UX Research Roadmap: How to Create and Why It Matters

Meticulous user research goes into understanding pain points and building a strategic product roadmap.

Rewind to the days of dial-up internet and AOL. (Or Yahoo, or MSN, or whatever. We weren’t too picky about our email at the time.)

Then came Gmail with its intuitive interface and all that storage space we didn’t know we needed. Google continues to add features to its product roadmap that make our lives easier (and more fool-proof!). They differentiate themselves by always solving the unaddressed customer need, such as recalling a mistakenly sent email.

Product features are not born out of thin air.

Depending on the project stage, companies undertake strategic or tactical user research. Strategic research is driven by high-level business objectives and usually broadly defined, while tactical research addresses a specific question/problem, usually within a short timeframe. 

And the companies that do research right often use a UX research roadmap to influence their product roadmap.

Stick with us for a short journey through these UX strategy themes:

• How to define your research roadmap
• What happens if you don’t use a research roadmap
• 6 steps for using research in your product development process
• User-centric product roadmaps start with UX research

What is a UX Research Roadmap?

Let’s look at “Gro-cery,” a fictional retailer that wants to launch a mobile app where customers can order their goods for delivery. Gro-cery’s strategic research should focus on the targeted demographic — what are their buying preferences? What is their willingness to spend on certain foods/items? What do they want from an app experience? Tactical research focuses on a particular part of the journey — can we streamline purchases by adding a ‘quick-buy’ button? Where would they get stuck in the buying process if they were shopping from their couch instead of the store?

Research teams at companies like Gro-cery juggle strategic and tactical projects like this, every single day. But how do they stay laser-focused on the user experience?

Like the most successful teams, they develop a “research roadmap.”

Definition of UX Research Roadmap

A UX research roadmap (or a UX strategy roadmap, as some companies call it) is an organizational tool for creating, prioritizing and executing projects in line with company strategy.

Most people are familiar with product roadmaps, and roadmaps for research serve the same purpose: They communicate a vision of customer problems that we aim to solve. 

They visualize our higher-level strategic goals (like understanding more about potential Gro-cery app users) and tactical initiatives (conducting user interviews with in-store shoppers) required to help us get there. The research roadmap is closely intertwined with the product roadmap because the research informs design decisions. At Gro-cery, the product roadmap’s overarching goal is to build and run the application, continually refining and enhancing the user experience over time.

Key Benefits of UX Research Roadmaps

Sharing roadmaps company-wide encourages cross-functional collaboration. Gro-cery’s marketing team has an interest in the user interview data — they seek to understand the target buyer so they create impactful campaigns. Sales, responsible for an important slice of revenue, hears directly from consumers every day, so they can suggest crucial product ideas, such as replicating the experience of grabbing last-minute items at checkout. This request could lead to a strategic research initiative that identifies which items shoppers frequently add at the last minute.

UX research roadmaps combine quantitative and qualitative data, giving you the big picture. Say a survey reports that only 4% of shoppers actively use grocery apps on their phones. That’s a pretty poor adoption rate, even for a small sample. Leadership at Gro-cery may wonder about the viability of the app in the first place. However, a deep dive reveals that over half of the sample installed grocery apps on their phones. These users cited “too complicated” and “confusing” as the reasons they did not use the apps regularly. This marriage of quantitative and qualitative insights reveals a genuine customer problem. 

The idea behind the UX research roadmap is to elevate the user’s voice. It aligns everyone at a company to a single vision: How can we help our customers simplify their lives?

When to Create a UX Research Roadmap  

Creating a UX research roadmap is essential for ongoing product development.

Ideally, teams should draft a UX roadmap at the start of the product development cycle. Alternatively, when leadership changes or projects are redirected, it helps to go back to the drawing board and create one. This ensures:

• Visibility. Roadmaps provide clarity on the direction of future product development and create a vision for strategic goals and the tactical initiatives needed to achieve them.
• Prioritization. Classify and execute activities according to their importance. Separate problems to solve, focus areas, and potential initiatives. Items with higher business impact get precedence.
• Allocation. How will the company allocate resources (time, money, and manpower) to research projects? Showcases the current and future capacity of the research team.
• Timelines. Establishes timeframes for delivering objectives. Milestones help teams measure and track progress toward strategic goals.

A roadmap provides organization-wide alignment on a product’s vision. It also outlines the project pipeline so everyone understands the status of research studies.

