What Is a User Research Strategy and How Do You Build One?

Most teams conduct user research. But not all of them have a user research strategy that connects every study to a business goal.

As a result, research requests pile up, priorities shift, and valuable insights don’t always reach the people who need them. That makes it harder to build the products and features your users want.

Whether you’re a researcher, product manager, or UX designer, you must be very clear on: 

• What you want to study
• Why that specific aspect matters
• How each project supports better product decisions

In this guide, we explore how to build a user research strategy that answers these essential questions.

Read on to discover how to turn ad-hoc studies into a repeatable process your team can build on over time.

What is a user research strategy?

A user research strategy is a high-level framework you can use to connect your research activities to specific business goals. It helps you decide what to study, when to study it, and where to invest research time as products evolve. This approach is:

• Different from ad-hoc research, where studies happen in response to immediate requests: Having a UX research strategy means you’re setting priorities over the long term. You ensure that every project you run contributes to broader product, design, or business objectives.
• Different from a UX research plan: A strategy defines the direction for your overall UX research and strategy efforts, while a plan outlines how to execute a study.

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Together, a UX research strategy and individual research plans create a repeatable system. The strategy sets priorities across research efforts, and the plan defines how each study will achieve its objectives.

What does a user research strategy include?

Every user research strategy relies on a few core elements. Each one plays a different role in helping research teams work effectively.

Vision

A company’s vision is a statement that clearly defines the desired future state of a product. An aspirational and ideal state that companies wish to achieve. It describes the value delivered to end users and the impact it’ll have on their behavior.

Developed over time, a company’s vision establishes the north star for its UX strategy. Vision statements align key stakeholders around the end user. They guide decisions throughout the product life cycle.

A B2B SaaS company building a collaboration platform might define its vision as helping teams collaborate more efficiently.

Goals and success metrics

A vision statement talks about a product’s final destination, not how to get there. Research goals define the questions your team needs to answer to move closer to that vision. And success metrics show whether your research efforts are helping you achieve your UX business goals.

Goals act as a guideline for the entire process. They help you evaluate the success of your user research strategy. Follow the SMART framework to define research goals. That is, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

A company may set the goal of exploring why new users abandon onboarding. It might track onboarding completion and drop-off rates, then monitor activation to see whether any changes improve the onboarding experience.

Research plan and roadmap

A research roadmap organizes research initiatives over time. Each initiative supports a product goal. 

A study plan then explains how the team will complete one initiative. It includes the participants, methods, timeline, resources, and deliverables. 

How would that look for a SaaS company? Its roadmap may start with an onboarding initiative. The next initiative explores collaboration workflows, and a later initiative focuses on enterprise customers. Each initiative has its own study plan. 

Remember, plans change as new information or insights emerge. The key to a good research plan is the flexibility to pivot.

People

It’s easy for researchers not to look past the customer. Every project gears itself towards improving the end-user experience. However, drafting a robust research plan requires cross-functional collaboration. 

How will you get stakeholder buy-in? How do they benefit from research initiatives? If you work alone, focus on keeping product managers and other decision-makers informed. In larger teams, align researchers and stakeholders on priorities before research begins.

Gather their requirements with a brainstorming session. This ensures diverse perspectives in the planning process and aligns everyone toward your UX goals:

• The product manager can identify the business problem. 
• The designer points to the parts of the workflow that confuse users. 
• Customer success shares recurring support tickets. 
• Engineering estimates what the team can realistically change after the research.

Processes

What processes must be in place to guarantee an effective implementation of the plan? 

Document the research methods that you’ll use. Outline the techniques and frequency of these processes. Include what kind of analysis you’ll conduct on collected data. What software or tools will you need? 

Teams also need a consistent way to document, share, and apply research findings. Store them in a research repository so everyone can build on previous work instead of starting from scratch. Try a UX research repository such as HeyMarvin to make past studies easy to find, organize, and share.

Beyond day-to-day execution, a plan should also establish core UX design and research principles. This maintains consistency across all UX initiatives. Includes criteria for adding features and testing methods and protocols.

