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Research questions

Run a team workshop at the beginning of each development phase to prioritize your team's research questions and the assumptions you need to test.

When to define research questions

The best time to capture research questions is at the start of a new development phase, especially discovery, alpha and beta.

Re-visit and refine your questions as you learn more about your users and service. Understanding what your team wants to learn, and how this changes over time, is an important part of planning user research for your service.

Workshop: Define research questions

This workshop is designed for teams who work in the same space. If you’re part of distributed team, you can modify it to work with online collaboration tools like Mural.

Plan your session

  • Arrange a space big enough for your team to write questions, with a wall you can post them on.
  • Aim for sessions to last about an hour — they can take longer with a new team or service.
  • Invite everyone on your team — writing research questions together will help you to agree what”s most important.
  • Make sure you have lots of sticky notes and pens.

Review the problem

Start the workshop by reminding the team about

  • The outcomes the team is trying to achieve — both for users and the organization
  • Things the team will need to do in the next development phase

Capture questions

Ask everyone to think about what they want to learn from research in the next phase. Then

  • Give people 5-10 minutes to write down their questions on sticky notes
  • Explain that broad, open questions (like “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” or “why”) are more helpful than narrow or specific ones (like “do”, “have”, “will” or “can”)
  • Remind them that these are things you need to learn, not questions you will ask users

After people have finished writing their questions

  • Ask everyone to place their notes on a wall and start sorting them into related groups
  • Allow team members to add new questions that are prompted by other people’s
  • Combine similar questions and remove exact duplicates
  • Refining any that are unclear
  • Write a summary question for each group of similar questions

Prioritize the questions

Ask team members to identify the highest priority questions by marking a dot on the 5 questions they think need answering first — in priority order

Use the research questions

Once you have your prioritized research questions

  • Document the research questions
  • Decide which research questions to focus on in your next sprint
  • Decide which research activities will help you to answer your questions