Weekly UX Research Prompt
Practice your user research skills
The first thing I tell people who are trying to learn or improve at user research is to practice. Practice, practice practice. Write research plans and scripts. Conduct practice interviews. Generate ideas on how you would help solve problems at a company. Always be practicing.
I employ this in my day-to-day life. I am a fiction writer and, I know, the best way to write is to write every single day. I have to practice writing to be a better writer. I generally do this by responding to a daily writing prompt. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it empowers me to get some words down on to a page every day. And that is what makes you better.
The other night, an idea popped into my head. I so value the concept of daily writing prompts, so why don’t I try to apply that to user research?
The Idea
I want you to help you think about and practice user research more realistically. These prompts will allow you to do several things:
- Create a fundamental user research portfolio piece
- Practice for a whiteboard challenge
- Think about how you tackle problems
- Make you think on your feet
- Get experience outside of your day-to-day
- Flex your creativity
I will try to leave the prompts as vague as possible. You can do as much or as little as you want for each prompt. A full-blown research project is time-consuming, but just writing out some ideas for the prompts can also be helpful. Feel free to use the prompt to do the following (or more):
- Problem statement: What is the research project?
- Research objectives: What are you trying to achieve?
- Methodology: How did you do the research?
- Participants & recruiting: Who did you talk to?
- Interview guide: What questions did you ask? What was the flow of the interview?
- Competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation
- Synthesis and analysis techniques
- Insights from the interviews, such as quotes and affinity diagrams
- Generate outputs, such as user personas and customer journey maps
- Report any usability testing you did
- Next steps
If you have other ideas on how you would like to use these prompts, please share them with me so I can add them!
My offer
I believe we also improve by getting feedback from people. Use the tag “weeklyuxresearchprompt” on Medium or comment with a way for me to access your project (especially if it contains sensitive information). Every week I will pick 2–3 projects to review. What does this mean? I will spend about 30 minutes going through the project and giving you as much detailed feedback as possible. If you have a particular area you need more help on, just let me know beforehand.
I will post a user research prompt every Monday. Please give me feedback as I try this idea. I want this to be beneficial for everyone, and I am more than happy to iterate to make it better for all.
This week’s prompt:
Problem statement
How can we better understand the way people travel?
Project brief:
Your client is a leading travel brand who sees new opportunities emerging in the digital space around how people plan travel. They want you to focus your research on one group of the travel experience, either leisure travel or business travel. The client expects you to deliver insights on how people travel, in order to start designing something relevant for users
How would you approach this problem?
If you respond on Medium, make sure to use the tag “weekly ux research prompt” so we can find each other’s projects!