highlight the main information you’re trying to convey. While you may want to include every detail of your findings and research process, stop yourself, and focus on adding what’s really important and corresponds to the goals defined earlier. 

Define the key insights of your findings, clearly explain the methodology and background you’ve worked with and come up with actionable recommendations and next steps you’re going to communicate.

4.) Prove your points with user feedback

Add credibility to your findings and make the report more engaging by adding feedback from real users received during the research. This may include quotes, video recordings of them facing a certain problem with your product as well as specific metrics or data from surveys. 

This will help to prove your points and better explain the issues users face to those who are not familiar with the concept of UX. 

5.) Put it all together

The final step is to put together everything you’ve already done and create a structured UX research report. Focus on making your report not only informative, but also visually appealing and easy to read. You can either do it yourself or use one of the UX research report templates that we’ll talk about below.

6.) Use reports from UX research tools

Alternatively, you can make use of the PDF report feature that many modern UX research tools offer. 

Tools like UXtweak automatically generate customized visually appealing reports of the data obtained from the study and make it easy to share and present your findings.

Generate Custom PDF Reports of Your Findings with UXtweak!

Create an account and start researching today!

Tips for creating a perfect UX research report

Here’s a summary of the main tips we recommend to follow to make your UX research report even better:

• Include illustrations and graphs 
• Make it visually appealing
• Structure the information in a logical way
• Tailor the tone of voice and wording to fit the target audience of your report 
• Add videos and test recordings to better illustrate issues
• Generate user empathy by demonstrating artifacts such as storyboards, personas and journey maps
• Go straight to the point and avoid information clutter
• Consider including a glossary of key terms or concepts if necessary
• Include a table of contents for easier navigation

UX research report example

A UX research report can be formatted in different ways:

• Slack update
• Notion page

Let’s take a look at 2 UX research report examples to get a better idea of how they look. 

UX research report example from a UX research platform

The first one will be a sample UX research report example from one of UXtweak usability testing studies. This is a perfect demonstration of a report you can generate with the help of UX research tools available online.

These reports are usually generated automatically and include all the data and analytics from your study, as well as metrics calculated by the tool. Not all platforms offer this feature, however, with UXtweak you can always count on a visually-appealing custom report of your findings . 

Here are some examples of such reports from UXtweak:

Take a look at how these reports look in our demos:

🎯Website Testing Demo Report

✅Prototype Testing Sample Report

The only downside of such reports is they don’t include any information about the background of your study . However, you can always just take the data you need and include it in the full UX research report of your study. This will save an enormous amount of time, compared to analyzing the data yourself.

Full UX research report example in PDF

The second example is a more detailed UX research report of the study conducted for Marriott hotel chain. Although the report is detailed, it’s still very straight to the point and perfectly communicated the primary insights without overwhelming the reader with information . 

The report is done in PDF, however, it’s not a hard-to read long document with tons of text, but rather a clearly structured slide deck. The report includes quotes from users to support the key points, a clear list of main findings and recommendations.

UX research report templates

To finalize and provide you with some guidance for creating your own user research report we gathered some great UX research report templates! You can download, customize them and save time on creating your own!

1. User Research Report: Summary

A visually appealing free PDF user research report template in a form of slide deck that you can use to present your findings to the team.

📥 Get the template .

2. Usability Testing Report Template

A customizable report from Xtensio to present your usability testing findings in a digestible way. 

3. UX Research Report Template from Pitch

A report template with great design that you can customize in the Pitch app and use to present your findings to stakeholders.

📥 Get the template

4. Usability.gov UX Report Template

A great Word document template by industry experts – Usability.gov. You can download both short and long versions, depending on how formal you want your report to be.

5. Notion Research Report Template

Although this is specifically a usability testing report template, that’s a great example of how you can report UX research using Notion. Download and customize the template to fit with your research methods.

6. UXBoost UX Research Template

A slide deck UX research report by UXboost with great structure and visuals that you can customize! 

Wrapping up

And that’s a wrap on UX research reporting! You now have everything you need to create your own perfect report and present your findings to the team. 

The next step is to register for your UXtweak account and conduct the research! Get to know your users, collect their feedback on your product and generate custom PDF reports of your findings with UXtweak!

FAQ: UX Research Report

To write a UX research report, summarize the research objectives , outline the methodology , present findings and recommendations , and ensure clear and concise communication of insights in a well-structured format.

A UX research report should include an executive summary, research background, methodology, findings, opportunities and recommendations , providing a comprehensive overview of the research process, insights, and actionable suggestions.

The purpose of a UX research report is to effectively communicate research findings , guide design decisions, justify choices, drive product improvements, and align stakeholders around user-centered goals and strategies.

UX Research Process

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• 09. UX Research Report
• 10. UX Research Framework
• 11. UX Research Presentation
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A complete guide to presenting UX research findings

In this complete guide to presenting UX research findings, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.

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User experience research sets out to identify the problem that a product or service needs to solve and finds a way to do just that. Research is the first and most important step to optimising user experience.

UX researchers do this through interviews, surveys, focus groups, data analysis and reports. Reports are how UX researchers present their work to other stakeholders in a company, such as designers, developers and executives.

In this guide, we’ll cover what you should include in a UX research report, how to present UX research findings and tips for presenting your UX research.

Components of a UX research report

How to write a ux research report, 5 tips on presenting ux research findings.

Ready to present your research findings? Let’s dive in.

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There are six key components to a UX research report.

Introduction

The introduction should give an overview of your UX research . Then, relate any company goals or pain points to your research. Lastly, your introduction should briefly touch on how your research could affect the business.

Research goals

Simply put, your next slide or paragraph should outline the top decisions you need to make, the search questions you used, as well as your hypothesis and expectations.

Business value

In this section, you can tell your stakeholders why your research matters. If you base this research on team-level or product development goals, briefly touch on those.

Methodology

Share the research methods you used and why you chose those methods. Keep it concise and tailored to your audience. Your stakeholders probably don’t need to hear everything that went into your process.

Key learnings

This section will be the most substantial part of your report or presentation. Present your findings clearly and concisely. Share as much context as possible while keeping your target audience – your stakeholders – in mind.

Recommendations

In the last section of your report, make actionable recommendations for your stakeholders. Share possible solutions or answers to your research questions. Make your suggestions clear and consider any future research studies that you think would be helpful.

1. Define your audience

Most likely, you’ll already have conducted stakeholder interviews when you were planning your research. Taking those interviews into account, you should be able to glean what they’re expecting from your presentation.

Tailor your presentation to the types of findings that are most relevant, how those findings might affect their work and how they prefer to receive information. Only include information they will care about the most in a medium that’s easy for them to understand.

Do they have a technical understanding of what you’re doing or should you keep it a non-technical presentation? Make sure you keep the terminology and data on a level they can understand.

What part of the business do they work in? Executives will want to know about how it affects their business, while developers will want to know what technological changes they need to make.

2. Summarise

As briefly as possible, summarise your research goals, business value and methodology. You don’t need to go into too much detail for any of these items. Simply share the what, why and how of your research.

Answer these questions:

• What research questions did you use, and what was your hypothesis?
• What business decision will your research assist with?
• What methodology did you use?

You can briefly explain your methods to recruit participants, conduct interviews and analyse results. If you’d like more depth, link to interview plans, surveys, prototypes, etc.

3. Show key learnings

Your stakeholders will probably be pressed for time. They won’t be able to process raw data and they usually don’t want to see all of the work you’ve done. What they’re looking for are key insights that matter the most to them specifically. This is why it’s important to know your audience.

Summarise a few key points at the beginning of your report. The first thing they want to see are atomic research nuggets. Create condensed, high-priority bullet points that get immediate attention. This allows people to reference it quickly. Then, share relevant data or artefacts to illustrate your key learnings further.

Relevant data:

• Recurring trends and themes
• Relevant quotes that illustrate important findings
• Data visualisations

Relevant aspects of artefacts:

• Quotes from interviews
• User journey maps
• Affinity diagrams
• Storyboards

For most people you’ll present to, a summary of key insights will be enough. But, you can link to a searchable repository where they can dig deeper. You can include artefacts and tagged data for them to reference.

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4. Share insights and recommendations

Offer actionable recommendations, not opinions. Share clear next steps that solve pain points or answer pending decisions. If you have any in mind, suggest future research options too. If users made specific recommendations, share direct quotes.

5. Choose a format

There are two ways you could share your findings in a presentation or a report. Let’s look at these two categories and see which might be the best fit for you.

Usually, a presentation is best for sharing data with a large group and when presenting to non-technical stakeholders. Presentations should be used for visual communication and when you only need to include relevant information in a brief summary.

