Skills Scratchpad: UX Research (Crafting a Research Protocol)

If you’re new here, I launched a series last week called “Skills Scratchpad” where I’ll be demystifying some skills based on my User Experience (UX) Research journey. My goal for this series is to help make UX Research as a career path feel more accessible to career switchers. I’ll share skills I leverage in my field while highlighting connections to key transferable skills across various industries.?

(Quick note: I was originally planning to start us off with the skill of “communicating findings for impact.” We’ll get there in a few weeks –?we need to first break down how we even get to those findings.)?

This week, we’re going to start out with the skill of crafting a research protocol for qualitative interviews.? A qualitative interview is a research approach that helps you to unearth the “WHY” of a user's behaviour/actions. For example, let’s say I have an online platform, ScratchPad, aimed at helping prospective career seekers to transition into UX research careers. My team tracks usage of our platform and notices first-time users on our platform are dropping off on a specific page and no one understands why. How do we dig deeper? How can we understand why they are dropping off? A UX Researcher might conduct a qualitative study to understand the “WHY”.?

When conducting qualitative interviews, my simplified process includes:

• Coming up with key research objectives based on team needs
• Developing a draft of the questions I want to ask my research participants (which in UX research jargon would be referred to as generating a “research protocol”)
• Asking my participants these questions (conducting an interview)?

Before draft protocol, I consider the following:

• Align protocol questions with research objectives:? I define a plan including research objectives. I clearly communicate these to my team so that draft questions we consider address larger research objectives.
• Gather team brainstorm of questions: I gather questions from my team so that I know what key questions and assumptions members of my team have.

During protocol, I then:

• Translate team brainstorm into questions I want to ask participants : I use questions from our team brainstorm to help inform the questions I want to ask my research participants. E.g if I get a question from my team like “are users dropping off because they don’t see the value?”, I could turn that into maybe two questions for example: “Tell me about the last time you logged into the platform??What drew you to the platform?"

Think critically about type of questions: Open-ended questions are *chef’s kiss* (along with jollof rice from Ghana). If you find yourself getting “yes” or “no” responses throughout your qualitative interviews, there might be an opportunity to make your questions more open-ended! A good way to avoid this is to start your questions with stems like, “Can you share about a time when…?” or “Tell me about the last/worst/first/best time when…”

• Cluster questions: I group questions into themes/sections to allow me to easily create a flow for the interview conversation.?
• Sequence and prioritise questions: ?I sequence the questions in a way that feel natural to the conversation and help position me to unearth the insights I need. I also prioritise questions informed by research objectives keeping in mind the research time limit.

There you have it! Some of the things I think about when drafting a protocol.

Activity: I’ve asked ChatGPT to create a protocol based on prompt below. I’ve begun critiquing protocol based on what’s missing and would love to hear your thoughts as well!?

Prompt to ChatGPT?

Create a qualitative research interview protocol using this scenario. "Let’s say I have an online platform, ScratchPad, aimed at helping prospective UX researchers to transition into UX Research careers. While my team is tracking usage of our platform, they notice first-time users on our platform are dropping off on a specific page. How do we dig deeper? How can we understand why they are dropping off?"

There's more in there that I might change but would love to hear from you. Comment below, what would you add or subtract from the ChatGPT protocol below?