User Research Guide For Founders, Part 2: Plan your Research
In Part 1, we broke down how to state your research goals and choose a research method.
In this issue, we will be focusing on creating a research plan, which includes:
Specify your audience
Recruit participants
Create a research plan
Write a script
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1. Specify your audience
Who should you talk to? Determine who can help answer your questions.
These could be current users, potential users, people with specific behaviors, etc.
When doing early research for Facebook Marketplace, we spoke with people who were already buying and selling items through Facebook groups or their Profiles. We also talked to people who had bought or sold items through other online marketplaces. We included people who made a living selling goods through online marketplaces and those who had just bought or sold a few items.
Identify any specific criteria you want people to have e.g.,
Experience buying or selling goods through an online marketplace
A range of experience, including active sellers with more than 10 listings per month
A range of locations including urban, suburban, and rural.
Tip: If you don’t have an existing product, look at other products people are using to do the same tasks. For example, if people hadn’t already been buying and selling through Facebook, we could still have talked to people who were using eBay, Craig’s List, etc. to buy and sell items.
Action: Choose your audience and identify any specific criteria you want them to have.
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2. Recruit participants
Managing participants
Before you start actively recruiting participants, take a quick moment to get organized. You’ll need a form for screening potential participants and a list to manage participants. Both AirTable and Google Forms/Sheets are great options for this.
The form should have all the criteria you want participants to have. A few tips to create useful screening forms:
Balance keeping the screening questions short (so people fill them out) with also being thorough enough that your research sessions are fruitful.
Mark key questions as mandatory (and put them first), then follow with the optional questions.
When possible, ask people to choose from options. e.g., Rather than asking a yes/no question if a person’s trading volume is >$5K, you can create some buckets from people to choose from (<1K, 1-5K, 5-10K, 10K+).
You can ask for their social profiles, wallet address, GitHub profile, etc. to confirm their answers.
Ask if you can contact them for future studies. This allows you to start building up a bank of potential participants.
Note: you will still end up with participants who are duds. It’s OK. Screening questions just aim to minimize the number of duds.
Here is an example form and corresponding table we created for research we ran at an Electric Capital Founder event:
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Finding participants
Now that you’ve identified your audience, you need to find people to talk to.
If you want to talk to current users and have their email addresses, send them an email with a link to the screening survey. Starting with your own network is fine. You can broadcast a wider call for participants via Twitter, Discord, Craigslist, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Some communities have virtual events/groups that can also be a good place to recruit from.
Note: generally you don’t need to specify the day and time in advance. We needed to since we were hosting several sessions in parallel at the founder summit.
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Determining the number of participants
Ideally, you should have at least 3-5 quality participants. Talking to anyone is helpful. This is qualitative feedback, so you don’t need huge numbers of people for the feedback to be valid. You just want to talk to enough people that you don’t over rotate on feedback from someone who is an outlier. Plan to recruit about 8-10 people because some participants won’t show up.
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3. Create a research plan
Pull together your goals, research methodology, questions, and audience, into a plan. These will vary a bit depending on what type of research you are doing.
For a user interview, which is conversation-based, capture:
Your research goal
The questions you hope to answer
Your audience — who you want feedback from
Whether you need to provide any type of overview for participants
Whether you want to show them anything to react to
For a usability study, which is more task-based, capture:
Your research goal
Your audience — who you want feedback from
Whether you need to provide any type of overview for participants
What tasks you want people to go through
The key pages you’ll share with people
What people will interact with (and if you need to set up any special access)
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4. Write a Script
At this point, you know what you want to learn, the method you’ll use, who you’ll talk to, and what you’ll cover in the session. Now you’ll move onto creating a script for the studies. It is good to capture, word for word, what you will ask them.
A few tips:
Start with a short warm-up and introduction.
Keep the questions open ended and remind people to think aloud.
Feel free to copy/paste the example scripts as a reference (modifying as appropriate).
AI can also be a useful tool for starting a script e.g., “Write a user interview script for [research question] + [audience]”
Practice with a co-worker to get comfortable. Talking to participants is harder than it looks!
Below is an example script for a user interview. Additional examples are available below.
Example Script: User Interview
Research Goal: Better understand the experiences, work flows, and friction points for smart contract developers.
Introduction
Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences. We are really interested in your feedback.
[Give a little overview of you, what you do, your name, etc. warm-up ice breaker, share a hobby and ask they what’s one of theirs, or favorite dessert, etc. Short, awkward chit chat to help participant warm up]
Nothing you say will offend me. I am excited to hear your thoughts and improve our product.
We will be recording this session so that we can refer back to it for notes and potentially capture small video clips of the screen + audio to share with our product team only.
Everything you say is confidential. We also ask for your full confidentiality and request that you not share anything from your experiences today with anyone else.
As much as possible, please try to think out loud, because it helps me understand your gut reactions to things
Background
Can you briefly describe your current role and the main projects or platforms you work on?
How long have you been involved in web3 development and writing smart contracts?
Which blockchain platforms or networks do you primarily develop for?
Development process:
Describe your typical development environment for writing smart contracts.
What tools, libraries, or frameworks do you commonly use for smart contract development?
How do you handle testing and deployment of your smart contracts?
Challenges + Friction Points:
What have been the most challenging aspects of writing smart contracts for you?
How do you ensure the security and robustness of your smart contracts?
Community and Collaboration:
How important is community involvement and feedback in your development process?
Are there online communities or forums you frequently turn to for advice or collaboration?
How do you stay up to date with the rapid evolution of web3 and smart contract development?
Here are some additional example scripts.
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In summary, here are the action steps:
Specify your audience
Recruit participants
Create a research plan
Write a script
Planning your research session in advance will help you run a successful session and get meaningful insights.
Next up: Part 3: Run sessions + Identify insights (coming soon).