How a UX strategy framework works in practice

The framework below shows how the different parts of a user research strategy fit together. This UX strategy example follows Golf-in-class (GIC), a golf coaching company, as it builds a lesson booking app.

While every product has different goals, you can adapt this framework to define your problem statement, research questions, objectives, and success metrics.

How to build a user research strategy step by step

Follow these steps to create a clear, comprehensive, and actionable UX research strategy: 

1. Outline business strategy: Tie UX research to overarching business goals. Involve leadership and key stakeholders early on. Understand how research will support their departmental objectives.
2. Conduct preliminary research: Market research helps you understand the competitive landscape. Where will your product lie within the marketplace? Map the user journey. How do users currently solve their problems? Understand user goals, needs, and pain points. What value will you offer to the end user? 
3. Set specific goals: Define the UX design strategy outcomes you want to achieve. Establish principles and criteria for assessing solutions. Create a roadmap detailing initiatives. Establish expectations of how you’ll achieve the goals. 
4. Choose methods and tools: Will studies be quantitative, qualitative, or both? In-person or online? What methodology fits with your research objectives and target audience? Consider budget, time, and manpower before choosing your UX research methods.
5. Analyze data: Once you’ve collected data, it’s time to extract meaningful and actionable insights. A combination of statistical and thematic analysis helps you develop detailed user personas. Understand what users do and why they do it.
6. Establish success metrics: How will stakeholders measure product success? Metrics and KPIs help you measure progress towards UX objectives. Tie them to user behavior and business outcomes. Monitor metrics and set targets and benchmarks for improvement. 
7. Present findings: Use visual storytelling to communicate research findings to relevant stakeholders. Recommend an approach, direction, and solutions. Don’t overwhelm them with data. Make it short, relevant, and easily digestible.
8. Iterate. No user research guide is complete without iteration. Validate your approach with users through further UX research. Repeat the process and delve deeper into user behavior.

What makes a good user research strategy?

Understanding why UX research is important helps organizations give research the time, budget, and attention it deserves. A strategic UX research approach then turns those investments into better product decisions and stronger business outcomes:

• Teams develop a customer-centric mindset: People across the organization develop user empathy by listening to frustrations, motivations and goals. A user research strategy aligns everyone around one goal - to help their users.
• Research efforts receive the right resources: Based on the importance and time sensitivity of research projects, a strategy helps prioritize studies. You conduct strategic UX research, in line with the product, design and engineering teams' more urgent needs.
• Product teams measure success consistently: Define what success is and how it’s measured at the outset. This aids in quantifying product decisions and keeps everyone on track.
• Research insights shape decisions across the organization: Research is a continuous process and provides ongoing learnings about users. Employees from various teams can access, benefit and act on research insights. Over time, reliance on research grows stronger.

One way to put a user research strategy into action is with a research roadmap. Closely tied to a product roadmap, a research roadmap lays out the path ahead, where one can oversee and guide individual research projects. Each project is linked to an overarching business goal. Project details such as scope, methodology and checkpoints are all easily accessible and retrievable from the roadmap. A research roadmap can also include documentation with principles and best practices to guide new researchers or non-researchers through the process.

In short, the roadmap outlines which research initiatives come first, how they support business goals, and when they should take place. Discovery typically marks the first stage of that journey.

User research starts with discovery

Before diving headfirst into conducting research, take a step back and consider the overall objectives.

Here’s how Eva, a researcher at GIC, would go through designing the user research strategy.

First, she must identify potential beneficiaries of her research. Who are the relevant stakeholders and what insights are they looking for? Product and design teams at GIC will likely benefit from user research while developing the app, but what about sales, marketing and upper management? They too can use insights to understand their demographic - learn more about their buying patterns and preferred channels of communication.

By involving them from the beginning, Eva can understand exactly what questions each team needs answers to. After collating questions and interest areas from each team, she must now decide what research methodology to use and when.

In the product development life cycle, research occurs in three phases:

‍Note: An exhaustive list lives in this Guide to Using User-Experience Research Methods

Qualitative research plays a crucial role in the discovery phase as researchers seek to understand more about the user experience and generate hypotheses. During validation and testing, methods tend to be more quantitative and statistically-driven, as real-life testing is conducted on the product or app. Here, researchers vigorously test hypotheses quantitatively. Despite the quantitative rigor, qualitative user feedback at this stage is crucial to the success of the product. Once the product is launched, a researcher’s work doesn’t stop. To continually improve their product and the user experience, they must collect both qualitative and quantitative data about how users interact with the product.

