How should I structure and write a User Research case study?
A sample UX Research case study.
By far, the most frequent question I get asked is, “how should I write a user research case study?” The second most frequent question I get asked is, “what should I include in my case study?”
Case studies are difficult and stressful. I have spent hours sweating and crying while putting together a case study. To this day, despite my years of experience and confidence in the field, I still hate the process.
However, I want to provide an example of how I structure and write a case study in the hopes that it will make your journey better.
What is a user research case study?
A user research case study is your way to demonstrate the value you provide to an organization. It is a story about a project you have accomplished and gives your audience a step-by-step understanding of how you approached it.
Case studies are at the heart of an interview and an integral piece to making it through to the next step during the interview process. If you tell a compelling and clear story of projects, you are more likely to get more interviews and further the interview process. Additionally, you will feel more confident during the interview process and with any next steps.
I promise you it is worth the time and effort to invest in your case studies.
What should be in a user research case study?
When you write a user research case study, there are areas you should include. However, always use your judgment. If a particular project did not cover one of these topics, you don’t have to make something up or force information into it. Use these topics as guidelines.
As a hiring manager, I always look for the following in user research case studies:
- Context
- Your role
- Timeline
- Research statement and goals
- Research methodology
- Recruitment criteria and process
- Sample questions asked or usability tasks
- Analysis and synthesis process
- Outputs/deliverables
- Impact
- Next steps and recommendations
- Reflections
Optional:
- Your/team biases and assumptions
Check out my user research case study template!
The Example
This example is based on a fictional problem and company. As much as I would like to use a real-life example, it is tough to do this. I did my best to simulate a real project and fill this out as if I was creating a real case study.
In this example, I was previously working at a food delivery company (think: Seamless, Liefrando, Deliveroo). The fictional name of this company is Tasty Delivery. I was a user researcher at Tasty Delivered.
I don’t include any photos since this is a fake company and project, but I highly recommend including this information whenever possible.
Context and background
Hi, I’m Nikki! I worked at Tasty Delivery, which is a food delivery app. The app's goal is to connect people with all the restaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores, bakeries, and coffee shops in their area. All they need to do is order, and tastiness will be delivered straight to their door. The company was founded in 2015, and we are available on the East Coast of the United States and in the UK, Denmark, and Germany. As a researcher, I work on the company's B2C side, but there is also a relevant B2B aspect.
And just some context outside of my work. In 2015, I started to learn how to cook, and now I can make complex vegan meals! In the years, I also picked up other hobbies, like table tennis, hiking, and listening to podcasts.
Today, I will talk to you about a project we did to better understand the personas on our platform and their top usability issues.
My role
I am a user researcher at Tasty Delivery, and during this project, I was the only qualitative user researcher. I lead all of the interviews, and the end-to-end process, such as recruitment, synthesis, and workshops.
I was fortunate enough to work with an amazing team that included two designers, a product manager, and a few developers. They were present in almost all of the research sessions (notetakers!) and the synthesis and related workshops. Although I did some synthesis on my own, they helped me with putting the main themes together. At the end of the project, we had some relevant findings to the marketing team, so I worked with them on workshops as well.
The project had come from a road mapping session the product team had done. I was part of that session, so I had a lot of background knowledge. However, I had them fill out a research request template. This helped me prioritize the project against other requests coming in, as it was a company priority.
Timeline
Overall, the project took a total of one and a half months. Of course, we are still iterating on the personas, but the deliverables were created and shared within that timeframe.
- Discussing the project: 1 week
- Recruitment: 2 weeks
- Conducting research: 2.5 weeks
- Survey: 1 week
- Analysis: 1.5 weeks
- Report: 1 week
Research statement and goals
We wanted to understand better how users think about ordering food online and how they interact with our product to improve our app's experience.
What were the goals of the research project?
- Discover user’s mental models on how and why they order food online (agnostic of Tasty Delivery)
- Uncover the different products people are using to order food online, and their experience with these products
- Evaluate how people are using Tasty Delivery to surface the top pain points
Research methodology
For this project, we decided on two different methods to fit the timeline:
- One-on-one generative interviews
- A follow-up survey
We decided on “walk the store” style interviews for the one-on-one generative interviews, which meant we had a 90-minute conversation. The first thirty minutes focused on their day-to-day and how ordering food online fits into their days. We also discussed competitors and other products. The latter 60 minutes was spent doing a complete walkthrough of the product, based on how they generally use it. This portion of the interview was a mix of interviewing and contextual inquiry. I observed them using the app, as they thought aloud, and then asked clarifying questions whenever necessary. I chose this method because it allowed us to understand people’s mental models of online food delivery and see how people interacted with our app. With this interaction, I could pinpoint the top pain points for the teams to focus on. Overall, we held 17 of these interviews.
We then did a follow-up survey in which we quantified the findings. Since the team would use this information for a future roadmap, I wanted to make sure the findings were as reliable and valid as possible. In this case, we used the insights we found of the top pain points and surveyed over 1,000 users on each pain point's importance and current satisfaction. We then calculated the opportunity gap (the level of importance of the pain point minus the current satisfaction level).
The stakeholders (product managers, designers, and developers) joined most of the research sessions as observers and as notetakers.
