Scoping and planning research

In this video, user researchers discuss how they scope research.

Research does not just happen – you need to plan.

The process of designing and building services normally starts with a service brief. It is often based on the existing understanding of a problem and a desired outcome. In government, a service brief commonly includes an idea, policy implementation or proposed solution that you and your team are asked to build.

However, though it might seem like a good idea, starting with a solution can pose difficulties later in the process!

As we learned in weeks 1 and 2, we have to start with users. If we do not take the time to speak to them and fully understand their needs, we can miss important insights and risk building the wrong thing. The eventual solution may be completely different from what was initially imagined.

At all times, you should be striving to understand what the problems are, not just what the solutions might be.

For this reason, it’s important to interrogate what is being asked in the brief so you fully understand the problem space, including – most importantly! – the things you do not already know.

The process

Scoping research

To try and understand how we should direct our research, we start with the basic questions:

• who are the users
• what are they trying to do
• what outcome does the organisation want to achieve

At the start of the discovery phase, user researchers conduct what is known as a ‘project inception session’ with the team and other stakeholders to consolidate information and understand what is already known about the answers to these questions. This session is also an opportunity to capture any existing resources, such as insight from previous research, contacts, or statistics on user groups.

This helps the team understand the problem from the organisational perspective, which will then form the basis of the user research questions and assumptions.

If more information is needed, user researchers often follow up with interviews or workshops with stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to find out and document everything there is to know about the problem space.

Forming research questions as a team

Next, user researchers conduct a session with your team to gather, group and prioritise all of the questions we have about the users and problem space.

A research question is a high-level, broad articulation of what exactly you want to find out by conducting research. It is the starting point for research that influences the design of the whole study, from research methods to user recruitment to data analysis.

A good research question is specific, actionable and practical.

Research questions that are too broad and try to encompass too many users – something like “how do users interact with GOV.UK?” – are not helpful. Trying to answer that question would involve too many variables and would not generate relevant insights.

A more specific, practical and actionable research question might be “what are the problems users face when trying to renew their passport?”

This question refers to a specific government service with a clear set of users. The insights that will be found through conducting this research will help the team designing the service to solve those problems and meet user needs.

Research questions are not user facing and should not be used in a survey or interview with users. A survey or interview question set should be carefully designed as part of research planning and preparation after the research questions are decided.

Research projects can have multiple research questions. By grouping your team’s research questions into themes, you can find an overarching research question for each area. This will help you design focused, practical research that generates interesting and useful data.

Prioritisation

You should then collate existing research you have in each area. Once you have done this, your team will be able to:

determine whether you have existing data that already answers your questions identify your biggest knowledge gaps decide what you see as the riskiest assumptions determine the likely impact of knowing/not knowing the answers to your questions

This can inform the prioritisation of your research questions and guide your research focus. Using the agreed prioritisation of research areas, you can refine your research questions and check back with your team to ensure that you’re all in agreement.

After all of this has been agreed, you need to choose your research method or methods. We will learn more about these in the next step.