Learn more about when to use quantitative vs. qualitative research.

Work on GIC’s app hasn’t even begun, and given the high time and money costs associated with ethnographic and diary studies, Eva decides to go with a combination of interviews, focus groups and field studies to gather more information about potential users. She decides to visit driving ranges at a host of local golf clubs to conduct her research.

Your user research strategy needs personas

Who are potential GIC app users? What do they think? What motivates them? Eva likely gained this deeper understanding of golfer’s needs and pain points from her interactions at driving ranges. How does she use this newly-acquired information to understand more about potential GIC app users?

Create user personas. User personas enable a deep understanding of the target audience for any product. A user persona is a typical user whose characteristics and attitudes are representative of a much larger group of users. It can include basic demographic data such as gender, income level, education, marital status and location. Personas also include traits such as goals or motivations, frustrations, preferences, biases and other social and cultural information. There’s a debate whether to include or omit basic demographic data while creating user personas, as it can create biases, unfair assumptions and generalizations about these users.

User personas help designers create better products, as they have specific, not generic users in mind. Traits of a generic or elastic user are loosely defined, and can vary in the minds of different stakeholders. Creating a user persona helps product and design teams identify users they are designing for — it personifies (for lack of a better word) the user and brings their voice into the conversation.

Golf is a game played by all age groups, Eva concluded from her research. She noticed a lot of young children accompanied by their parents at lessons. It occurred to her that the parents (aged 40+) would be the ones interacting with the app. While constructing a user persona of a typical parent, Eva noted, Parents may not be as tech savvy as millennials or younger age groups, therefore they would likely favor simplicity while navigating through the GIC app.

User personas build user empathy and put designers (and beyond) in the user's shoes. How do we map user needs to their experiences while immersed in our product? Parents are looking for an easy way to book lessons for their kids, and wouldn’t be too enticed by the merchandise shop or videos. What about the user persona of golf coaches who will use the GIC app? Their interaction must be simple too - ideally they’d like to view their lessons in a calendar format, and be apprised of any schedule changes via notification.

Creating user personas also helps avoid self-referential design - where designers create products chiefly for themselves. Their audience may be vastly different from their own personality traits and preferences. Without understanding their users, designers may add features and functionality without questioning whether it's really needed or not. Adding a mobile golf game within the app might confuse parents who are simply on the app to book a lesson. User personas help decide what’s necessary and what isn’t. The best user personas are based on real field research and user interviews, but creating temporary personas is a good starting point.

User interviews validate your user research

One research methodology was left off the list above. Typically conducted before the launch of a product, contextual inquiry is a valuable weapon in the researcher’s arsenal. So what is contextual inquiry?

As its name suggests, contextual inquiry involves researchers observing users in their natural environment and asking questions to fill in the gaps of their observations. Researchers observe the user as they perform tasks — there’s a constant dialogue between the two, with the researcher asking how and why the user is performing a certain act.

Eva decides to conduct some contextual inquiry research with a prototype app created by the product and design teams. These semi-structured interviews record users' thoughts and gauge how quickly and easily they perform certain tasks within the app, such as booking a lesson or buying a golf cap. 

Eva conducts her research one user at a time, and puts participants at ease by letting them know that it's not them being tested, but the GIC prototype. She observes what they do when given a task, documents what they are doing, and also engages in constant dialogue to gauge user emotions and thoughts.

Researchers should be able to decode a user's body language and grasp their emotions even while the user is not speaking. Eva notices some seniors (aged 60+) struggle and grimace while purchasing items from the merchandise store — these nonverbal cues are important. She notes that the navigation must be easier to understand for all users, and also calls attention to a glitch in the merchandise store’s checkout process.