Recruitment criteria and process
For this study, we were looking for a mixture of users and non-users. We did this because we wanted to make sure we got a fresh perspective of the app and see how first-time users respond to our flow and experience. This helped us ensure we weren’t just looking at power users that were “used to” our flows.
Some of our recruitment criteria were:
- Have ordered food online at least once in the past month
- Has used an online food delivery app
- Age: 25–45
- Geography: the US only
- Language: English
We used the following tools for recruitment:
- HotJar pop-up on the app and website
- Emailing newsletter subscribers
We used a 20% discount voucher on their next order as an incentive for this study to recruit as quickly as possible.
Sample questions or usability tasks
Here is a link to the moderation guide.
During the interview sessions, I used very open-ended questions. To ensure this was the case, I used the TEDW approach to frame most of my questions. This led to an extremely open conversation, which allowed us to understand mental models and pain points without leading them.
When it came to the walkthrough portion of the interview, we had users walk us through the last order they made (whether it was on our platform) and then prompted the participants to talk through each step in detail.
Analysis and synthesis process
After each session, I hold a 30-minute debrief session with the team to discuss key takeaways, pain points, and surprises. This helps the team reflect on the session and starts building us up to the larger synthesis.
I synthesize research sessions by listening to each session 24 hours afterward and transcribing the session directly into an excel spreadsheet. I then code the data with common tags (such as pain points, needs, goals, tools). I also use this opportunity to highlight relevant quotes.
After eight interviews (halfway through), I held a mini synthesis session. Every stakeholder took three interviews, listened to them, and tagged the data. In the session, we did affinity mapping of the most common trends. Since we were hyper-focused on pain points for this study, we looked into those and goals, needs, and other products participants were using. The reason I did this mini-synthesis is that I know 17 sessions can feel overwhelming. This split up the sessions and made it more digestible.
I then held another session at the end of the project, where we tackled the remaining interviews. We then layered the mapping from the previous session and found the overarching trends. We discussed the top themes using the RICE method (reach, impact, confidence, effort) and did some dot voting to find the top three action items.
I also held a few workshops with marketing once we found some content insights.
Outputs and deliverables
After synthesizing each session, I put together a report for the session. I called this a research snapshot as it gives a high-level overview of what happened in that particular session. It is beneficial for teams to have this information at-a-glance because they ingest it more easily and take action.
After the mini-synthesis, I put together a report. In this report, I summarized the key takeaways and pain points we were finding. In this report, I included videos and links to more information. I did this as well after the final synthesis.
Other deliverables included two new personas and the first iteration of a customer journey map (which needs to be validated later). We chose personas because, before this project, the teams had little understanding of who was using our product and why. These personas enabled them to anchor decision-making, and what should be prioritized next.
In addition to the deliverables, we presented the results to several teams, including marketing, sales, and the C-level. These presentations were taken very well, and the teams felt empowered to use the insights across the organization.
Impact
This research helped the entire organization understand how customers move across our product and the most painful experiences they encounter. Teams could better work together on the holistic experience, making it more seamless for our users. During the quarterly planning, the insights and the personas were used in the prioritization and planning process — the pain points were highlighted and are being tackled through ideation, prototyping, and more research.
At a larger level, the marketing team was able to iterate on their content strategy, including how they reached out to customers, which increased our overall conversion rate and the number of orders per newsletter subscriber.
We have been working on improving the pain points, which has led to an increase in revenue per user.
Finally, our culture shifted in that the organization moved to a more user-centric mindset and is now more excited to do research.
Next steps and recommendations
Many pain points came out of the research. We are now following-up on these pain points with ideation and usability testing:
- The checkout flow was long and difficult to get through
- It was hard for users to know where they were (grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop)
- There was little reason for users to return and stay loyal to us
We shipped an MVP of a loyalty program, which has an increased retention rate by 5%. We also iterated on the checkout flow, making it more concise and straightforward. This increased click-thru rate by 15%
We will continue to iterate on the personas as we learn more. We also will validate the customer journey map with more interviews.
Reflections
What went well:
- People actually used the research!
- The methodology allowed us to reach all of our goals
- Stakeholders participated in the research
- The mindset of the organization shifted towards more user-centricity
Challenges:
- Recruitment took a very long time -> I will target better next time on more focused recruitment criteria
- It took a while to get buy-in ->I will educate more on the value of research
- The scope of the project changed a lot -> I will send an intake document sooner to have everything documented
- There were some last-minute participant no shows, so we had to scramble for back-ups -> I will find a way to include back-ups in recruitment
(Optional) Your/teams assumptions and biases
Biases/assumptions:
- People order food because they are lazy
- People want to order food from many different places (ex: grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants, bakeries)
- People don’t know what they want before they open the app (more browsing)
What we validated:
- People want the ability to order food from many places but tend to have a few favorites
What we disproved:
People don’t order food because they are lazy; they order because:
- Something went wrong with dinner (ex: forgot to pick up something, groceries went off)
- Stress (ex: too much to do)
- Fun (ex: a relaxing night in)
- People have an idea of what they want before even opening the app
I truly hope this walk-through of my approach has helped you and can guide you through your next case study! Don’t forget to check out my template!
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