A presentation is usually formatted in a:

• Case studies
• Atomic research nuggets
• Pre-recorded video

If you’re presenting to a smaller group, technical stakeholder or other researchers, you might want to use a report. This gives you the capacity to create a comprehensive record. Further, reports could be categorised based on their purpose as usability, analytics or market research reports.

A report is typically formatted in a:

• Notion or Confluence page
• Slack update

You might choose to write a report first, then create a presentation. After the presentation, you can share a more in-depth report. The report could also be used for records later.

1. Keep it engaging

When you’re presenting your findings, find ways to engage those you’re presenting to. You can ask them questions about their assumptions or what you’re presenting to get them more involved.

For example, “What do you predict were our findings when we asked users to test the usability of the menu?” or “What suggestions do you think users had for [a design problem]?”

If you don’t want to engage them with questions, try including alternative formats like videos, audio clips, visualisations or high-fidelity prototypes. Anything that’s interactive or different will help keep their engagement. They might engage with these items during or after your presentation.

Another way to keep it engaging is to tell a story throughout your presentation. Some UX researchers structure their presentations in the form of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey . Start in the middle with your research findings and then zoom out to your summary, insights and recommendations.

2. Combine qualitative and quantitative data

When possible, use qualitative data to back up quantitative data. For example, include a visualisation of poll results with a direct quote about that pain point.

Use this opportunity to show the value of the work you do and build empathy for your users. Translate your findings into a format that your stakeholders – designers, developers or executives – will be able to understand and act upon.

3. Make it actionable

Actionable presentations are engaging and they should have some business value . That means they need to solve a problem or at least move toward a solution to a problem. They might intend to optimise usability, find out more about the market or analyse user data.

Here are a few ways to make it actionable:

• Include a to-do list at the end
• Share your deck and repository files for future reference
• Recommend solutions for product or business decisions
• Suggest what kind of research should happen next (if any)
• Share answers to posed research questions

4. Keep it concise and effective

Make it easy for stakeholders to dive deeper if they want to but make it optional. Yes, this means including links to an easily searchable repository and keeping your report brief.

Humans tend to focus best on just 3-4 things at a time. So, limit your report to three or four major insights. Additionally, try to keep your presentation down to 20-30 minutes.

Remember, you don’t need to share everything you learned. In your presentation, you just need to show your stakeholders what they are looking for. Anything else can be sent later in your repository or a more detailed PDF report.

5. Admit the shortcomings of UX research

If you get pushback from stakeholders during your presentation, it’s okay to share your constraints.

Your stakeholders might not understand that your sample size is big enough or how you chose the users in your study or why you did something the way you did. While qualitative research might not be statistically significant, it’s usually representative of your larger audience and it’s okay to point that out.

Because they aren’t researchers, it’s your job to explain your methodology to them but also be upfront about the limitations UX research can pose. When all of your cards are on the table, stakeholders are more likely to trust you.

When it comes to presenting your UX research findings, keep it brief and engaging. Provide depth with external resources after your presentation. This is how you get stakeholders to find empathy for your users. This is how you master the art of UX.

Need to go back to the basics and learn more about UX research? Dive into these articles:

What is UX research? The 9 best UX research tools to use in 2022

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FREE 10+ User Research Report Samples in PDF

In our present generation, designing  a sleek interface in a specific website or digital platform is not enough. As a competent designer, you need to give an appealing service to your potential clients. That’s why you need to perform an in-depth product research and design.  But how are you going to better understand human motivations and needs?  Research is a method to help product teams to look outside the box  that will help in creating innovative designs based on their understanding of a certain brand.  In this article, we have some informative guide and downloadable user research or UX research report templates to guide you in your research work. Keep on reading!

User Research Report

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A user research report or UX research report is a significant document that contains the aim and scope of the project for user research work. It provides necessary information to help the UX designers obtain a clear understanding of user behaviors, needs, and motivations with the use of careful and thorough observation methods, task analysis, and other feedback strategies. This is important to have an insight about the impact of a particular design from a target audience. 

Writing a user research report is a simple task which can be really helpful while performing your user research work. Below are some easy-to-follow tips  that indicate how to design and accomplish comprehensive reports in user research: 

Arthur C. Clarke said: “I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” The first thing you need to consider for your user research or UX research report is figuring out what questions you need to answer or basically, identify the core problems of your design project. Try to make a simple list of questions and iterate on them to avoid getting deeper into other issues.

Tim Brown said: “Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” If you’re creating a design which appears to be insignificant to your target audience, then your design will never be effective. There are a wide array of methods that are available and you can use when learning about your users. However, you need to be able to select which type of methods are appropriate for you and your product design team. 

3. Use effective quantitative research tools

The book “ UX Research: Practical Techniques for Designing Better Products ” stated that quantitative research informs designers where customers are accessing their information as well as what devices they are using. So, one of the valuable quantitative research tools that you need to use for your user research project is conducting a survey or asking the users to provide their personal opinions, comments, and suggestions on a particular program, product, or service.

Adam Fard, a UX Designer, explained in his article that in order to observe and make an analysis of user behavior, it is recommended that you establish different kinds of user metrics to measure usability and intuitive design such as clicks, session length, navigation, and conversion rates. Also, he mentioned that you need to perform some important steps to fully understand their behaviors. Some of these steps are seeking out purposeful action, discovering habitual patterns, mapping insights, refining user advantages, and many more. 

The research report format includes a list of main sections and subsections containing page numbers, tables, illustrations, reference list, and appendices. Additionally, it comprises an abstract, showing a clear summary of goals, methods, results, and conclusions.                                    

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To write an effective UX report , you need to write your reports in simple and clear English language. Avoid using difficult words that might confuse the readers. Organize your reports into simple sections. Be direct and honest about your reports. Also, keep things concise as much as possible. 

To present user research findings, you need to make a group of slides which includes one or two slides that create an outline of the research you made. Then, include five to ten slides that contain a comprehensive description of your findings. Plus, another one or two slides that will further demonstrate what you will perform next which is relevant to your research work.

The different types of reports are formal/informal, short/long, informational/analytical, proposal, vertical/lateral, internal/external, periodic, and many more.

Therefore, writing a comprehensive user research or UX report is a beneficial step in acquiring better understanding of your users especially on their behavior or attitude while interacting with your product. With this, you and your team can create a successful product that allows many users to feel great satisfaction and joy. Hillman Curtis said: “The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, and glean insights that enable him or her to make the invisible visible.” Here are some of our downloadable and printable research report samples available in different kinds of formats. Simply click the templates in this article and start downloading now!

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How to write a UX research report and present your findings

UserTesting

Writing a  UX research report can feel like studying for an exam. You know you need to do it. You know it's important for success. And yet, getting down to business can feel overwhelming.

After all, you've spent days—maybe weeks—conducting your research, and now you have to somehow condense all that work into under 20 slides? Not only that: you need every piece of information you include to be compelling and valuable—especially if you're presenting to hard-to-please executives.

The good news is that creating an exceptional research report is very doable. You just need the formula for success. 

Let's look at some proven steps that will help you put together a report guaranteed to wow your stakeholders.

What is a UX research report?

A UX research report is the final stage of any UX research project. It's the culmination of all the hours your team has spent planning, researching and analyzing data—summarized into one succinct presentation.

Regardless of whether you're presenting to the wider UX team , web developers, or executives, the primary aim is always the same: communicate valuable insights and provide actionable recommendations to enhance the user experience.  

Beyond that, reports are also a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the strategic value of UX to leadership. By tying your recommendations to broader business objectives, you can build UX advocates at the highest level of your organization and secure more budget as a result. 

Essential elements of UX research reports

So, what differentiates excellent UX reports from average ones? In our experience, it comes down to structure. Quality research reports include the following six components. 

Introduction

A punchy introduction will grab your audience's attention and keep them engaged throughout your presentation. Keep your intro short and sweet. Briefly explain the parameters of your research, why it matters, and how your findings could help drive the company forward. 

Research scope 

Now that you've captivated your audience, provide a little more detail to establish trust in the research process. Describe the scope of your study, noting things like:

• The research objectives 
• Your research questions and methodology 
• An overview of your participants 

Like the intro, you'll want to keep this part succinct. While it can be tempting to throw in masses of detail, focus on what your stakeholders need to know.

Strategic value

This section is all about honing in on your why. Focus on helping your stakeholders understand why your research matters. For executives, explain how your research supports strategic business goals. For the wider UX team, hone in on how your insights can improve the user interface design.

Key findings

And now for the main course: sharing the most critical learnings from your study . This section will be the most prominent part of your report, spanning a few pages or slides—but not too many. 

To maintain engagement, you’ll want to be clear and concise. Provide enough information to explain your findings but be careful not to overload your audience with masses of data. 