Companies that rush their product to market without a UX research plan suffer in the long run. If you fail to consider UX, usability suffers. Complex products with inefficiencies are difficult to fix later on. Users don’t get the desired value out of the product.

Remember, creating a roadmap is not a one-time task. It’s a living document that teams must continually update. Review it annually to incorporate new studies, scrap old ones, and maintain a log of resource allocation.

UX research roadmaps guide product, design, and development teams to create products people love.

What Happens Without a UX Research Roadmap?

In the absence of a UX research roadmap, silos may develop between teams at Gro-cery. Researchers find themselves performing reactive rather than proactive research. Research is carried out as an afterthought, rather than before the design of Gro-cery’s app even begins. Gro-cery’s engineering team may simply focus on what to build, rather than why it is being built (more on this below). Marketing and sales teams have a vested interest in the research outcomes (they’re not the only ones). When you don’t share insights across teams, research efforts are often duplicated, wasting time and resources. 

Roadmaps repeatedly circle back to the customer problem, focusing on what each decision means for the end user. Research roadmaps can focus on either features or outcomes. 

Feature-Based Product Roadmaps Might Confuse Customers

• “Should we add a quick buy button?” Yeah, that would help speed up the checkout process.
• “Would customers benefit if the Gro-cery app had user reviews?” Absolutely, this enables customers to identify high-quality items. 
• “What about a social tool to connect them to other shoppers?” Probably not, but our competitors have one.
• “Should we add this?” Sure.
• “Should we add that?” Yep!

With this approach, Gro-cery ends up flooding the user with features simply because competing apps offer similar functionality. Companies get so caught up in updating and releasing new features that they lose sight of users and their biggest problems.

We can reframe “Adding a quick-buy button” to a desired outcome instead: “Simplify user purchases to reduce friction and improve conversion rate.” This is intentionally a much more broad definition defined to leave room for innovation as you collect and analyze user research.

How to Create Your Own UX Research Roadmap

Juggling timelines and resources and coordinating with different teams sounds like a gargantuan task. Where do you even begin?

Marvin’s got you covered.

Follow these steps to create your own UX research roadmap:

1. Assess stakeholder needs. As you begin, ask leaders from all teams (product, engineering, sales, marketing and business) if they have any requests that require research for the upcoming year. Spend time understanding each item, and why it’s important to them. Leave no stone unturned. 
   
2. Evaluate existing research. No point starting from scratch when another researcher or product partner asked the same questions before. Audit existing research documents, dig into their insights, and look for potential themes. Learn from their learnings to improve the customer experience and solve your own research problems faster.
   
3. Prioritize relentlessly. The stakeholder list of requests will always be long (and potentially never-ending!). At Foursquare, product and engineering teams use three simple buckets to prioritize research tasks — #now, #next and #later. #now lists items for the next 2-4 weeks, #next is 1-3 months, and #later is anything that needs revisiting after 3 months. Simplicity is key.
   
4. Plan and execute. Twilio ensures every research project begins with a research brief — a single document detailing the questions that need answers, the research that needs conducting, and the guidelines in how the work gets done. A simple, yet effective, way to keep everyone on the same page. Pun intended.
   
5. Share, share, share. Broadcast your findings and the best quotes to everyone. Share your users’ voice with all stakeholders, keeping them invested in the process. This also acts as a forum for exchanging ideas, such as adding “last-minute checkout” in the Gro-cery app.
   
6. Review and recalibrate. Check in with everyone on a quarterly basis to see if priorities have shifted, and add any new items to the pipeline. Periodically assess your research roadmap, and look for ways to improve it without losing sight of the customer pain points. Refocus, and start again. 

Complex, specific research roadmaps with strict deadlines seldom work. Teams struggle to (a) estimate the time required to finish a task, and (b) stick to their deadlines.

It’s important to understand that a UX research roadmap is a living document and subject to change. Don’t waver on your strategic objectives, but tactical goals are bound to shift over time. Be accommodating and flexible to inevitable changes that come up in the day to day.

UX Research Roadmap Example

At Gro-cery, the research team used a UX research roadmap to clearly communicate their research goals across the organization and promote the exchange of insights.

For instance, the team conducted an ethnographic study to understand supermarket customer behavior better. This study was documented on the research roadmap for everyone in the company to access and review.

