Research ops and planning
I have run user research for many different organisations. This has lead me to develop user research operations and processes to plan for it.
My process for planning research involves:
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Running kick off workshops
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Setting objectives and hypotheses to test
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Defining audience demographics with teams
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Writing recruitment screeners
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Recruiting users
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Scheduling sessions
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Creating consent forms
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Writing discussion guides
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Creating note taking methods
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Setting up surveys
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Approach to structuring qualitative research
The question of 'how many qualitative research sessions are needed for a study' comes up a lot in my work. So I put this guide and structure together to explain my approach to it.
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It makes sense to combine research and testing in sessions.
If you are pre Discovery phase and don’t know anything about your users then you need to have included at least 15 participants in your study to adequately gather enough insight to understand the different user groups.
The Discovery research with 15 participants can be done all in one go, or it is also possible to do this over 3 separate studies to gain traction and move fast with designs, if there are concepts ready to usability test.
If there is one cohort then it makes sense to quickly and iteratively test with 5 participants at a time
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See for reference: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (nngroup.com)