Recommendations

Conclude your report with actionable next steps. Suggest where improvements could be made to your product or service, focusing on the business benefits of your proposed implementations. As a bonus, why not put forward another study you can undertake that leads on from your project?

How to write a great UX research report

Now you know what to include in a great UX research report, it's time to think about how you'll present everything. Here's what to keep in mind. 

Empathize with your audience

As a UX researcher, you've already cultivated high levels of empathy for end users, and now it's time to channel that into your report writing. Be mindful of the different audiences you will present to, and tailor your presentation to each one. 

Think about factors like language, terminology, and length. Consider what each stakeholder group wants and needs to know, and craft your report to meet these expectations. You can lean on the interviews you conducted at the beginning of your project to inform your approach. 

For executives especially, remember to communicate the value of your research in terms of ROI . Tailor your suggestions to focus on tangible results like customer lifetime value, lowered acquisition costs, and increased website traffic. 

Not to toot our own horn, but our  QX Score  is an effortless way to translate UX results into a language your business leaders care about.

Turn your findings into a story 

UX researchers are passionate about data and insights, but our stakeholders don't always share the same enthusiasm. To captivate your audience, you'll need to master the art of data-driven storytelling.

Start by grouping your findings into research trends and write a headline insight for each. From there, add summaries, artifacts, and supporting evidence explaining each insight in a little more detail. 

Think carefully about how you'll organize each headline within the presentation. Your aim is to take your audience on a journey. Ideally, each headline will flow nicely into the next, naturally building toward your recommendations for improvement. 

If you're worried about fitting all your information in, or some of your findings don't sit within the key themes you've identified, consider creating an appendix with more granular insights. That way, if a stakeholder wants to learn more, it's easy for them.

Embrace visualization 

While the word "report" might conjure up images of lengthy academic papers, UX research reports certainly don't have to be text heavy. In fact, we caution against it.

For maximum engagement, be playful and creative with your design choices . Consider using mediums like video, cartoon storyboards and charts to convey your findings in digestible, eye-catching ways. 

Dot the I's and cross the T's 

Spelling errors, inconsistent fonts, and other little mistakes can distract your audience from listening to your amazing insights and even undermine your hard work. 

It's easy to avoid these issues by carefully proofreading your report. At the same time, double check your presentation has a consistent, sleek design with matching colors, fonts, and visuals. All these things will help keep your stakeholders attention and boost your credibility. 

Use multiple mediums

Depending on your stakeholders' preferences, you may be asked to present your report in-person or send it via email. Written reports will naturally be slightly more detailed than in-person presentations. If you're asked to share one, take the time to read through the document carefully and make sure it makes sense as a standalone item. 

For meetings and presentations, consider how you can add value to each slide. Resist the urge to simply read from your laptop. Look at how your words can complement what's on the screen, offering your audience deeper insights and context. 

Spread the word 

Presenting your UX research findings doesn't start and end in the boardroom. You want to get as many people as possible excited by your research. After all, everyone in your organization can benefit from building empathy with users , and your UX research is a surefire way to achieve that. 

As a best practice, we recommend sharing the highlights of your study on your company's internal communications channel—be it Slack or Teams. You don't need to write more than a paragraph to do this. Focus on the key findings and their business applications. 

Best practices for presenting UX research findings

At this point, you've created a quality UX research report and are ready to head into your presentation. Presentation nerves are normal. But there are few things you can keep in mind to lessen them.

Practice makes perfect 

Before your meeting, practice your presentation with a colleague who isn’t part of the research team. Not only will this build your confidence, but they may be able to shine a light on points that you've overlooked. 

For example, you may have used some UX terminology in the presentation that they aren't familiar with, or find that one of your sections goes on a little longer than anticipated. 

Any feedback is super helpful for improving your report, so don’t be afraid to ask your colleagues for their honest thoughts! 

Enhance your soft skills 

Confidence is a huge part of effective presenting, helping you come across as credible, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. 

It's easy to improve your soft skills with a few simple tricks: project your voice to the back of the room, avoid using 'uh's' and 'um's', and make eye contact with your audience. 

Be concise 

As the saying goes, time is money! You'll rarely, if ever, have more than half an hour to present your findings to stakeholders, so you'll want to be as concise as possible. Less is always more. 

Too much raw data and excess insights can overwhelm executives, so narrow down on what's relevant to your audience.

Time to shine: Presenting insight

Armed with this information, you're ready to roll into your meeting and knock your stakeholders' socks off. Hopefully, you’ll leave the room with the go-ahead for your design team to spring into action, along with some additional budget for new research projects.

Relax. Trust yourself and the work you've put in to get to this point. You've got this. 

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18+ SAMPLE User Research Report in PDF

User Research Report

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1. service user research in health and social care report, 2. game user research report, 3. mobile application user research report, 4. social media user research report, step 1: state the major goals in the user research , step 2: make an outline of the user research process , step 3:  showcase the results of the user research, step 4:   proofread and revise the research report, step 5: prepare the final user research report, share this post on your network, you may also like these articles, medical report.

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The right way to structure a UX research report

I spent hours staring at blank Google Docs or Google Slides when creating a user research presentation. Finally, it got to the point where, instead of focusing on the actual content, I decided to try a plethora of tools and templates to help me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t have the right color palette or beautiful graphics (I’m not a designer, after all). So I tried notes, Notion, Miro, some obscure tools that no longer exist, and I downloaded an obscene number of Keynote and Google Slide templates. There was even a point where I  bought  slide templates on Etsy. 

However, the real problem was not the formatting, design, or aesthetic of my research reports—as much as I wished it was because that was a lot easier to solve than the real problem. I had no idea how to structure my research reports. I was constantly faced with writer’s block, staring at the blank pages, knowing that I had to present findings and the clock was ticking. Nothing is more complex than creating something from scratch.

.css-1nrevy2{position:relative;display:inline-block;} Structure by research themes

The first and most common way of structuring reports is by themes. In this structure, you use what you learned from synthesis to guide how you write the report. But what exactly is a theme?

After  affinity diagramming , you will have clusters of information. For example, if I conducted a study on how people decide on where to travel next, I might see the following groups come up:

Inspiration from social media (Instagram, blogs)

Recommendations from friends, family, or communities

Going to a place you’ve been before and enjoyed

Using package or vacation deals

Partner, spouse, or friend wanting to travel somewhere specific

Discounted trip finders 

Choosing from a bucket list of destinations

Randomly selecting a destination that sounds cool

Now, that is a lot to report on in and of itself! If I could help the team better understand this decision, I would focus on the top three to five themes with the highest number of participants. Let’s say I spoke to 20 people, and the top three decision-making factors were:

Inspiration from social media (Instagram, blogs)—17/20 participants

Recommendations from friends, family, or communities—14/20 participants

Using discounted trip finders—13/20 participants

I would use these three themes as the structure of my report, starting with the most common theme and ending with the least. Within the report, I would include:

Theme title

Theme summary, which includes bullet points of the main one to three findings within the theme

A deep dive section, including the insight behind the finding, quotes, videos, or audio clips of each finding

So, this would then look like this:

Theme title: Inspiration from social media

Theme summary:

Finding one: People follow travel influencers on social media (e.g., Instagram and blogs) to constantly be up-to-date on where to travel next

Finding two: People create lists, boards, or collections to save all the destinations they find from influencers or on social media and return to them when they want to travel

Deep dive into finding one:

Many people love to daydream about travel, and there isn’t a better way to do that than getting lost on social media. Jake opens Instagram during work one day because he overheard a colleague talking about a recent trip. Jake knows he has some vacation days left, so he goes to his favorite Instagram travel accounts and starts scrolling. He remembers he started collecting a few places he’d like to go and looks through them, deciding on the top two. He makes a note to look up the prices later tonight, after work, and look into some potential dates. Although he wishes he could book the trip right then and there, it is too complicated to do during work, so he waits until later.

“Yeah, I just got this travel bug suddenly after I heard some people talking, and as soon as I saw the photos on Instagram, I was like, I  have to go. I wish I could have just booked it immediately, but figuring out dates, airlines, hotels, and budget takes focus, so I just look into it when I have more time.”

By following this structure, you can lay out the most important information you found for stakeholders to quickly get the most critical findings. 

Three unexpected ways a research repository makes your life easier

Research goals and questions.

I used the theme template frequently for quite a few years, without deviating much. However, I still saw confusion at times with some stakeholders. With this structure, the answers to their questions or the research goals weren’t always straightforward. I then decided to try another format.

Instead of organizing the findings by themes gathered in clusters, I went straight to answering the research goals or questions 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.  

