User Research Roadmap
Fig. 01 — User Research Roadmap
Building A Practice Of User Research Into Product Development Cycle
Healthline Media is the second-largest and fastest-growing consumer health media publisher in the world, reaching 125 million people a month. Since the time I joined in 2016, we had a guerilla approach to user-research done on-demand as needed. A new effort to build structure into the user-research process was lead by the VP of Product, Todd Zander. I was tasked at coming up with a plan, visualize, and marry the process to the product development life-cycle.
Product Roadmap
This roadmap was our starting point. it depicts when and what products/features get launched.
Analysing Intervention Needs
Typically we had three types of intervention needs from a user-research point of view. They were
- New products
- Existing products
- Post Launch
New Product Roadmap
This roadmap depicts (in blue) when and how we can intervene for conducting user-research to add to the product wisdom.
Existing Product Roadmap
An existing product often has some form of research effort forming the base for product assumptions and decisions. However, sometimes need for additional tests to refine and upgrade existing features might need new research effort. Here's our plan depicting the process.
Post Launch Roadmap
Once the product/feature is launched its metric starts trickling in. Based on the metrics a contingency plan was devised to support product actions that would result post launch.
Research Methods
A list of research methods with brief explanation was outlined for teams to refer and learn about the steps involved and what to expect in terms of outcomes.
Implementation
Here's an example of how we put our newly developed plan to built a new BodyMaps tool.
