Research Template
Keep all your user research in one place and collaborate with your team.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Research Template
Teams can document findings from usability testing sessions and customer interviews into a systematic, flexible user research template. Collecting everyone’s observations into a centralized location makes it easier to share insights company-wide and suggest new features based on user needs.
Keep reading to learn more about the Research Template.
What is a Research Template
Research templates can be adapted to work with different design methods or user research techniques. When it’s your job to ask questions, take notes, learn more about your user, and test iteratively, a Research Template can help you validate your assumptions, find similarities across different users, and articulate their mental models, needs, and goals.
User research helps teams avoid designing for themselves, and instead turn their attention to who will actually use your product, in what context they’ll be using your product or service, and what they need or expect from your brand or organization.
Research templates can be used to record two different types of data or observations:
Quantitative: numbers-based research, or anything you can count. This includes the number of users and percentage changes. It helps teams understand what is happening on a website or app.
Qualitative: opinion-based research, or anything that can take place in the form of a question-and-answer format (closed questions), or conversational exchange (open questions).
Whichever way you choose, a Research Template will help you keep your designs informed, contextual, and user-centric.
When to use Research Templates
A Research Template can be used at any stage of the product or service design life cycle.
Right now: No time like the present. The earlier you start your research, the bigger the impact your research findings will have on your product or service.
At every stage of the design process: User research can reveal important findings that can be applied to your product or service. This increases its value.
In the earliest stage of the project: Not every team can budget for research every step of the way. In that case, do the most research as early as possible in the project. Make sure to reserve some time and budget for conducting supplementary research later on in the process, too.
Create your own Research Template
Participating in user research efforts as a team is important. Everyone can get involved, better understand the user they’re designing for, and clarify why certain decisions are based on user research findings.
Get started by selecting the Research Template, to make one of your own:
Record your observations and make revisions where needed. Assemble a cross-functional team who can empathize with your users: designers, engineers, product managers, user researchers, marketers, and support team members will all have valuable input to contribute. Nominate someone in your group to facilitate. This person will lead the conversation with the user participant. Everyone else will listen and watch for potential roadblocks and epiphanies for the user.
Take notes. The user research template’s columns and rows are customizable and can be renamed to record elements such as observational goals, tester details, and emotions that emerge during the conversation. These notes can also be useful for people unable to attend the session.
Bring it all together. After the user interview sessions are done, group similar notes into themed clusters. What are the pain points for the customer? Where were the opportunities for delight? Sometimes notes will come together into logical themed clusters, but sometimes you’ll have “odd one out” observations that don’t fit anywhere. You can gather these into a “basket” or collect them into a separate area in case they may become useful later.
Adapt as needed throughout the research and design process. Ideally, this process will help you develop features side-by-side as a team, rather than go through a hand-off process with all the involved departments. The Research Template is flexible enough to be adapted to best serve your team’s needs.
Get started with this template right now.
Communications Plan Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Project Management, Project Planning
You saw the opportunity. You developed the product. Now comes an important step: Find your audience and speak to them in a way that’s clear, memorable, and inspiring. You need a communications plan—a strategy for controlling your narrative at every stage of your business—and this template will help you create a good one. No need to build a new strategy every time you have something to communicate. Here, you can simplify the process, streamline your messaging, and empower you to communicate in ways that grow with your business.
Co-Creation Template
Works best for:
Design
The Co-Creation Template enables the visual expression of ideas using essential elements. Analysis of these creations identifies explicit and implicit needs. For instance, a human resources team may use symbols to envision their ideal work environment. The output reflects people's desires and expectations.
Crazy Eights Template
Works best for:
Design Thinking, Brainstorming, Ideation
Sometimes you just need to get the team’s creative juices flowing for a brainstorm—and get them thinking of as many ideas as they can, as fast as they can. Crazy Eights will do it in a hurry. Favoring quantity over quality, this sketch brainstorming exercise challenges them to come up with eight ideas in eight minutes, which leaves no time to second guess ideas. It’s perfect for early stages of development, and it’s a team favorite for being fast paced and fun.
Customer Journey Map Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Mapping, Product Management
A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of your customer’s experience. It allows you to capture the path that a customer follows when they buy a product, sign up for a service, or otherwise interact with your site. Most maps include a specific persona, outlines their customer experience from beginning to end, and captures the potential emotional highs and lows of interacting with the product or service. Use this template to easily create customer journey maps for projects of all kinds.
Remote Design Sprint Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Sprint Planning
A design sprint is an intensive process of designing, iterating, and testing a prototype over a 4 or 5 day period. Design sprints are conducted to break out of stal, work processes, find a fresh perspective, identify problems in a unique way, and rapidly develop solutions. Developed by Google, design sprints were created to enable teams to align on a specific problem, generate multiple solutions, create and test prototypes, and get feedback from users in a short period of time. This template was originally created by JustMad, a business-driven design consultancy, and has been leveraged by distributed teams worldwide.
BCG Matrix Template
Works best for:
Strategic Planning
Use the BCG matrix template to make informed and strategic decisions about growth opportunities for your business. Assign your portfolio of products to different areas within the matrix (cash cows, dogs, question marks, stars) to prioritize where you should invest your time and money to see the best results.