If we take the example from above, let’s say the research goals were to:

Understand people’s current mental models around deciding on where to travel to 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 summary, which includes bullet points of the one to three findings relevant to the goal

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

This way, the evidence you present is directly related to the study’s goals and the information stakeholders need to make decisions. Take a look at my  sample UX research report template here  (in exchange for your email, please)!

What we learned from creating a tagging taxonomy

Usability testing.

Now, I have found that usability testing is its own type of report and template. So I use one of the initial templates but then add a separate component that analyzes the usability aspect. Since it is slightly more manageable, I usually use the theme template to begin my usability test and then dive into the prototype findings. Still, I usually only highlight the top two themes to ensure the presentation isn’t too long. 

The main difference here is the concept/prototype analysis section. There are a few ways to structure analysis when it comes to usability testing. The two main ways I have had success with are:

Screen-by-screen analysis, which includes a photo of the screen and annotations of feedback 

A flow analysis, which includes bullet points of feedback 

If you are doing any quantitative usability testing, such as measuring time on task or task success, include a stoplight chart

The way I decide whether to use screen-by-screen or flow analysis depends on the stakeholders’ needs and the depth of feedback I received from participants. For example, if I find that each screen received a lot of feedback, I will do that analysis. However, if the team needs to understand the flow of the prototype, I will break that up into several slides to demonstrate the feedback on the overall flow.

So my usability testing reports are generally structured like:

Theme title one

Theme title two

A deep dive slide, behind the finding, quotes, videos, or audio clips of each finding

Concept/prototype analysis 

Reminder of the prototype

Screen-by-screen or flow analysis

If applicable, a rainbow chart 

These three structures cover the most common reports/presentations you will encounter as a user researcher. I highly encourage you to try different approaches within these structures by always thinking of your audience first and gathering feedback after each presentation!

If you’re a Dovetail Analysis+Repository or Enterprise customer, you can make awesome-looking reports in Dovetail using Stories. Check out our guide for building beautiful reports here .

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Top 10 UX Research Templates with Examples and Samples

Neha Parmar

In today's fast-paced world, delivering user-centric products that meet customer needs is no longer an option but a necessity for business success. However, conducting user experience research from scratch can be a daunting task that drains time and resources. That's where SlideTeam comes in - we've developed a range of high-quality  UX Research Templates  that will help you streamline your research efforts and deliver impressive results in no time.

We understand that most businesses want to deploy UX as part of their business repertoire, but often lack the resources, time, or both to make an effort from scratch. Our premium UX Research Templates bring a sense of calm to your hectic routine schedule.

These presentation templates are ideal for UX researchers, designers, and product managers, and it produces impressive results with little effort.

Each of these templates is 100% customizable to give you flexibility; the content-ready nature offers the necessary structure that you only need to adjust slightly to serve your unique purpose.

Let’s explore.

Template 1: Six Months Agile Sprint Project UX Research Roadmap

Our six-month agile project UX research roadmap is a customizable PowerPoint layout that effectively communicates your work plan. It is a strategic planning tool that overviews the project, key deliverables, and milestones. The PPT Theme is available in 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios and customizable font, color, and shape, and saves in PDF, PNG, and JPG formats. Use this roadmap to stay on track with your project, track progress, and envision the result.

Download Now!

Template 2: Quarterly Agile Sprint Project UX Research Roadmap

Our UX research roadmap is ideal for visually representing your work plan and sharing ideas. The pre-designed PowerPoint Layout allows you to highlight project overview, deliverables, and milestones. You can highlight project goals and tasks in a clear and approachable manner using our expertly created PPT theme. By describing the workflow, monitoring progress, and clearly understanding the desired outcome, this roadmap is a strategic planning tool. Save countless hours with a download of this PowerPoint Theme.

Template 3: Three Month Roadmap to UX Research with Key Activities

Use our pre-built three-month roadmap on UX research with critical activities to maximize your efficiencies. Incorporating our eye-catching PPT theme can eliminate unnecessary paperwork and increase visual appeal. The color-coded roadmap provides a structured outline of the process flow, allowing you to provide your team with clear guidelines. Easily assign members to designated groups based on work milestones met within a specific time frame.

Template 4: Quarterly UX Research Roadmap with Sprint Planning

Our Quarterly UX Research Roadmap PowerPoint theme assists you in organizing project details into a simple format. It ensures that milestones are met on time and increases efficiency. The color-coded layout highlights essential information, and the tool assists in quickly identifying potential problems and finding solutions.

Template 5: Six-month UX Research Roadmap with Sprint Planning

A good plan is an asset. Our Six-Month UX Research Roadmap PowerPoint theme can assist you in organizing essential project details, such as budget, timeframe, milestones, and key deliverables. It provides insight into the process, assists in identifying potential problems, and suggests solutions. It's an excellent tool for team brainstorming and increasing work efficiency.

Template 6: Quarterly UX Research Process Roadmap with Test Validation

A well-organized work plan is essential for achieving the desired result. Our well-designed PowerPoint Layout allows you to effectively communicate your vision while establishing a solid foundation in front of your audience. It helps synchronize project milestones, budgets, deliverables, deadlines, and other pertinent information for a dynamic presentation. Use our pre-made roadmap PowerPoint theme to quickly establish coordination among activities and present insights to your colleagues.

Template 7: Five-Yearly UX Research Roadmap with Sprint Planning

A practical action plan simplifies execution and increases the likelihood of success—all milestones on time with our exclusive PPT Theme. Using our PowerPoint Set, you can organize all work-related information. Our comprehensive research roadmap PowerPoint layout offers insight into the process, reducing time lag and increasing work efficiency. You can quickly identify potential problem areas and propose solutions by downloading our roadmap.

Template 8: One-page Template on User Survey Results of Popular UX Research Methods PPT Design

The one-page template highlights user survey results to provide a comprehensive and visually appealing overview of popular UX research methods. This editable A4 PowerPoint template simplifies the 5-stage UX research process, allowing for better planning, problem-solving, and decision-making while saving time. The template is customized to cover the problem formulation, creativity, experimentation, optimization, and evaluation stage, the stages that mark any UX cycle. Use this one-page template to convey your message to your audience quickly, with conviction, and make sure the message hits home.

Template 9: One-page user Results Template on Traditional and Lean UX Research Process Infographic PPT

Our one-pager template simplifies the UX research process. It covers problem framing and idea generation, which can help you save time and communicate your message more effectively. This tool is ideal for professionals who want to present their research findings more efficiently and in a manner that gives them the desired results. Download the template now to produce impressive research results with little effort!

Template 10: One-Page User Results Template on Five-Stage UX Research Process Report

Get this visually appealing PPT Template that streamlines communication and saves time by presenting information clearly and concisely. It addresses problem framing, allows for text and graphic editing, and promotes better comprehension for problem-solving and decision-making. Download the template now to plan your activities better.

Template 11: One-page Landscape Template  of UX Research Method Results 

By presenting a user UX research method results in an easy-to-understand, visually appealing one-page landscape format, our PowerPoint Template streamlines communication. You can customize the text and graphics to create a concise and compelling report while again touching upon the five stages of UX Research. Download this template now to make an impact with your UX research presentation.

Template 12: One-page Template on Why, How and What of User Results in UX Research Report

The One Page Template Presenting Why, How, and What Of User Findings In UX Research Presentation Report Infographic PPT PDF Document" streamlines the five stages of UX research by covering problem framing, creativity, experimentation, optimization, and assessment. This one-pager template saves you time as well. The key is effective communication and evaluating whether the user experience aligns with what the business wants it to be!

TAKE THE STRUCTURED APPROACH

In today's fiercely competitive market, the importance of UX research cannot be overstated. With SlideTeam's UX research templates, you have everything you need to gain deep insights into your users' behavior and preferences and ultimately design products that meet their needs and exceed their expectations. Start using our templates today and take your business to the next level!

FAQs on UX Research

What is the role of a ux researcher.

A UX researcher's role is to collect insights and data on user behavior, needs, and preferences to inform the design and development of products and services. UX researchers employ user interviews, surveys, usability testing, and data analysis to understand user needs and preferences. They work with designers, developers, and other stakeholders to ensure user requirements consider throughout the product development process. A UX researcher's goal is to improve the user experience of a product or service, which leads to increased user satisfaction and business success.

What are some examples of UX research?

Here are some examples of user experience research:

User interviews are one-on-one conversations with users to learn about their habits, needs, and pain points.

Surveys collect quantitative data on user demographics, satisfaction, and preferences.

Usability testing is observing users interacting with a product to identify usability issues and areas for improvement.

Card sorting is a technique for determining how users categorize information and where they expect to find it on a website or app.

