Democratizing User Research Protocol Development

It is essential to develop a user research protocol before conducting studies to discover user needs. A user research protocol acts as a detailed plan of execution steps, guidelines, interview questions, and prompts, to enable consistency, effectiveness, and efficiency in the user research execution. Formulating relevant questions for a study is challenging and is human-skill dependent, prone to biases, and limited coverage of user research objectives. Our research aims at process and technology assistance to develop user research protocols, with a focus on aiding designers and business stakeholders to formulate the right questions to ask users. We define a two-stage process: Stage 1 is to transform the user research study objective into candidate questions and prompts. This step also leverages principles and approaches from service design to enrich the question formulation. Stage 2 is to generate a dynamic user research protocol, including the formulated questions. The protocol is updated through iterations of execution to sharpen the focus on developing areas of interest. The paper introduces this approach, illustrated with a walkthrough. This method has implications on democratizing user research and enabling large-scale user research.