The most recent episode of the Awkward Silences podcast from User Interviews has a brilliant interview with Holly Hester-Reilly about common mistakes that are made when planning, conducting, analyzing, and sharing user research.

When she discussed planning user research, she talked about needing to understand what decisions would be driven by the user research. This point is one that I see researchers and people conducting research miss frequently.

Knowing what decisions will be made helps you frame your research well and ensure that you’re asking the right research questions. You can always go back to the decisions that need to be made to help you evaluate whether you’re using the right research methodology or you’re applying that methodology well.

Defining the decisions that will be made as a result of the research can be a powerful tool when a team is using research for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen teams become so risk-adverse that they want to test every single thing. I’ve also seen teams become so beholden to a process that they don’t know when or even how to deviate from it. In those cases, defining the decision that will be driven and why that decision matters illuminates the more important problem that needs to be addressed within the team.

When you’ve completed the user research, you can measure its effectiveness by determining whether it actually drove the decision(s) that it needed to. This is especially helpful if you have to cut the proposed scope of a research project due to budget or timeline constraints. If your research successfully answered the question, you learned something about the benefits of a lean research plan. If it helped with some but not all of the decisions that you thought needed to be made, you can then decide what to do to address the remaining decisions to be made.

Another benefit of defining the decisions to be driven by user research is to prioritize research requests. We should invest more time in the research to support those decisions for which we have little data, or little agreement within our teams, or which have a high opportunity cost.

Knowing why you’re doing the research is at least as important as selecting the right methodology, doing a great job of collecting and analyzing the data, and sharing the results in the right ways with the right people. If you have a template that helps you plan your research studies, consider adding this section to improve the usefulness and business value of your user research.