Research Template
Keep all your user research in one place and collaborate with your team.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Research Template
Teams can document findings from usability testing sessions and customer interviews into a systematic, flexible user research template. Collecting everyone’s observations into a centralized location makes it easier to share insights company-wide and suggest new features based on user needs.
Keep reading to learn more about the Research Template.
What is a Research Template
Research templates can be adapted to work with different design methods or user research techniques. When it’s your job to ask questions, take notes, learn more about your user, and test iteratively, a Research Template can help you validate your assumptions, find similarities across different users, and articulate their mental models, needs, and goals.
User research helps teams avoid designing for themselves, and instead turn their attention to who will actually use your product, in what context they’ll be using your product or service, and what they need or expect from your brand or organization.
Research templates can be used to record two different types of data or observations:
Quantitative: numbers-based research, or anything you can count. This includes the number of users and percentage changes. It helps teams understand what is happening on a website or app.
Qualitative: opinion-based research, or anything that can take place in the form of a question-and-answer format (closed questions), or conversational exchange (open questions).
Whichever way you choose, a Research Template will help you keep your designs informed, contextual, and user-centric.
When to use Research Templates
A Research Template can be used at any stage of the product or service design life cycle.
Right now: No time like the present. The earlier you start your research, the bigger the impact your research findings will have on your product or service.
At every stage of the design process: User research can reveal important findings that can be applied to your product or service. This increases its value.
In the earliest stage of the project: Not every team can budget for research every step of the way. In that case, do the most research as early as possible in the project. Make sure to reserve some time and budget for conducting supplementary research later on in the process, too.
Create your own Research Template
Participating in user research efforts as a team is important. Everyone can get involved, better understand the user they’re designing for, and clarify why certain decisions are based on user research findings.
Get started by selecting the Research Template, to make one of your own:
Record your observations and make revisions where needed. Assemble a cross-functional team who can empathize with your users: designers, engineers, product managers, user researchers, marketers, and support team members will all have valuable input to contribute. Nominate someone in your group to facilitate. This person will lead the conversation with the user participant. Everyone else will listen and watch for potential roadblocks and epiphanies for the user.
Take notes. The user research template’s columns and rows are customizable and can be renamed to record elements such as observational goals, tester details, and emotions that emerge during the conversation. These notes can also be useful for people unable to attend the session.
Bring it all together. After the user interview sessions are done, group similar notes into themed clusters. What are the pain points for the customer? Where were the opportunities for delight? Sometimes notes will come together into logical themed clusters, but sometimes you’ll have “odd one out” observations that don’t fit anywhere. You can gather these into a “basket” or collect them into a separate area in case they may become useful later.
Adapt as needed throughout the research and design process. Ideally, this process will help you develop features side-by-side as a team, rather than go through a hand-off process with all the involved departments. The Research Template is flexible enough to be adapted to best serve your team’s needs.
Get started with this template right now.
Research Topic Brainstorm Template
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Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.
iPhone App Template
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Incredible percentages of smartphone users worldwide have chosen iPhones (including some of your existing and potential customers), and those users simply love their apps. But designing and creating an iPhone app from scratch can be one seriously daunting, effort-intensive task. Not here — this template makes it easy. You’ll be able to customize designs, create interactive protocols, share with your collaborators, iterate as a team, and ultimately develop an iPhone app your customers will love.
Product Development Roadmap Template
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Product development roadmaps cover everything your team needs to achieve when delivering a product from concept to market launch. Your product development roadmap is also a team alignment tool that offers guidance and leadership to help your team focus on balancing product innovation and meeting your customer’s needs. Investing time in creating a roadmap focused on your product development phases helps your team communicate a vision to business leaders, designers, developers, project managers, marketers, and anyone else who influences meeting team goals.
Look Mock Analyze Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Product Management
Doing your homework (aka, the research) is a key step in your design process, and the Look, Mock, Analyze approach helps you examine, structure, and streamline that step. With this powerful tool you’ll be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses, what you did right or wrong, and whether you spent time efficiently. Our Look, Mock, Analyze template makes it so easy for you to discover inspiration, mock up designs, and get feedback — you can start by setting up your board in less than a minute.
UX Project Canvas Template
Works best for:
User Experience, UX Design, Market Research
Inspired by Alexander Osterwalder's 2005 business model canvas, the project canvas will help your team visualize the big picture of your UX and design projects, providing a convenient structure that holds all of your important data. This innovative tool enables you to transform an idea into a project plan, stimulating collaboration and communication between collaborators. Unlike alternative models, the project canvas is a simple interface. There are few startup costs, and employees can easily be brought up to speed to start using the canvas quickly.
User Interview Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management
A user interview is a UX research technique in which researchers ask the user questions about a topic. They allow your team to quickly and easily collect user data and learn more about your users. In general, organizations conduct user interviews to gather background data, to understand how people use technology, to take a snapshot of how users interact with a product, to understand user objectives and motivations, and to find users’ pain points. Use this template to record notes during an interview to ensure you’re gathering the data you need to create personas.