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The Heart of Your UX Research: Practical Guide to Formulating Powerful Questions

The Heart of Your UX Research: Practical Guide to Formulating Powerful Questions

By Paulina Contreras•
Learn UX ResearchUX Research Stages

Have you ever felt lost when starting a UX project, not knowing where to begin? Effective research always starts with a clear, well-formulated question. This question is the backbone of your entire research process. Without it, it’s like building a house without foundations.

In this post, you’ll learn what a UX research question is, why it’s essential, how to build it step by step, and practical examples for different experience levels.

What is a UX Research Question and why does it matter?

A research question is a central question that your team needs to answer to move forward with a design or product decision. It doesn’t refer to the questions you ask in interviews, but to the question that guides your entire study.

The research question may relate to the initial request we receive, but that request often needs to be reframed to become a good research question.

Transformation example:

Initial request: “We need to know if people understand the app’s payment flow.”

Questions we must ask ourselves:

  • Which people specifically? (user types)
  • Which flow exactly? (is there one or more)
  • At what point in the process? (beginning, end, all steps)
  • In what context? (country/region, purchase type, online/in-person, app/web)
  • What does “understand” mean? (texts, interaction, complete process)

If we’re asked this, there are probably metrics indicating drop-offs or customer messages pointing to difficulties in the process. This serves as initial hypotheses.

Thus, we raise doubts and questions that lead us to iterate from the initial request toward the research question that will guide the study. In the end, based on the results, we’ll try to answer that original request.

The importance of the Research Question:

  • Defines the purpose of the study
  • Guides the selection of methods and data types
  • Reduces biases and unfounded assumptions
  • Optimizes resources and team focus
  • Facilitates communicating the value of research clearly

Characteristics of a Good Research Question

An effective research question should be:

  • Clear and specific
  • Open-ended (not yes/no)
  • User-centered and focused on their experience
  • Actionable
  • Feasible according to available resources
  • Impartial and free of assumptions (simple, right?)

Steps to Formulate Your Question

Step 1: Define the Problem and Goals

  • What does the business want to achieve?
  • What decisions depend on this research?

Step 2: Identify the Knowledge Gap

  • What don’t we know about our users?
  • Example: “Why do they abandon the cart?”

Step 3: Draft a General Statement

“We want to understand how users [act] in [context] to [objective].”

Step 4: Formulate 3-5 Specific Questions

  • Use “how” and “why”
  • Avoid technical jargon

Step 5: Refine and Validate

  • Review them with your team
  • Verify if they can guide real design decisions

Examples by Complexity Level

Basic – Initial Exploration

Useful for: understanding behaviors or identifying obvious problems. Used when the team has little prior information, it’s a first approach, or there’s a need to map the terrain. These are more descriptive questions: what they do, how they do it, what difficulties they have.

Examples:

  • How do users navigate the site when searching for prices?
  • What difficulties do they encounter when registering?

Intermediate – Experiential Deep Dive

Objective: understand more complex experiences, emotions, patterns, perceptions, or connections with the product/service. Requires having hypotheses, prior data, or having observed key behaviors. Involves finer analysis of language, tone, context, and prior experience.

Examples:

  • How does previous experience on similar platforms influence?
  • How does language impact user trust?

Advanced – Strategic Research

Objective: connect UX with organizational decisions, business impact, inclusion, public policies, digital culture, etc. Requires experience translating human needs into implications for roadmap, governance, or innovation. These are usually questions with many variables: context, behavior, culture, technology.

Ideal for: product strategy, digital transformation, UX in government or healthcare, high-impact decisions.

Examples:

  • How does digital maturity influence feature adoption?
  • How to design for inclusive understanding of public data?

Template to Create Your Question

Based on the “Research Question Framework” from IDF (Interaction Design Foundation) and “The Research Statement” from Erika Hall (Just Enough Research), here’s a base template:

Formula:

“How / Why [phenomenon or behavior] do [user type] in [context] to [business/design objective]?”

Complete example:

“How does the hotel selection process on our platform frustrate frequent travelers with little time, and what factors influence their decisions, to reduce the abandonment rate?”

Template breakdown:

1. “How / Why” → type of open research question

  • Based on qualitative methodology: questions with “how” and “why” encourage deep exploration, understanding of processes, motivations, and meanings.

2. [Behavior or phenomenon] → what you observe/are interested in investigating

  • Here you define the main object: an action, perception, or experience.
  • It’s the center of observation or analysis.
  • Ex.: “use the internal search”, “abandon the cart”, “get frustrated with onboarding”.

3. [User type] → specific target user

  • Defined based on segmentation or user persona.
  • It’s important not to use generalities (“users”) but real groups with context (“young people without a bank account”, “teachers in rural areas”).
  • This improves the precision and relevance of the study.

4. [Context/product/service] → where the experience occurs

  • Specify the platform, channel, flow, or situation where the phenomenon occurs.
  • Helps narrow the research and choose the appropriate method.
  • Ex.: “in the booking mobile app”, “when using the portal chatbot”.

5. [Business or design objective] → what the answer is for

  • Links the question with a concrete need of the team or business.
  • Prevents the research from being an isolated exercise.
  • Ex.: “to improve conversion rate”, “to redesign the registration flow”.

Final Tips

Iterate: the first version is rarely the best.

Describe it out loud: if it’s not easily understood, rephrase it. I usually write the first thing that comes to mind on paper (physical or digital) and from that base continue iterating the question. If there’s a team, I usually work on it together, or bring a more refined version to a group session.

Align with the team: everyone should be clear about what they’re trying to learn. This is more relevant than it seems, because as researchers we have an idea of what we think the team wants/needs to know, but we don’t always have the whole picture. It’s better to meet with the people involved and define the final question together (UX, UI, Writers, POs, Managers, etc.), since ultimately the results are for the team.

Formulating good research questions is a skill that is learned and trained with each iteration. Training yourself to ask good questions allows you to discover what really matters and make informed, people-centered decisions.