Set Up a UX Research Project

This year I had the opportunity to apply my fundamental marketing research process knowledge to create a user experience study of WWU Marketing students for the Spotify Advertising certification course.

This process is not just limited to UX research. It will work for any type of marketing research project. Starting any marketing research project can be completely overwhelming. This list is intended to serve as a guide for other new marketing researchers (MRs) as they begin their marketing research journey.

Finding Your Bearings

When I began my marketing research, I started by determining the basics of what we were studying, why we were conducting this research, who we were going to include in our sample, when and over the course of what time period we would be running our tests, and how we would be measuring our results.

For example, where are the W’s/H’s of our study:

• What: we were studying: the user experience and academic value of the Spotify Certification course 
• Who: we would include in our study: current WWU marketing students 
• Why: we were studying it: to determine how we could make the course content even more suitable for an college-academic environment 
• How: we would measure user experience and academic value of the certification by
  
  • Collecting quantitative data about student retention through before and after quizzes
  • Collect objective and subjective qualitative data through a survey and focus group.
  • Have students run an actual campaign in Spotify and study the results
• When: we would run experiments: during the course of fall quarter 2022

This step takes some time, but these basics provide clarity that will guide the entire process.

Problem Definition

Steve Jobs once said, “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solutions.”

Defining the problem often takes the most amount of time during the research setup properly, but Jobs was right. Every second you put into defining the problem correctly saves you time down the road.

The problem definition starts by defining the stakeholders involved.

In the case of the Spotify certification exam, the key stakeholders were:

• Spotify: what problem are they facing that needs to be solved
• Students: what are students trying to achieve when they take this certification
• Faculty: what problems are professors experiencing when they turn to a certification course to help their students learn?
• Small businesses: what problems are small businesses facing that they turn to the certification course content to solve?

Before we can come up with a single solution that solves the problem for all important audiences, we need to define the problem for each group.

To create your own problem statements, fill out this framework from Real Symple Solutions:

1. I’m a ________________________________
2. I’m trying to ________________________________
3. But ________________________________
4. Because ________________________________
5. Which makes me feel ________________________________

As an example from our Spotify UX research setup, for the problem the students are facing is:

• I’m a college student 1-4 quarters from earning my bachelor’s degree
• And I’m trying to learn how to run a marketing campaign
• But I am unable to get the practical and hands-on experience I need
• Because the resources I have access to are insufficient
• Which makes me feel incapable, awkward, inferior, overwhelmed, incompetent, insecure, unmotivated, unsure, hesitant and stressed

Once you’ve given a great deal of thought into the root cause of each stakeholder’s problem and you have successfully filled the framework for all key groups, you are ready to proceed to determining the research objectives.

Determine Research Objectives

Now that we have defined the root problem each stakeholder group is experiencing, we are ready to determine research objectives.

Research objectives are the research questions you wish to answer with your research. These Research Objectives tell marketing researchers:

• Who they will gather information from
• What information is needed to answer the question (or find insights into potential solutions)
• What we want to know
• What unit of measurement will be used to gather the information
• The frame of reference for question wording.

For example, for my first research objective for the Spotify Project, I filled out a table that states:

• Who will you gather research from?: Conduct a study of current students in the Integrated Marketing Communications Class (marketing majors 1-4 quarters from graduating)
• Information needed to answer the question: gaining an understanding of what to change to make the certification course more valuable for students, professors, and small business owners on three planes (1) overall satisfaction (2) content value and (3) technical user experience.
• What we want to know: How did the experiential factors of the certification course help or hurt students’ retention of the information and their overall value of their time spent?
• Unit of measurement used to gather information: Survey, focus groups, before and after quiz
• Frame of reference: all wording will be in students’ frame of reference 

Most research projects will have 2-5 research objectives. 

Once we know what problems our key stakeholders are facing, and what we hope to achieve through our research, we are ready to start designing the research.

Research Design and Types

First, there are three types of research design you can conduct to explore a problem.

• Exploratory Research: is about learning about the problem
• Descriptive Research: describes who, what, where and when something is happening
• Causal Research: describes the “cause and effect” or the “why” behind an occurrence. 

Knowing which type of research you need to conduct is key to determining what kind of research you need and how to find answers.

Second, determine which type of research you want to conduct. There are two types of research:

• Secondary Research: includes accessing data online, in books, and databases for example
• Primary Research: this is research you collect first-hand, including focus groups, lab experiments, and surveys.

Most research projects are a combination of the two methods. 

When conducting the Spotify Advertising Certificate UX research, I determined that I needed to conduct both exploratory research to learn more about the problem users are facing, as well as causal research to determine the cause and effect of users’ success or struggles in running a real Spotify Ad campaign after taking the certification. 

While most of my research was primary research, I did conduct some secondary research to learn more about Spotify as a company as well as their target audience.

Next Steps

Once you’ve determined the problems we want to research, our research objectives, and our research design, we are ready to design our collection methods to start actually capturing data to reach our objectives. 

Whether we intend to use a survey, focus group, or before and after quizzes to collect the user experience data, if follow this setup process we can be confident moving forward.