A/B testing compares two versions of a product or website to see which one performs better.

Focus groups: Gathering a group of users to talk about their experiences and opinions about a product or service.

What is UX research vs. UI research?

UX and UI research are related but distinct fields. UX research is the process of understanding user behavior, needs, and preferences to improve the design and usability of a product or service. Its goal is to develop products and services that meet the needs and expectations of users, resulting in increased user satisfaction and business success.

On the other hand, UI research is concerned with creating user interfaces such as websites, apps, and software. It aims to improve the product's visual and interactive aspects, including layout, navigation, and overall user experience. User testing, A/B testing, and user surveys are examples of UI research methods.

UX research is broader and more holistic, focusing on the overall user experience, whereas UI research is more focused on the design of the interface itself.

Is UX research a tech job?

UX research is not just a tech job; it applies to industries and fields. While UX research is most commonly associated with technology and software design, it spreads to product design, marketing, and healthcare. Understanding the needs and preferences of users and customers is at the heart of UX research, in which virtually any context where a user or customer experience is considered. As a result, UX researchers may have studied psychology, anthropology, design, or marketing.

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The User Research and Insights Tool for Design and Product Teams

How to Create a UX Research Plan [Free Template Inside]

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”. While Benjamin Franklin wasn’t talking about UX research, the statement applies. 

Many researchers fail to plan because they assume they understand user research well enough to create a budget, timeline, process, and more. They conveniently forget that planning is the cornerstone of a successful project and expertise is never enough to see anything through. 

Creating a UX research plan allows you to leverage multiple perspectives from project stakeholders and teammates.  Stakeholders can help you understand where techniques might not work, timelines may be too tight, or budget insufficient to execute a research project. 

Research planning prevents surprises that may come up along the way. It reduces cost and helps you determine how each step of the UX research will be executed to ensure success.

In this guide, we’ll lead you through the steps of creating a UX research plan. You’ll also get a free template so you can create your first research plan immediately.

What Is UX Research?

UX research is the study of user interaction to obtain insights that improve the design process. UX researchers study a group of target users to collect and analyze data that leads to user-friendly products. 

The primary goal of UX research is to build products for the end-user based on real data not what you think the user wants. When you conduct UX research, you can give your audience the best solutions because you know what they need.

As a UX researcher, you could begin with qualitative research methods to collect data and understand the user’s needs and motivation. Next, you use quantitative measures such as usability testing to test your hypothesis and results.

What Is a UX Research Plan?

A UX research plan is a document that sets expectations and highlights the most important information you need to communicate with stakeholders in a research project. It is usually a collaboration between all stakeholders to ensure it meets the goals and objectives you’ve laid out.

A user research plan acts as a starting point to help you write easily and keep your team focused on the who, what, why, and when of a UX research project.

What Are the Benefits of Planning User Research?

Show Project Sponsors and Senior Executives the ROI of Your Research

In most scenarios, project sponsors do not care about the process or the user research techniques you choose. They want to know what your research will achieve and how much it will cost to execute. A brief research plan lays out the objective of the research and how it will benefit product design.

Engage Stakeholders

A written research plan is also a great way to engage stakeholders and ensure they’re involved with the research project and the results. You’ll also be leveraging the experience of team members who’ve conducted similar research in the past.

Keeps You Accountable

When you write something down, it looks different from what you pictured in your head. It eliminates the risk of missing steps in the process, going above budget, or losing sight of your research objectives. Think of a research plan as a list of checkpoints to make sure you’ve achieved each goal in your research.

Easier to Plug Holes in Your Process

A research plan helps you to learn what works or doesn’t work and questions you need to be asking. As you write down your plan and process, you can find holes and improve your research plan. It makes it easier to focus and prepare for the study.

How to Create a User Research Plan? 

1. Write the Background of the Research

The background section should be brief. Tell stakeholders and clients about the recent history of the project, why you’re conducting the research, and what you’re going to accomplish. In a few sentences (no more than five lines of text), everyone should understand the purpose of the study.

The background section should also include the problem statement. A few ways to identify the problem statement include interviews with stakeholders, a deep analysis of the current data, or team sessions to brainstorm.

2. What Are the Objectives of the Research?

You must have an objective before getting in a room with users. The research objective drives all the research questions you’ll be asking participants during the user interview process.

Why are you conducting user research? What problems do you hope to solve? What is the end goal after completing the research?

Getting answers to these questions should be a collaborative effort between stakeholders and team members involved in the project.

3. Define Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders that will benefit from the results? Research project stakeholders could be employees in sales, customer support, C-level executives, or product teams.

When you’ve listed everyone you think should be involved, set up a meeting to brainstorm ideas and collect input. It’s easier to deliver the right insights when you’re involving the right stakeholders in your project.

4 . Study Existing Solutions

Have any studies been done on this topic in the past? Perhaps your competitors or in-house teammates have published previous findings that will work as the basis of your research? The answers will help you determine where to begin.

If your team uses Aurelius as a research repository , you’ll be able to easily search through past research projects to quickly find information and make Cross-Project Insights and recommendations from past research with your current project.

5. Recruit Participants

After defining the problem and objectives, it’s time to create a participant profile. Choosing the right participants is one of the most crucial parts of a project. 

When creating participant profiles start with characteristics such as occupation, age group, geography, and level of engagement with the product. Next, determine the number of participants to recruit for each UX research method. 

We advise internal collaboration with all stakeholders such as sales, marketing, and customer support teams to brainstorm a hypothesis on who your ideal user is. Analyze your competitors to see what type of users they have in their audience.

If you have a database, consider looking inwards to customers who already know your product. If you don’t, use a research recruitment platform to find participants. 

When recruiting externally, use a screener to hone in on your ideal participant. Is there a particular behavior you’re looking for? A qualifying action they must have taken within a specific timeframe? Do they need to be a certain age? Screeners ensure you’re bringing in the right users for your research.

6. Establish KPIs and Metrics of Success

How will success be determined?  What criteria will you use to check milestone achievements? Examples of success metrics include:

• Time on task
• Specific information about the user 
• Decisions that the collected data will help you make 
• Statistics you intend to create

7. Outline Scope and Focus of Research

Outlining the focus areas leads to efficient research planning. The deeper you’re able to hone in on the specific information you want to collect from the research, the more clarity you’ll have. 

8. Write Research Questions

This is the section where you’ll write down the research questions to ask during user interviews. Start by examining what you already know about the problem such as insights from previous research . Find the knowledge gaps and create questions to answer them.

When brainstorming research questions, it’s important to determine if the goal is to create a new design or to fix an existing design. 

If your objective is to build the right design, then your questions will focus on observing user behavior and leveraging mental models.

If the goal is to fix an existing design, then you’ll ask questions about usability to improve the current design. Whatever the goal is, aim for open-ended questions.

Here’s a comprehensive list of questions to ask when conducting UX research interviews

9. Determine Your Budget 

Budget plays a role in the amount of data you gather and how you conduct research. More budget equals flexibility to outsource to a dedicated recruitment service, run paid campaigns to attract more people, or even increase the incentives for participants.

More money also makes it easier to choose the right UX research methods that translate into quality insight. Conversely, with a small budget, you have to think of ways to stretch your funds such as using zoom over in-person meetings, limiting the number of research participants, or choosing inexpensive research techniques.

10. Establish Project Timeline

Having a timeline for executing the research plan lets stakeholders and clients know how long the research will take. There might be different expectations between what you think the timeline should be versus the client’s expectation. 

When establishing a timeline consider the following:

• The scale of the project
• The time needed to collect data for research analysis
• Time for recruiting research participants
• Number of teammates to engage in research activities
• Unforeseen circumstances such as participants showing up late or needing to reschedule for another day

11. Develop Research Protocols

The research protocol is a list of questions and tasks you’ll cover during in-person sessions. It also includes a list of research methods you’ve chosen. 

A common practice is to write down the opening and closing statement of your UX interview. It begins with an explanation of the product, research objectives, and how long each interview session will take. In the end, you thank the participant for their time and answer any questions they might have.

Make sure you get feedback from stakeholders on the research questions as well as the following:

• The duration of each session
• Tasks each research participant will complete during usability testing
• A script to guide each session
• How to record interviews and protect participant data

12. Determine the Research Methods

In this section, you’ll discuss the UX research methods you’ll use during the research and explain why you’ve chosen these techniques.

While there are dozens of research methods to choose from, your choices should be informed by your research questions. Some, like A/B tests and surveys, are suited for quantitative research while others like user interviews and contextual inquiries work best for qualitative research . 

Learn more about how to choose a UX research method plus options to choose from during user research

13. Choose UX Research Tools 

Similar to research protocols, the research tools you choose should be based on your research objectives and questions.

