A UX research framework is a systematic approach that guides the process of conducting research. It helps to ensure that the process is well-structured and organized, and contains a set of research tools, methods and principles that researchers utilize for understanding the users and their needs better.
Having an established UX research framework helps to create a structured approach, save time, align research and business goals and foster collaboration.
There’s a list of key components for a classical research framework, that includes research methods, tools, research plan, analysis techniques and ethical considerations.
A good UX research framework should provide valuable insight into the company’s research processes and how they’re structured.
To make your framework even more helpful and save time, include handy templates, scripts and cheat sheets that you often use in your research.
Here are all the things it can help with:
Creating a structured approach: UX research frameworks bring structure to your organization. Having one assures that all your teams and researchers are on the same page, maintaining consistency across different projects.
Saving time: following the previous point, having a predefined structured approach to research allows you to save time on reinventing the process for each project and focus on uncovering insights instead.
Aligning research and business goals: a research framework helps to align your research activities with the broader goals of the organization and ensure it always has a positive impact on the company’s product.
Fostering collaboration and communication: above all, a clearly defined research framework helps to establish effective communication among teams.
Best practices for creating UX research framework
Involve a diverse team: This will help to ensure that your framework includes a wide range of insights from people with different backgrounds and experiences, making it insightful and useful for everyone.
Introduce user-centered design principles: Design your framework with the user-centered design principles in mind. It should clearly communicate why research is important and why we want to understand the users.
Use comprehensive language:
- Some tips to keep in mind are:
- Avoid jargon
- Include a glossary to explain complex terms if necessary
- Provide examples
- Use visuals to aid with comprehension
Make it shareable: Our last tip is to make sure your UX research framework is a shareable document that is easy to read and navigate.
Components to include in a UX research framework
1. Introduction: What is UX research?
2. User Research Plan
Describe its structure, format and key elements, such as:
- Research Scope, Goals
- Stakeholders, Participants
- Methods, Team and Roles
- Timelines and Budget
3. Research methods and their use cases
4. Documentation methods
5. Methods for processing and analyzing data
6. Ways to communicate findings
7. Ethical considerations
A framework for Decision Driven Research
In this framework, the idea is to map your research methods to the types of decisions you want to enable. There are 4 types of decisions:
Vision decisions establish a potential company, product, or service direction. To enable vision decisions, you should choose methods that give you clarity on participants’ big-picture beliefs, philosophies, and experiences.
Strategy decisions determine how you will achieve your vision. To enable strategic decisions, you should choose methods that give you detailed insights into participants’ big-picture beliefs, philosophies, and experiences.
Definition decisions determine whether or not you pursue a specific design direction. To enable these decisions, you should choose methods that allow you to get early feedback on potential design directions and to better understand how a participant may interact with a potential product or service.
Evaluation decisions concern iterations to existing products or services. To enable evaluation decisions, you should choose methods that allow you to continuously identify problems, bugs, or confusion that customers may encounter during use.
A 3-dimensional framework for UXR
The Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Dimension
This distinction can be summed up by contrasting "what people say" versus "what people do" (very often the two are quite different). The purpose of attitudinal research is usually to understand or measure people's stated beliefs, but it is limited by what people are aware of and willing to report.
Card sorting provides insights about users' mental model of an information space and can help determine the best information architecture for your product, application, or website. Surveys measure and categorize attitudes or collect self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues to address. Focus groups tend to be less useful for usability purposes, for a variety of reasons, but can provide a top-of-mind view of what people think about a brand or product concept in a group setting.
A/B testing presents changes to a site's design to random samples of site visitors but attempts to hold all else constant, in order to see the effect of different site-design choices on behavior, while eyetracking seeks to understand how users visually interact with a design or visual stimulus.
The Qualitative vs. Quantitative Dimension
Studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing or hearing them directly, whereas in quantitative studies, the data about the behavior or attitudes in question are gathered indirectly, through a measurement or an instrument such as a survey or an analytics tool.
The kind of data collected in quantitative methods is predetermined — it could include task time, success, whether the user has clicked on a given UI element or whether they selected a certain answer to a multiple-choice question.
Qualitative methods are much better suited for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem, whereas quantitative methods do a much better job answering how many and how much types of questions.
The Context of Product Use
The third distinction has to do with how and whether participants in the study are using the product or service in question. This can be described as:
- Natural or near-natural use of the product
- Scripted use of the product
- Limited in which a limited form of the product is used to study a specific aspect of the user experience
- Not using the product during the study (decontextualized)
When studying natural use of the product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behavior or attitudes as close to reality as possible.
A scripted study of product usage is done in order to focus the insights on specific product areas, such as a newly redesigned flow.
Limited methods use a limited form of a product to study a specific or abstracted aspect of the experience. For example, participatory-design methods allow users to interact with and rearrange design elements that could be part of a product experience.
Studies where the product is not used are conducted to examine issues that are broader than usage and usability, such as a study of the brand or discovering the aesthetic attributes that participants associate with a specific design style.
In the beginning of the product-development process, you are typically more interested in the strategic question of what direction to take the product, so methods at this stage are often generative in nature, because they help generate ideas and answers about which way to go. Once a direction is selected, the design phase begins, so methods in this stage are well-described as formative, because they inform how you can improve the design. After a product has been developed enough to measure it, it can be assessed against earlier versions of itself or competitors, and methods that do this are called summative. This following table describes where many methods map to these stages in time:
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