Elevate your research objectives

I remember the first time I wrote a research plan. It took me hours (days, if I am being honest), and I was still pretty unclear as to why I had to write one. Ever since moving from academic research, I made any attempt to avoid processes, as they made up the bulk of research I did during my MA program. However, after some time, I came to learn how utterly important research plans are, as the contain the very material that drives and gives structure to your research sessions.

How do I write objectives?

Objectives boil down to the main reasons you are doing the research; they are the specific ideas you want to learn more about during the research and the questions you want answered during the research. Essentially, the objectives drive the entire project, since they are the questions we want answered.

First, you have to start with a research problem statement. This is the central question that has to be answered by the research findings. The problem statement is WHAT we will be studying, and is the overarching topic your research project is about.

Example topic: To assess how people make travel decisions

Once we create this problem statement, we can start writing our objectives.

Our research objectives should address HOW we are going to study the problem statement. We do this by breaking the research problem down into several objectives. Here are the steps I bring myself through, and then talk through the steps using the travel example from above:

• I ask myself: “what am I trying to learn?” and “what must the research achieve?”
• Identify what stage of the idea is being researched (prototype, concept, etc)
• Talk to your team to align with what they want to learn

What am I trying to learn

I want to understand how people make travel decisions in order to, ultimately, improve that decision-making process.

However, this statement is broad, and we need to break it down to what we want to learn about that problem statement. To do this, I sit at a whiteboard and brainstorm all the different areas I am interested in, or the different assumptions I have. I want to learn:

• How people currently make travel decisions
• Why they decide to travel; who else is involved; when do they travel; where do they travel to; how do they travel
• What tools people use to make travel decisions
• How they feel about the current decision-making process
• What problems they encounter when trying to make travel decisions
• What improvements they would make to their current decision-making process

Once I dismantle the problem statement, I feel more comfortable forming objectives.

What is being researched

Knowing what exactly we are researching will also help us hone into our research objectives. I am constantly researching the following:

• A concept or idea: we need to understand the process people are currently going through (generative research)
• A prototype: we need to uncover what people think about the prototype and how they expect to use it (generative + usability testing)
• Live code: we need to evaluate the performance of the product and what people think about it (usability testing)

These will change your objectives slightly to know whether you are focused on understanding an overall concept/idea, uncovering what people expect from a product or evaluating the performance of a product. A usability test is far different from generative research, so it is important to know what type of research we are doing, as it helps us understand what we can expect to learn.

Talk to your team

I talk to all my (three, soon to be four) teams very often and we tend to form the problem statement together, in order to ensure we are aligned on the overarching idea for the project. Once we have the idea, I set some objectives and approach the team to ask them:

• What they want to learn from the research project
• What are they expecting from the research

This way, you clarify whether or not you are missing out on a perspective or angle in your objectives. Once I have all this information, I form the objectives. For this example, I am trying to understand a concept through generative research. So my objectives will be focused on understanding people’s current processes:

Sample objectives

• Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions
• Uncover the different tools participants use to make travel decisions
• Identify any problems or barriers they encounter when trying to make travel decisions
• Learn about any improvements participants might make to their current decision-making process

The research findings should ultimately be able to answer the problem statement: understanding how people make travel decisions, and it should be able to answer all of the objectives I am curious to learn more about. By building these objectives, I can ensure I ask the  right types of the questions, and I create a path in which I can guide participants down.

Travel is a broad topic, and we could go in many different directions. These objectives narrow the scope, while still allowing for natural conversation and innovation.

Bad versus better objectives:

Here are some additional examples I have generated in order to exemplify good versus bad objectives.

Bad: Understand why participants travel

Better: Understand the end-to-end journey of how and why participants choose to travel

Why: The bad objective, “understand why participants travel” is still too broad, and feels more like a problem statement. With that objective, we don’t really have a direction, or boundaries.

Bad: Find out how to get participants to buy flight insurance

Better: Uncover participants’ thought processes and prior experiences behind flight insurance

Why: We don’t want to find out how to get someone to do something, because, how would we ask good questions to get that information? We are more interested in seeing what their thought process is behind flight insurance, and if/why they have used it in the past

Bad: Find out why people use Expedia to book travel

Better: Discover the different tools participants use when deciding to travel, and how they feel about each tool

Why: This could be helpful if Expedia is a tool your users frequently use instead of your platform. However, I have always found it better to first ask, in general, what kind of other tools are used, so you are not so hyper-focused and miss other opportunities to explore.

Great, I have objectives — now what?

Research objectives frame generative research questions. Your questions should be able to give you insights that answer your objectives. So when you ask a participant a question, it is ultimately answering one of the objectives. Turn each objective into 3–5 questions

For example:

?Research problem: Understand how people make travel decisions

Objective 1: Understand the end-to-end process of how participants are currently making travel decisions

• Question 1: Think about the last time you traveled, walk me through your decision-making process
• Question 2: Explain how you felt during that process
• Question 3: Talk to me about what other factors influenced your decision

Objective 2: Identify any problems or barriers they encounter when trying to make travel decisions

• Question 1: Describe the last time you had a problem when making travel decisions
• Question 2: Were you able to solve the problem? What did you do to try to solve the problem?
• Question 3: How would you improve or change the situation?

Objective 3: Uncover the different tools participants use to make travel decisions

• Question 1: Talk me through the different tools you used while making this decision
• Question 2: Describe your experience with these different tools
• Question 3: Compare the different experiences you had with the tools ORtalk about any tools you’ve heard of and haven’t used

By starting off with a project with strong research objectives, you are far more likely to get impactful, actionable and deep insights that will help inform the company what the best next steps are. Since I have started really paying attention to, and honing, my research objectives, my interviews have visibly improved and my confidence in interviewing has greatly increased. Besides that, it is a fun exercise to deconstruct a problem statement into smaller puzzle pieces that move you toward your goal!