When choosing UX research tools, consider the following:

• Are you recruiting participants internally from your database or externally?
• Is it going to be a usability test?
• Will you conduct interviews via video conferencing?
• How will you store and analyze research data ?
• Are you going to A/B test certain elements for conversion?
• Will you conduct surveys to collect mass feedback?

There are different tools that fulfill each of these objectives. For example, you can recruit participants from platforms like User Interviews and Userbrain . You can build a research repository to store data and get insights with Aurelius . Tools like Optimizely and Crazy Egg are great for A/B testing.

Get a comprehensive list of UX research tools to complete each stage of the research process in this article

14. Draw Insights and Present your Research Findings

This is the final stage when creating a UX research plan. The insights will be determined by the goals of the research. Is the goal to improve an existing product or create a new product? Which stakeholders will need access to the result?

Make sure you document your process and include details about setbacks you faced along the way, methodologies used, and session materials. This way, your team can have an overview to look back on when conducting the next research project.

To get insight from your research data, use Aurelius to analyze dozens of notes, audio/video recordings as well as spreadsheets.

Create a new project in Aurelius, import your data from anywhere, find information quickly with Tags, search for patterns with Keywords, highlight major findings with Key Insights and make suggestions with Recommendations.

Aurelius turns your recommendations and key insights into shareable reports that you can customize as you like. You can share or present your research findings via email, a PDF, or a live link to your report.

Learn More About How Aurelius Can Help You Improve the Research Process 

Asides from having a plan of action for research issues, you must have a plan for working with research participants. 

A few things to do during the first interaction with research participants include:

• Inform users about the background of the research and what they’re signing up for
• Tell them how you plan to store their data
• Ask for permission to record the process
• Ask for permission to use their data for research purposes only
• Share details about the UX research process
• Tell them the methods you’re using to collect data 

If you feel like it’s too much information, remember that it’s better to overshare than to not give sufficient information.

Use a Template to Streamline UX Research Planning

Templates help you create research plans quickly. Think of it as a starting point for your research project. It includes all the essential elements you need to conduct research and communicate your findings.

Go ahead and download our free UX research plan template. Then, use the tips above to fill out the template.

Download our free UX research plan template

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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Essential elements of an effective UX research plan (examples + templates)

Conducting UX research without a plan is like moving to another country without knowing the language—confusing and exhausting.

To avoid wasting time and resources, it’s crucial to set achievable research goals and work on developing a research plan that’s clear, comprehensive, and aligned with your overarching business goals and research strategy.

A good UX research plan sets out the parameters for your research, and guides how you’ll gather insights to inform product development. In this chapter, we share a step-by-step guide to creating a research plan, including templates and tactics for you to try. You’ll also find expert tips from Paige Bennett, Senior User Research Manager at Affirm, and Sinéad Davis Cochrane, Research Manager at Workday.

What is a UX research plan?

A UX research plan—not to be confused with a UX research strategy or research design—is a plan to guide individual user experience (UX) research projects.

It's a living document that includes a detailed explanation of tactics, methods, timeline, scope, and task owners. It should be co-created and shared with key stakeholders, so everyone is familiar with the project plan, and product teams can meet strategic goals.

A UX research plan is different to a research strategy and research design in both its purpose and contents. Let’s take a look.

Research plan vs. research design vs. research strategy: What’s the difference?

While your UX research plan should be based on strategy, it’s not the same thing. Your UX strategy is a high-level document that contains goals, budget, vision, and expectations. Meanwhile, a plan is a detailed document explaining how the team will achieve those strategic goals. Research design is the form your research itself takes.

In short, a strategy is a guide, a plan is what drives action, and design is the action itself.

What are the benefits of using a UX research plan?

Conducting research without goals and parameters is aimless. A UX research plan is beneficial for your product, user, and business—by building a plan for conducting UX research, you can:

Streamline processes and add structure

Work toward specific, measurable goals, align and engage stakeholders, save time by avoiding rework.

The structure of a research plan allows you to set timelines, expectations, and task owners, so everyone on your team is aligned and empowered to make decisions. Since there’s no second guessing what to do next or which methods to use, you’ll find your process becomes simpler and more efficient. It’s also worth standardizing your process to turn your plan into a template that you can reuse for future projects.

When you set research goals based on strategy, you’ll find it easier to track your team’s progress and keep the project in scope, on time, and on budget. With a solid, strategy-based UX research plan you can also track metrics at different stages of the project and adjust future tactics to get better research findings.

“It’s important to make sure your stakeholders are on the same page with regards to scope, timeline, and goals before you start," explains Paige Bennett, Senior User Research Manager at Affirm. That's because, when stakeholders are aligned, they're much more likely to sign off on product changes that result from UX research.

A written plan is a collaborative way to involve stakeholders in your research and turn them into active participants rather than passive observers. As they get involved, they'll make useful contributions and get a better understanding of your goals.

A UX research plan helps you save time and money quite simply because it’s easier and less expensive to make design or prototype changes than it is to fix usability issues once the product is coded or fully launched. Additionally, having a plan gives your team direction, which means they won’t be conducting research and talking to users without motive, and you’ll be making better use of your resources. What’s more, when everyone is aligned on goals, they’re empowered to make informed decisions instead of waiting for their managers’ approval.

What should a UX research plan include?

In French cuisine, the concept of mise en place—putting in place—allows chefs to plan and set up their workspace with all the required ingredients before cooking. Think of your research plan like this—laying out the key steps you need to go through during research, to help you run a successful and more efficient study.

Here’s what you should include in a UX research plan:

• A brief reminder of the strategy and goals
• An outline of the research objectives
• The purpose of the plan and studies
• A short description of the target audience, sample size, scope, and demographics
• A detailed list of expectations including deliverables, timings, and type of results
• An overview of the test methods and a short explanation of why you chose them
• The test set up or guidelines to outline everything that needs to happen before the study: scenarios, screening questions, and duration of pilot tests
• Your test scripts, questions to ask, or samples to follow
• When and how you’ll present the results
• Cost estimations or requests to go over budget

Collect all UX research findings in one place

Use Maze to run quantitative and qualitative research, influence product design, and shape user-centered products.

How to create a UX research plan

Now we’ve talked through why you need a research plan, let’s get into the how. Here’s a short step-by-step guide on how to write a research plan that will drive results.

• Define the problem statement
• Get stakeholders’ buy-in
• Identify your objectives
• Choose the right research method
• Recruit participants
• Prepare the brief
• Establish the timeline
• Decide how you’ll present your findings

1. Define the problem statement

One of the most important purposes of a research plan is to identify what you’re trying to achieve with the research, and clarify the problem statement. For Paige Bennett , Senior User Research Manager at Affirm, this process begins by sitting together with stakeholders and looking at the problem space.

“We do an exercise called FOG, which stands for ‘Fact, Observation, Guess’, to identify large gaps in knowledge,” says Paige. “Evaluating what you know illuminates questions you still have, which then serves as the foundation of the UX research project.”

You can use different techniques to identify the problem statement, such as stakeholder interviews, team sessions, or analysis of customer feedback. The problem statement should explain what the project is about—helping to define the research scope with clear deliverables and objectives.

2. Identify your objectives

Research objectives need to align with the UX strategy and broader business goals, but you also need to define specific targets to achieve within the research itself—whether that’s understanding a specific problem, or measuring usability metrics . So, before you get into a room with your users and customers, “Think about the research objectives: what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what you expect from the UX research process ,” explains Sinéad Davis Cochrane , Research Manager at Workday.

Examples of research objectives might be:

• Learn at what times users interact with your product
• Understand why users return (or not) to your website/app
• Discover what competitor products your users are using
• Uncover any pain points or challenges users find when navigating with your product
• Gauge user interest in and prioritize potential new features

A valuable purpose of setting objectives is ensuring your project doesn't suffer from scope creep. This can happen when stakeholders see your research as an opportunity to ask any question. As a researcher , Sinéad believes your objectives can guide the type of research questions you ask and give your research more focus. Otherwise, anything and everything becomes a research question—which will confuse your findings and be overwhelming to manage.

Sinéad shares a list of questions you should ask yourself and the research team to help set objectives:

• What are you going to do with this information?
• What decisions is it going to inform?
• How are you going to leverage these insights?

Another useful exercise to help identify research objectives is by asking questions that help you get to the core of a problem. Ask these types of questions before starting the planning process:

• Who are the users you’re designing this for?
• What problems and needs do they have?
• What are the pain points of using the product?
• Why are they not using a product like yours?

