A truism of my job is that user research begets more research.\u00a0 There’s two major reasons this is true: you always have more research questions than you can answer in any given amount of time, and you always learn something when you’re conducting research that you want to learn more about.<\/p>\n
The first problem is the most apparent when you set out to do research.\u00a0 You begin by identifying what questions you want to answer.\u00a0 Your list of questions grows as you identify themes and trends.\u00a0 As you share your research questions with others, they have more questions to add to it.<\/p>\n
Once you feel like you’ve got a good list of questions, you then have to prioritize them.\u00a0 Some questions are more important than others.\u00a0 When I’m prioritizing my list of research questions, I try to determine what action will be taken if I answer a given question.\u00a0 If I think that it would simply be nice to know a given piece of information, then it’s immediately struck from my list.\u00a0 I craft my list such that every research question has something actionable that comes out of it.<\/p>\n
Once the prioritization is done, then you have to decide what methodology you will use to answer those questions.\u00a0 The methodology that you will use is dependent on many factors that are external to your research questions, such as the time that you have available, your budget, access to appropriate users, and support from your management.\u00a0 Even in the best of circumstances when you have an infinite budget, lots of access to the right people, and lots of time, the methodology that you choose is unlikely to answer all of the research questions that you have identified.\u00a0 There are a lot of factors in play, and you’ll have to make a decision about the best way to proceed.\u00a0 You will have to leave some of your research questions unanswered, oftentimes with the hope of being able to revisit them at a later point to answer them.<\/p>\n
As you’re conducting your research, you will learn new things.\u00a0 This is, after all, why you’re conducting your research in the first place.\u00a0 Inevitably, your new information will create new research questions.\u00a0 Sometimes this will happen early in your research, and you’ll have an opportunity to tweak your methodology in an attempt to try to answer this new question.\u00a0 In this case, you have to choose whether your new research question is one that you can answer using your current methodology, and whether it’s more important to answer this question than one of the ones that you’ve already identified.\u00a0 You might have to remove an existing research question to make way for the new one.<\/p>\n
In many cases, new research questions arise as you’re analyzing your data.\u00a0 Perhaps you can’t answer one of your existing research questions because you need to know something else.\u00a0 Perhaps you learn something entirely new that you don’t understand, so you know that you want to conduct additional research about it.<\/p>\n
Perhaps a different way to look at this truism is to say that you have to accept that you’ll never answer all of the questions that you can identify.\u00a0 I always have a running list of research questions.\u00a0 That list always<\/em> gets longer.\u00a0 When I left my previous employer, I shared my running list of research questions with my colleagues in the hopes that perhaps it would be useful to them.\u00a0 One of the hardest things about leaving my previous position was the day that I deleted that running list of questions.\u00a0 I’d invested so much effort into my research there, and there was still so much left that I could learn.\u00a0 I put off deleting that file for days.\u00a0 Conversely, one of the most awesome days that I’ve had since I joined VMware was the day when I created my new running list of research questions that I’d like to answer some day.<\/p>\n Research begets more research.\u00a0 While I sometimes find it frustrating that I’ll never answer all of the questions that I have, it’s really one of the things that I love about my job: there’s always something new to learn.\u00a0 The day when I run out of research questions is probably the day that I’m taken off of life support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A truism of my job is that user research begets more research.\u00a0 There’s two major reasons this is true: you always have more research questions than you can answer in any given amount of time, and you always learn something when you’re conducting research that you want to learn more about. The first problem is … Continue reading user research begets more research<\/span>