Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Align research goals, cluster ideas, and debrief with stakeholders.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Before you can sign off on your UX research plan, you need to know you’re asking the right research questions. A research topic brainstorm with your team can ease navigating the different stages of the design process, from discovery to testing.
Whether you’re doing stakeholder interviews or user group outreach, you should focus on the right topics and ask questions that generate useful insights. To ensure that you understand your customers and translate that knowledge into intelligent and inspiring design solutions, first brainstorm with your team what (or who) is worth researching.
What is a Research Topic Brainstorm
Research topic brainstorming helps you generate questions for stakeholder or user interviews based on topics like partnership opportunities or first-time experience.
Ideally, brainstorming questions worth asking during user research activities can help you clarify:
Your user research objectives: What questions are you trying to answer? What do you need to know at this point in the design process?
Your user research hypotheses: What do you already know? What are your assumptions? What do you think you understand about your user’s behavior, and potential solutions you can fulfill based on unmet needs?
Your user research methods of choice: How will you fill in your knowledge gaps? Based on the resources available, what methods will you choose?
Use these three steps to turn your brainstorming session into a repository of questions. Aim for 3-5 prioritized research questions in your UX research plan document.
When to use Research Topic Brainstorms
Research topic brainstorming happens in the early stages of user research and enables you to build a foundation, generate inspiration and ideas, and evaluate design choices to better serve user needs.
A research topic brainstorm can help UX researchers:
Frame questions in the “5 Ws and H” structure (who, what, when, where, why, how), so your team can generate a variety of insightful questions (but remember to keep your research objective specific!).
Prioritize questions needing to be answered right away and those that can be more valuable later on.
Externalize hypotheses to minimize external bias (such as client or team influence).
Choose the right research methods to fulfill your objectives.
Use your early hypothesis to demonstrate and compare what you actually discovered during research.
Create your own Research Topic Brainstorm
Making your own research topic brainstorms is easy. Miro is the perfect tool to create and share them. Get started by selecting the Research Topic Brainstorm Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Define key research areas. Do you want to look at new opportunities for partnering with other business areas? Improve your app’s onboarding flow for new users? Pick 1-4 key topics your team thinks are worth exploring.
Brainstorm questions relevant to each research topic. Aim for quantity first, then prioritize for quality and impact. Keep criticism aside. Also, this part of your research brainstorming should be timebound (try the Countdown Timer) and tied back to your business goals and user needs.
Identify research or knowledge gaps. Based on what you’ve just brainstormed, what’s missing? What don’t you already know? Record these missing elements on sticky notes as well.
Ask relevant stakeholders or team members for feedback. Invite collaborators onto your Miro Board using a preferred method (like sharing public links to invitations to edit via Slack or email).
Add your preferred research questions to your UX research plan. Your prioritized research questions form an important segment on your UX research plan – copy over the sticky notes and update your research plan accordingly.
Get started with this template right now.
Ansoff Matrix Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Operations, Strategic Planning
Keep growing. Keep scaling. Keep finding those new opportunities in new markets—and creative new ways to reach customers there. Sound like your approach? Then this template might be a great fit. An Ansoff Matrix (aka, a product or market expansion grid) is broken into four potential growth strategies: Market Penetration, Market Development, Product Development, and Diversification. When you go through each section with your team, you’ll get a clear view of your options going forward and the potential risks and rewards of each.
Mitch Lacey's Estimation Game Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Agile Methodology, Prioritization
A wordy name but a simple tool, Mitch Lacey’s Estimation Game is an effective way to rank your work tasks by size and priority — so you can decide what to tackle first. In the game, notecards represent your work items and feature ROI, business value, or other important metrics. You’ll place each in a quadrant (ranking them by size and priority) to help you order them in your upcoming schedule. The game also empowers developers and product management teams to work together and collaborate effectively.
Flyer Maker Template
Works best for:
Design, Marketing
Whether it’s a client party or a nonprofit fundraiser, your event needs one key thing to be a smashing success: people to show up. That’s why promoting it is such an important part of the planning—and creating and sending a flyer is the first step. These single-page files will grab your guests’ attention and give them the key details, such as the time, date, and location (and if it’s a fundraiser, who/what the funds will benefit). This template will let you lay out text and customize a flyer design.
Priority Matrix Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
If you need a little more than a basic to-do list, then you’d probably benefit from a Priority Matrix. The Priority Matrix template is designed to help you determine which tasks are critical so you can focus on the most urgent needs. In a 2x2 matrix, input your priorities based on whether they must be completed with high or low urgency and are of high or low importance. Applicable to project management and personal management alike, use the Priority Matrix template to improve business processes, create efficiency, remove blockers, and reduce operational waste.
Kanban Framework Template
Works best for:
Kanban Boards, Agile Methodology, Agile Workflows
Optimized processes, improved flow, and increased value for your customers — that’s what the Kanban method can help you achieve. Based on a set of lean principles and practices (and created in the 1950s by a Toyota Automotive employee), Kanban helps your team reduce waste, address numerous other issues, and collaborate on fixing them together. You can use our simple Kanban template to both closely monitor the progress of all work and to display work to yourself and cross-functional partners, so that the behind-the-scenes nature of software is revealed.
Kano Model Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management, Prioritization
When it comes down to it, a product’s success is determined by the features it offers and the satisfaction it gives to customers. So which features matter most? The Kano model will help you decide. It’s a simple, powerful method for helping you prioritize all your features — by comparing how much satisfaction a feature will deliver to what it will cost to implement. This template lets you easily create a standard Kano model, with two axes (satisfaction and functionality) creating a quadrant with four values: attractive, performance, indifferent, and must-be.