3. Get stakeholders buy-in

It’s good practice to involve stakeholders at early stages of plan creation to get everyone on board. Sharing your UX research plan with relevant stakeholders means you can gather context, adjust based on comments, and gauge what’s truly important to them. When you present the research plan to key stakeholders, remember to align on the scope of research, and how and when you’ll get back to them with results.

Stakeholders usually have a unique vision of the product, and it’s crucial that you’re able to capture it early on—this doesn’t mean saying yes to everything, but listening to their ideas and having a conversation. Seeing the UX research plan as a living document makes it much easier to edit based on team comments. Plus, the more you listen to other ideas, the easier it will be to evangelize research and get stakeholder buy-in by helping them see the value behind it.

I expect my stakeholders to be participants, and I outline how I expect that to happen. That includes observing interviews, participating in synthesis exercises, or co-presenting research recommendations.

Paige Bennett , Senior User Research Manager at Affirm

4. Choose the right research method

Choose between the different UX research methods to capture different insights from users.

To define the research methods you’ll use, circle back to your research objectives, what stage of the product development process you’re in, and the constraints, resources, and timeline of the project. It’s good research practice to use a mix of different methods to get a more complete perspective of users’ struggles.

For example, if you’re at the start of the design process, a generative research method such as user interviews or field studies will help you generate new insights about the target audience. Or, if you need to evaluate how a new design performs with users, you can run usability tests to get actionable feedback.

It’s also good practice to mix methods that drive quantitative and qualitative results so you can understand context, and catch the user sentiment behind a metric. For instance, if during a remote usability test, you hear a user go ‘Ugh! Where’s the sign up button?’ you’ll get a broader perspective than if you were just reviewing the number of clicks on the same test task.

Examples of UX research methods to consider include:

• Five-second testing
• User interviews
• Field studies
• Card sorting
• Tree testing
• Focus groups
• Usability testing
• Diary studies
• Live website testing

Check out our top UX research templates . Use them as a shortcut to get started on your research.

5. Determine how to recruit participants

Every research plan should include information about the participants you need for your study, and how you’ll recruit them. To identify your perfect candidate, revisit your goals and the questions that need answering, then build a target user persona including key demographics and use cases. Consider the resources you have available already, by asking yourself:

• Do you have a user base you can tap into to collect customer insights ?
• Do you need to hire external participants?
• What’s your budget to recruit users?
• How many users do you need to interact with?

When selecting participants, make sure they represent all your target personas. If different types of people will be using a certain product, you need to make sure that the people you research represent these personas. This means not just being inclusive in your recruitment, but considering secondary personas—the people who may not be your target user base, but interact with your product incidentally.

You should also consider recruiting research participants to test the product on different devices. Paige explains: “If prior research has shown that behavior differs greatly between those who use a product on their phone versus their tablet, I need to better understand those differences—so I’m going to make sure my participants include people who have used a product on both devices.”

During this step, make sure to include information about the required number of participants, how you’ll get them to participate, and how much time you need per user. The main ways to recruit testers are:

• Using an online participant recruitment tool like Maze Panel
• Putting out physical or digital adverts in spaces that are relevant to your product and user
• Reaching out to existing users
• Using participants from previous research
• Recruiting directly from your website or app with a tool like In-Product Prompts

5.1. Determine how you’ll pay them

You should always reward your test participants for their time and insights. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because if they have an incentive they’re more likely to give you complete and insightful answers. If you’re hosting the studies in person, you’ll also need to cover your participants' travel expenses and secure a research space. Running remote moderated or unmoderated research is often considered to be less expensive and faster to complete.

If you’re testing an international audience, remember to check your proposed payment system works worldwide—this might be an Amazon gift card or prepaid Visa cards.

6. Prepare the brief

The next component of a research plan is to create a brief or guide for your research sessions. The kind of brief you need will vary depending on your research method, but for moderated methods like user interviews, field studies, or focus groups, you’ll need a detailed guide and script. The brief is there to remind you which questions to ask and keep the sessions on track.

Your script should cover:

• Introduction: A short message you’ll say to participants before the session begins. This works as a starting point for conversations and helps set the tone for the meeting. If you’re testing without a moderator, you should also include an introductory message to explain what the research is about and the type of answers they should give (in terms of length and specificity).
• Interview questions: Include your list of questions you’ll ask participants during the sessions. These could be examples to help guide the interviews, specific pre-planned questions, or test tasks you’ll ask participants to perform during unmoderated sessions.
• Outro message: Outline what you'll say at the end of the session, including the next steps, asking participants if they are open to future research, and thanking them for their time. This can be a form you share at the end of asynchronous sessions.

It’s crucial you remember to ask participants for their consent. You should do this at the beginning of the test by asking if they’re okay with you recording the session. Use this space to lay out any compensation agreements as well. Then, ask again at the end of the session if they agree with you keeping the results and using the data for research purposes. If possible, explain exactly what you’ll do with their data. Double check and get your legal team’s sign-off on these forms.

7. Establish the timeline

Next in your plan, estimate how long the research project will take and when you should expect to review the findings. Even if not exact, determining an approximate timeline (e.g., two-three weeks) will enable you to manage stakeholders’ expectations of the process and results.

Many people believe UX research is a lengthy process, so they skip it. When you set up a timeline and get stakeholders aligned with it, you can debunk assumptions and put stakeholders’ minds at ease. Plus, if you’re using a product discovery tool like Maze, you can get answers to your tests within days.

8. Decide how you’ll present your findings

When it comes to sharing your findings with your team, presentation matters. You need to make a clear presentation and demonstrate how user insights will influence design and development. If you’ve conducted UX research in the past, share data that proves how implementing user insights has improved product adoption.

Examples of ways you can present your results include:

• A physical or digital PDF report with key statistics and takeaways
• An interactive online report of the individual research questions and their results
• A presentation explaining the results and your findings
• A digital whiteboard, like Miro, to display the results

In your plan, mention how you’ll share insights with the product team. For example, if you’re using Maze, you can start by emailing everyone the ready-to-share report and setting up a meeting with the team to identify how to bring those insights to life. This is key, because your research should be the guiding light for new products or updates, if you want to keep development user-centric. Taking care over how you present your findings will impact whether they’re taken seriously and implemented by other stakeholders.

Your UX research plan template: Free template + example

Whether you’re creating the plan yourself or delegating to your team, a clear UX research plan template cuts your prep time in half.

Find our customizable free UX research plan template here , and keep reading for a filled-in example.

Example: Improving user adoption of a project management tool called Flows

Now, let’s go through how to fill out this template and create a UX research plan with an example.

Executive summary:

Flows aims to increase user adoption and tool engagement by 30% within the next 12 months. Our B2B project management software has been on the market for 3 years and has 25,000 active users across various industries.

By researching the current product experience with existing users, we’ll learn what works and what doesn’t in order to make adjustments to the product and experience.

Research objectives:

Purpose of the plan and studies:

The purpose is to gather actionable insights into user needs, behaviors, and challenges to inform updates that will drive increased adoption and engagement of 30% for the B2B project management tool within 12 months.

Target audience, sample size, scope, and demographics:

Expectations, deliverables, timings, and type of results:

Research methodologies:

*Some teams will take part in more than one research session.

Research analysis methods:

We are doing a mixed methods study.

User interviews are our primary method for gathering qualitative data, and will be analyzed using thematic analysis .

• Quantitative data will be pulled from usability tests to evaluate the effectiveness of our current design.
• Research set up and guidelines:
• Create baselines surveys to gauge current usage and pain points
• Develop interview/discussion guides and usability testing scenarios
• Pilot test materials with two teams
• User interviews: 60 mins, semi-structured; usability tests: 90 mins
• Findings will be presented in a research report for all stakeholders

Research scripts, questions, and samples:

User interview questions:

• What’s your experience with Flows?
• How does Flows fit into your workflow?
• What is your understanding of Flows’ features?
• What do you wish Flows could do that it currently doesn’t?

Usability test sample with Maze:

Cost estimations or budget requests/pricing:

Total estimated budget: $8,000

More free customizable templates for UX research

Whether you’re creating the plan yourself or are delegating this responsibility to your team, here are six research templates to get started:

• UX research plan template : This editable Miro research project plan example helps you brainstorm user and business-facing problems, objectives, and questions
• UX research brief : You need a clear brief before you conduct UX research—Milanote shares a template that will help you simplify the writing process
• User testing synthesis : Trello put together a sample board to organize user testing notes—you can use this as a guide, but change the titles to fit your UX research purposes
• Usability testing templates : At Maze, we’ve created multiple templates for conducting specific UX research methods—this list will help you create different remote usability tests
• Information architecture (IA) tests template : The way you organize the information in your website or app can improve or damage the user experience—use this template to run IA tests easily
• Feedback survey templates : Ask users anything through a survey, and use these templates to get creative and simplify creation

Everything you need to know about UX research plans

We all know that a robust plan is essential for conducting successful UX research. But, in case you want a quick refresher on what we’ve covered:

• Using a UX research strategy as a starting point will make your plan more likely to succeed
• Determine your research objectives before anything else
• Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Come up with clear personas so you can recruit and test a group of individuals that’s representative of your real end users
• Involve stakeholders from the beginning to get buy-in
• Be vocal about timelines, budget, and expected research findings
• Use the insights to power your product decisions and wow your users; building the solution they genuinely want and need

UX research can happen at any stage of the development lifecycle. When you build products with and for users, you need to include them continuously at various stages of the process.