Months later, a product team member revisited the roadmap and noticed the study’s findings. Realizing the insights’ value, she reached out to the research team. Together, they used the shopping behavior data to build comprehensive customer user personas.

With these personas, the product team shared detailed demographic and psychographic profiles with other departments. This helped the development team design an app that catered to different types of users while the marketing team tailored its campaigns more effectively based on the new audience insights.

The roadmap didn’t just highlight successes—it also revealed gaps in the research process. For example, Sales had suggested exploring “last-minute purchases,” but this key insight wasn’t incorporated into the product team’s study. This oversight raised the question: Was the roadmap effectively communicating all relevant inputs?

This example shows how refining the UX research roadmap process can ensure everyone’s ideas are captured and utilized. A well-maintained roadmap drives data-informed product design and sets the foundation for long-term business success.

Role of User Research in the Product Roadmap Process

User research informs product decision-making and helps deliver innovative, user-centric products. Studies help various teams learn more about users and their preferences. They uncover user pain points and areas for improvement.

Fostering innovation requires a shift in culture toward strategic research. However, you’ll always need research to validate a product that’s already designed. For research, old and new, you’ll need a location to store all the data from various tools already in use.

You’re looking for a research repository. One that facilitates proper information exchange. Ensure your repository makes research data:

• Accessible. Colleagues across the organization must have easy access to insights from studies. This informs decision-making.
• Shareable. Insights must be easy to collate and share with various stakeholders. Everyone benefits from hearing directly from users.
• Easy-to-Use. A steep learning curve means more time spent learning a tool. Choose a tool that’s easy to pick up so you can focus on research.

Want a repository that checks all these boxes (and more)?

Sign up for free to make Marvin your new research repository! With its numerous integrations, Marvin centralizes user data from various sources under one roof.[To learn more, head over to our comprehensive guide for research repository tools. We cover plenty of options for different budgets and team requirements.]

Research Roadmaps: The Key to User-Focused Product Development

User research is instrumental in creating and improving the products we know and love. Companies that consistently deliver value to their customers use research as the bedrock for their success. Research roadmaps can be a valuable asset to the organization because they align all departments around solving specific customer problems. 

By collaborating on projects and elevating the customer voice, it ensures that everyone maintains a user-centric focus. User research should drive the direction of a product’s road map, not the other way around.

UX & design leader Gina Rahn rolled out a UX research roadmap when she joined LINQ. Here’s a sneak peek at her advice so you can get started.

Can Marvin help you get started on building a more collaborative UX research roadmap and process?

Common Challenges in UX Research Roadmap Creation

Every road has its speed bumps, and roadmaps are no different. Watch out for these challenges when creating a UX Roadmap:

• Feature, Not Outcome Focus. Teams often flood their products with features without considering the user impact. Features are only the means to the end. Prioritize user outcomes instead. Roadmaps need not include specific features—only their end goal. How does this translate into making users’ lives easier?
• Minimal Stakeholder Involvement. Stakeholders have different interests. Not involving them creates misalignment and causes priorities and resource allocation to go awry. By involving stakeholders in the vision-creation process, you can create a shared vision and balance stakeholder needs with overall business goals.
• (Lack of) Transparency. Roadmaps must be accessible to everyone in an organization. Failure to keep everyone informed results in siloed teams, each conducting its work without collaboration. A lack of internal cohesion becomes apparent when products stop addressing user problems.
• (Lack of) Adaptability. Roadmaps are living documents. Hence, they must allow for flexibility in planning and executing research projects. Too rigid a structure, and teams get pigeonholed into performing tasks that seem counterintuitive. So incorporate it into the roadmap and pivot as necessary.

To avoid these pitfalls, remember to maintain a user-centric focus. Collaborate across departments to gain insight into various stakeholder needs. Keep updating the roadmap as new information comes to light. 

Best Practices for UX Research Roadmap Success

How do you set up a roadmap for success? Implement these best practices to get the most out of your UX research roadmap:

• Involve stakeholders in roadmap creation. Communicate across departments to get a well-rounded picture of stakeholder needs. Work with stakeholders throughout the process to guarantee alignment on the company strategy.
• Tie roadmap to key business objectives. Roadmaps aren’t a task list — they focus on high-level initiatives and long-term goals. To get buy-in from leadership, illustrate a project’s impact on the business. Be realistic while setting goals.
• Maintain a user research focus. Research brings new insights. Incorporate these into your roadmap to understand user needs and motivations. This helps you prioritize problems that need solving. Remove any gut feelings or hunches with a data-driven UX roadmap.
• Keep adapting. Make the roadmap flexible and easy to update. Constantly review and recalibrate your direction based on evolving customer and stakeholder needs. Adjust timelines and deliverables as necessary to maintain agile product development.

