User Research Checklist
One of my favourite episodes of Desert Island Discs features the surgeon Atul Gawande. Atul pioneered the idea of introducing a very simple surgery safety checklist to help reduce human error when conducting surgical procedures.
Research has shown that the using a simple checklist such as this can reduce surgery related deaths by up to a staggering 40% and complications by up to a third.
So this all got me thinking about what sorts of checklists could be useful for my own work.
A while ago I considered what often goes wrong when conducting user research. Conducting user research involves lots of individual tasks so felt like an ideal topic to create a checklist for to help avoid some common pitfalls.
I’ve created it from the perspective of someone working in a consultancy so ignore the stuff about ‘clients’ & ‘briefs’ if that’s not your world. In addition I’ve added examples of things like kick off meeting agendas, tips for things to include in discussion guides and a typical report structure.
As this is my first draft, I’m bound to have missed something. My colleagues have kindly added their suggestions but please do add your suggestions as a comment below and I’ll iterate!
Download : User Research Checklist (PDF)
Originally posted on the cxpartners website