It’s helpful to explore the need for continuous discovery in your UX research plan and look for a tool like Maze that simplifies the process for you. We’ll cover more about the different research methods and UX research tools in the upcoming chapters—ready to go?

Elevate your UX research workflow

Discover how Maze can streamline and operationalize your research plans to drive real product innovation while saving on costs.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between a UX research plan and a UX research strategy?

The difference between a UX research plan and a UX research strategy is that they cover different levels of scope and detail. A UX research plan is a document that guides individual user experience (UX) research projects. UX research plans are shared documents that everyone on the product team can and should be familiar with. A UX research strategy, on the other hand, outlines the high-level goals, expectations, and demographics of the organization’s approach to research.

What should you include in a user research plan?

Here’s what to include in a user research plan:

• Problem statement
• Research objectives
• Research methods
• Participants' demographics
• Recruitment plan
• User research brief
• Expected timeline
• How to present findings

How do you write a research plan for UX design?

Creating a research plan for user experience (UX) requires a clear problem statement and objectives, choosing the right research method, recruiting participants and briefing them, and establishing a timeline for your project. You'll also need to plan how you'll analyze and present your findings.

How do you plan a UX research roadmap?

To plan a UX research roadmap, start by identifying key business goals and user needs. Align research activities with product milestones to ensure timely insights. Prioritize research methods—like surveys, interviews, and usability tests—based on the project phase and objectives. Set clear timelines and allocate resources accordingly. Regularly update stakeholders on progress and integrate feedback to refine the roadmap continuously.

Generative Research: Definition, Methods, and Examples

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UX Research Cheat Sheet

February 12, 2017 2017-02-12

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User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

In This Article:

When to conduct user research.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

• Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now . The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.
• Do user research at all the stages . As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
• Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing , which is the most effective method to improve usability . If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what , but you often need to know why . So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all .

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

• Conduct field studies and interview users : Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.
• Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
• Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
• Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
• Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
• Do competitive testing . Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

• Compare features against competitors.
• Do design reviews.
• Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
• Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
• Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
• Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
• Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
• Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
• Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

• Do qualitative usability testing . Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
• Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies .
• Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
• Talk with user groups.
• Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
• Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
• Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

• Survey customers and prospective users.
• Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
• Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
• Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
• Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
• Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.
• Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

• Find allies . It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.
• Talk with experts . Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.
• Follow ethical guidelines . The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.
• Involve stakeholders . Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.
• Hunt for data sources . Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?
• Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.
• Follow Tog's principles of interaction design .
• Use evidence-based design guidelines , especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.
• Design for universal access . Accessibility can’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.
• Give users control . Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.
• Prevent errors . Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.
• Improve error messages . For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.
• Provide helpful defaults . Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.
• Check for inconsistencies . Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment . Meet expectations instead.
• Map features to needs . User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.
• When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy . Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.
• When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling . Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.
• Avoid waste . Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.
• Consider system usability in different cultural contexts . You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries . Translation is only part of the challenge.
• Look for perverse incentives . Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.
• Consider social implications . How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?
• Protect personal information . Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.
• Keep data safe . Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.
• Deliver both good and bad news . It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.
• Track usability over time . Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.
• Include diverse users . People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.
• Track usability bugs . If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.
• Pay attention to user sentiment . Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.
• Reduce the need for training . Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
• Communicate future directions . Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.
• Recruit people for future research and testing . Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

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UX Research Plan Template

Create a strong business case for UX research and streamline your process with the UX research plan template.

About the UX Research Plan Template

A UX research plan, also known as a user research plan, is a brief reference document that outlines your research project’s goals, key contributors, important dates, and timelines.

Think of your research plan as a UX-focused  kick-off document  for your project. The plan offers an overview of the research initiative, encourages well-defined and agreed-upon goals, and acts as a written guarantee that the research will meet these goals.

What is a UX research plan?

When conducting usability testing or user research with a goal in mind, researchers need to plan. UX researchers often present their findings to stakeholders, like product managers, developers, marketers, and executives, to act on those results.

You should present your UX research plan in plain language with a single document. Keep your findings clear, collaborative, easily accessed, and digestible to get buy-in for your research and your team’s next steps.

A user research plan typically has up to seven segments:

Project background: Reasons for the study and internal stakeholders involved.

Research goals and objectives: What your teams want to learn, or their ideal research outcome.

Research participants: Who they are and how they’ll be recruited.

Method: How you conducted research, and any other information about how the research will be conducted.

Guides: An interview guide or cheat sheet of instructions and questions to follow during the session.

Duration: A rough timeline of how long the research will take and when the team can review the report.

Other helpful information: Additional resources for your team, such as previous studies, scripts, or results, can inform this new round of research.

Research plans keep your team focused on outcomes rather than getting lost in the details or changing the research goal midway through the project. By the end of the project, UX researchers should feel confident that their questions were answered and presented in both the plan and actual research.

When to use UX research plans

UX research plans are useful for teams who need to decide on  questions such as:

What do our customers need? Who is our target persona?

Does the proposed or current design work well for our customers? How can we make it better?

Planning UX research also gives researchers an opportunity to:

Decide what works for your stakeholders, especially the questions they’re trying to answer.

Engage stakeholders and keep them invested in your research results.

Clarify your ideas, problems to be solved, and research approaches.

Treat your research plan as a blueprint for aligning expectations, asking for feedback, or generating enthusiasm and support for increasing the value of user research in your organization.

Create your own UX research plan template

Making your own UX research plans is easy, and Miro is the perfect tool to create and share them. Get started by selecting the UX research plan template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

Give your team or stakeholders a quick project introduction.  You can hop on a video chat with up to 25 team members and remind everyone what you’re trying to achieve. Remember that research proves its value when it satisfies a single objective rather than many. If you seem to have lots of different goals or objectives, avoid overreaching and start fresh: what’s the one customer problem and business problem you’re trying to solve?

Define the user and business problems your research needs to solve.  The default sticky notes are simply for inspiration — feel free to edit each of these to fix your own context. If you want your team to focus on this area instead of skipping ahead, you can select the “problem” frame and  click the “hide frame” (closed eye) icon  that appears in the frame’s menu.

Define your research goals.  Ask your team to brainstorm their top three research goals or priorities. Remember that the best research sessions are chasing a single objective, so out of the two to three you note down, ask your team to vote for their preferences. Try  Miro’s Voting Plugin  to help your team reach a decision.

Draft your research questions.  Pick three to five questions with your team or stakeholders that are most important to your research. Aim for no more than 10. The more focused your questions, the more focused your research will be.

Link to useful supporting information as needed.  Keep this plan to the point in order to get buy-in. For stakeholders who need more detail, there may be other useful data to link to. If you have previous UX research results or relevant studies, link to them on your Miro Board. You can also import survey data, embed  tables and charts , or link sticky notes  to external sources .

Dive even deeper into how to conduct UX research – and see examples – in our expert guide to  user research .

Why should you use the UX Research Template?

Centralized planning: Centralize your UX research plans in one shared space. This ensures that all relevant information, including research objectives, methodologies, and timelines, is easily accessible in one place, reducing the risk of scattered or lost documentation.

Collaborative research: Multiple stakeholders, including designers, researchers, and product managers, can collaborate on your UX research plan template simultaneously, fostering a more inclusive and collaborative approach to research planning.

Visual representation of research steps: Create diagrams, flowcharts, and visual representations of the research process. This visual mapping helps teams better understand the sequence of research activities, identify dependencies, and effectively communicate the overall research strategy.

Iterative refinement: Provide feedback, comments, and suggestions directly on the UX research plan template. Promote continuous improvement, allowing the team to refine the research plan based on insights and changing project requirements.

Integration with user flows and personas: Integrate with other templates, such as user flows and persona maps. By connecting these elements, teams can create a holistic view of the user experience journey. This integration helps align research activities with the overall UX strategy and ensures a more cohesive and user-centric product design.

How can I ensure that a UX Research Plan remains effective?

Regularly review and update the research plan as project requirements evolve. It's crucial to stay flexible and adapt the plan based on the findings and changing project needs.

Get started with this template right now.

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