UX Research Plan Template
Create a strong business case for UX research and streamline your process with the UX research plan template.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the UX Research Plan Template
A UX research plan, also known as a user research plan, is a brief reference document that outlines your research project’s goals, key contributors, important dates, and timelines.
Think of your research plan as a UX-focused kick-off document for your project. The plan offers an overview of the research initiative, encourages well-defined and agreed-upon goals, and acts as a written guarantee that the research will meet these goals.
What is a UX research plan?
When conducting usability testing or user research with a goal in mind, researchers need to plan. UX researchers often present their findings to stakeholders, like product managers, developers, marketers, and executives, to act on those results.
You should present your UX research plan in plain language with a single document. Keep your findings clear, collaborative, easily accessed, and digestible to get buy-in for your research and your team’s next steps.
A user research plan typically has up to seven segments:
Project background: Reasons for the study and internal stakeholders involved.
Research goals and objectives: What your teams want to learn, or their ideal research outcome.
Research participants: Who they are and how they’ll be recruited.
Method: How you conducted research, and any other information about how the research will be conducted.
Guides: An interview guide or cheat sheet of instructions and questions to follow during the session.
Duration: A rough timeline of how long the research will take and when the team can review the report.
Other helpful information: Additional resources for your team, such as previous studies, scripts, or results, can inform this new round of research.
Research plans keep your team focused on outcomes rather than getting lost in the details or changing the research goal midway through the project. By the end of the project, UX researchers should feel confident that their questions were answered and presented in both the plan and actual research.
When to use UX research plans
UX research plans are useful for teams who need to decide on questions such as:
What do our customers need? Who is our target persona?
Does the proposed or current design work well for our customers? How can we make it better?
Planning UX research also gives researchers an opportunity to:
Decide what works for your stakeholders, especially the questions they’re trying to answer.
Engage stakeholders and keep them invested in your research results.
Clarify your ideas, problems to be solved, and research approaches.
Treat your research plan as a blueprint for aligning expectations, asking for feedback, or generating enthusiasm and support for increasing the value of user research in your organization.
Create your own UX research plan template
Making your own UX research plans is easy, and Miro is the perfect tool to create and share them. Get started by selecting the UX research plan template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Give your team or stakeholders a quick project introduction. You can hop on a video chat with up to 25 team members and remind everyone what you’re trying to achieve. Remember that research proves its value when it satisfies a single objective rather than many. If you seem to have lots of different goals or objectives, avoid overreaching and start fresh: what’s the one customer problem and business problem you’re trying to solve?
Define the user and business problems your research needs to solve. The default sticky notes are simply for inspiration — feel free to edit each of these to fix your own context. If you want your team to focus on this area instead of skipping ahead, you can select the “problem” frame and click the “hide frame” (closed eye) icon that appears in the frame’s menu.
Define your research goals. Ask your team to brainstorm their top three research goals or priorities. Remember that the best research sessions are chasing a single objective, so out of the two to three you note down, ask your team to vote for their preferences. Try Miro’s Voting Plugin to help your team reach a decision.
Draft your research questions. Pick three to five questions with your team or stakeholders that are most important to your research. Aim for no more than 10. The more focused your questions, the more focused your research will be.
Link to useful supporting information as needed. Keep this plan to the point in order to get buy-in. For stakeholders who need more detail, there may be other useful data to link to. If you have previous UX research results or relevant studies, link to them on your Miro Board. You can also import survey data, embed tables and charts, or link sticky notes to external sources.
Dive even deeper into how to conduct UX research – and see examples – in our expert guide to user research.
Why should you use the UX Research Template?
Centralized planning: Centralize your UX research plans in one shared space. This ensures that all relevant information, including research objectives, methodologies, and timelines, is easily accessible in one place, reducing the risk of scattered or lost documentation.
Collaborative research: Multiple stakeholders, including designers, researchers, and product managers, can collaborate on your UX research plan template simultaneously, fostering a more inclusive and collaborative approach to research planning.
Visual representation of research steps: Create diagrams, flowcharts, and visual representations of the research process. This visual mapping helps teams better understand the sequence of research activities, identify dependencies, and effectively communicate the overall research strategy.
Iterative refinement: Provide feedback, comments, and suggestions directly on the UX research plan template. Promote continuous improvement, allowing the team to refine the research plan based on insights and changing project requirements.
Integration with user flows and personas: Integrate with other templates, such as user flows and persona maps. By connecting these elements, teams can create a holistic view of the user experience journey. This integration helps align research activities with the overall UX strategy and ensures a more cohesive and user-centric product design.
How can I ensure that a UX Research Plan remains effective?
Regularly review and update the research plan as project requirements evolve. It's crucial to stay flexible and adapt the plan based on the findings and changing project needs.
Get started with this template right now.
Executive Summary Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Project Management, Documentation
Pique their curiosity. Get them excited. Inspire them to keep reading, diving further into your proposal details. That’s what a good executive summary has the power to do—and why it’s a crucial opening statement for business plans, project plans, investment proposals, and more. Use this template to create an executive summary that starts building belief, by answering high-level questions that include: What is your project? What are the goals? How will you bring your skills and resources to the project? And who can expect to benefit?
Cross Functional Flowchart
Works best for:
Org Charts, Business Management
Have a quick look at everyone on a project and see exactly what they’ll contribute. That’s the clarity and transparency a cross-functional flowchart will give you. These are also called “swim lane” flowcharts because each person (each customer, client, or representative from a specific function) is assigned a lane—a clear line—that will help you visualize their roles at each stage of the project. This template will empower you to streamline processes, reduce inefficiencies, and make meaningful cross-functional relationships.
Business Model Canvas Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning
Your business model: Nothing is more fundamental to who you are, what you create and sell, or ultimately whether or not you succeed. Using nine key building blocks (representing nine core business elements), a BMC gives you a highly usable strategic tool to develop and display your business model. What makes this template great for your team? It’s quick and easy to use, it keeps your value proposition front and center, and it creates a space to inspire ideation.
Website Flowchart Template
Works best for:
Flowcharts, Mapping, User Experience
A website flowchart, also known as a sitemap, maps out the structure and complexity of any current or future website. The flowchart can also help your team identify knowledge gaps for future content. When you’re building a website, you want to ensure that each piece of content gives users accurate research results based on keywords associated with your web content. Product, UX, and content teams can use flowcharts or sitemaps to understand everything contained in a website, and plan to add or restructure content to improve a website’s user experience.
AWS Chef Automate Architecture Template
Works best for:
Software Development, Diagrams
The AWS Chef Automate Architecture Template is a visual representation of the AWS Chef framework. Track your cloud solutions easily, and automate operational tasks at scale like never before.
FMEA Analysis Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Software Development
When you’re building a business or running a team, risk comes with the territory. You can’t eliminate it. But you CAN identify it and mitigate it, to up your odds of success. Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a powerful tool designed to help you manage risk and potential problems by spotting them within a process, product, or system. And you’ll spot them earlier in your process—to let you sidestep costly changes that arise late in the game or, worse, after they’ve impacted your customers and their experience.