User Research Estimation

Question

What are the units/factors you take into account when estimating or scoping your user research? Other than the business domain's complexity, remote/in-person research and the difficulty of participant recruitment, I am looking more for quantitative units that could help assess the complexity of a user research initiative. Would you use a hierarchy that goes like this?

• Number of User Groups
  • Number of User Journeys
    • Number of User tasks
      • Length of user tasks

Answer 1

If you want to drill in deeper and get more detailed with your planning then you would continue by looking at the number of touch points across different services/applications, and then the number of interface screens and interactions involved.

I think the difficult part of the estimate isn't going to be the quantitative aspects (which is more objective), but trying to assess which contexts and scenarios that you are testing has the greater complexity.

However, from a high level planning perspective it is probably sufficient to simply allocate broad buckets like high/medium/low and rely on the quantitative values to help give you the big picture.