Additionally, include the following details about a project to make your roadmap as informative as possible:

Key Components of a Research Roadmap:

• Name. Pick a shorthand project name that’s easy for everyone (internally) to refer to.
• Description. Why undertake this project? Briefly describe the project background, goals, and objectives. Include any other relevant information.
• Type. Outline the methodology and type of study. What output do you expect?
• Priority. How critical is the study? Prioritize studies with a high business impact.
• Timelines. Roadmaps are planning documents and must include specific timelines. For more abstract studies and initiatives, include approximate deadlines to keep teams on track.
• Budget. What resources can we allocate to this study? Consider resource availability (the big three) and incentives offered for study participation.
• Status. What stage has the project progressed to? Is it planned, ongoing, or completed?
• Teams. Apart from research, what teams does it involve? Which ones benefit from the study’s findings?
• Future. What are the follow-up items once a study has concluded?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Below, we address some of the most popular questions about UX research roadmaps:

What is the Difference Between a UX Research Roadmap and a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap communicates a company’s vision and strategy for its product. It provides a strategic plan that details what teams are building and why. Roadmaps act as a blueprint for initiatives across functions. These include UX, design, development, content, marketing, sales, and customer success.

UX research roadmaps are more specific. They outline research objectives and initiatives, a pipeline of research studies and fieldwork undertaken, and research questions that need answering. They also include specific project details such as resource allocation, timelines, budget, etc.

How Do You Measure the Success of a UX Research Roadmap?

At the highest level, evaluate the success of a UX research roadmap by its impact on two parties:

1. Users. How do users feel while using the product? Look at metrics that track the following:
   1. Usability. How easy is it for customers to use a product? 
   2. Engagement. How are users interacting with a product or website? 
   3. Customer Satisfaction. Are your customers happy? 
2. The Business. How does the user experience affect a business’ overall goals?

Remember to define clear and measurable goals. Obtain baseline data to measure achievements against these goals to track progress over time. Track multiple metrics to get a holistic understanding of the user experience.

Can a UX Research Roadmap Include Qualitative and Quantitative Research?   

It must! Combine both qualitative and quantitative research to get a well-rounded understanding of the user experience.

Quantitative research uses numerical data to identify trends or patterns in user behavior. Statistical analysis reveals what users are doing. How are they interacting with a product? Qualitative research uses open-ended responses to facilitate open discussion with your customers and add context to numbers. Qualitative data reveals the why behind user actions. What is their underlying motivation for taking action?

Collecting both types of data helps companies understand customer needs, expectations, and pain points. Designers and developers use this information to promote product updates and improvements.

Looking for a research repository that houses both quantitative and qualitative data? Your search ends here. Give Marvin a test drive — book your free demo today!

How Do You Involve Stakeholders in the UX Research Roadmap Process?

The first step in creating a research roadmap is assessing stakeholder needs. Understanding the expectations and needs of different departments helps researchers identify key research questions.

Here’s a quick run-down of the process of involving stakeholders:

1. Identify. Who does the research impact? What do they need? Stakeholders include:
   • Customers
   • C-suite executives
   • Product, Development, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.
2. Interview. Engage in conversations with concerned stakeholders. Understand their goals and pain points. Each stakeholder will have different requirements and expectations based on the research. Remember, be transparent and present insights in a way that stakeholders can relate to. Speak their language!
3. Prioritize. Map stakeholder priorities based on their interest in the project. Address their concerns—link research to overall organizational goals and estimate which has the biggest impact.

Conclusion

UX research roadmaps have an enormous bearing on a product’s success.

As blueprints that outline research initiatives and milestones, roadmaps help align stakeholder interests. A strategic document that directs stakeholders towards a shared product vision.

A UX professional’s role is to connect stakeholders to understand their needs. Roadmaps help prioritize needs and examine what initiatives will have the maximum impact — on both the user and the business.

Roadmaps ensure everyone at an organization stays well-informed of research work. Allocate resources efficiently and add value to the user experience. Make sure you have a UX research roadmap to guide you through product development and improvement.

Photo by Liam Seskis on Unsplash