Ordinary surveys and interviews rely on the user’s ability to recall a process — users don’t share their reasoning, motivation and mental state. As a result, these items aren’t captured and the researcher is left with a superficial understanding of the user's approach. This isn’t the case with contextual inquiry — it provides richer and more relevant information because users talk about what they are doing while doing it. Observing them in their natural environment (the driving ranges) gives Eva access to more accurate, user-centered information.

Contextual inquiry is crucial in shaping design choices such as requirements, personas, features and product architecture. It can be used at any point during product development, from designing a user interface to testing a product and determining any flaws. Researchers also get insight into user behavior within their product and can anticipate use cases for their app.

How does a user research strategy connect to your product roadmap?

The product serves users. Therefore, its roadmap should run in parallel with the user research strategy. The product roadmap defines what the team plans to build, while the research roadmap identifies the evidence that supports those decisions.

Here’s how to make sure the two evolve together:

• Use research to shape product priorities: User insights should guide which features, markets, and business goals enter the product roadmap.
• Build on what you already know: Before starting a new study, review your existing research. Confirm what still applies, then focus the new research on the questions that still need answers.
• Review both roadmaps regularly. Continue collecting user feedback and studying behavior after release. Use those insights to update your roadmaps and guide future product decisions.

Here’s a quick example. 

Your team plans new collaboration features for existing customers.

At first, your research roadmap prioritizes interviews with existing users, workflow observations, and usability studies. But then, the leadership shifts focus to attracting more enterprise customers.

The earlier research may no longer answer your team's biggest questions. You need to understand enterprise workflows before deciding what to build next.

The research roadmap shifts. You pause usability testing and return to discovery research to explore enterprise workflows, pain points, and buying requirements.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Here are answers to the questions researchers and product teams ask most often about building and maintaining a user research strategy.

What is the difference between a user research strategy and a UX research plan?

A user research strategy sets the long-term direction for research across multiple studies. A user research plan supports that strategy by outlining one specific study, including its questions, methods, participants, timeline, and deliverables. Depending on your research goals, one strategy may include multiple research plans over time.

How does a UX strategy improve product development?

A user research strategy helps teams make better product decisions: 

• Aligns research with business goals and stakeholder priorities.
• Helps teams identify and address usability issues before they become expensive to fix.
• Makes it easier to adapt research as new insights emerge and product priorities change.
• Ensures product decisions focus on user needs, improving satisfaction, engagement, and retention.

What are the core components of a UX research strategy?

Clear goals, research priorities, solid processes, and the right people form the core of a user research strategy. Each component supports better planning and stronger product decisions. The section above on "What does a user research strategy include?" explains each one in detail.

Why is user experience planning crucial for a successful product?

UX research is important because it leaves less room for assumptions during development, increasing the chances of a successful product launch. 

A good product rarely comes from research that changes direction every week. User experience planning gives each study a clear direction and objectives before the work begins. Teams know what evidence they need and how to collect it.

How do you get stakeholder buy-in for a user research strategy?

Your stakeholders already care about specific business goals. When you connect those goals with your research priorities, you define clear UX business goals and strengthen stakeholder buy-in:

• Link each research priority to a measurable business outcome.
• Use previous research to demonstrate the value of investing in user research.
• Organize the strategy as a roadmap with clear priorities and milestones.

Can a solo researcher build a user research strategy?

Yes. Solo researchers can follow the same framework but on a smaller scale and with some adjustments. For instance, you can focus several studies on one research question over the course of a quarter. 

Upload your research to a dedicated repository, organize your findings in a clear report, and update stakeholders as priorities shift. You’ll only need to add more structure later on, as your workload grows.

Which user research methods work best when starting a new strategy?

When you're building a new strategy, resist the urge to test solutions too early. First, learn how people work, what slows them down, and what they expect from the product. Interviews and contextual inquiry answer those questions well. Once you understand the problem, evaluative studies can tell you how well your solution works.

Conclusion 

Without a clear research strategy, teams struggle to use the information they have and allocate new resources for new studies.

But clarity comes from having a solid user research strategy and a repository that helps you stay on top of your data. This way, your team can build on previous work and share findings with everyone who needs them.

HeyMarvin makes that easier with an AI-powered searchable repository, analysis tools, and reporting. Book a demo to see it in action.