ux-research-workflow

UX research workflow

Sequences research specialists so a decision gets the evidence it needs and no more. This skill owns the sequence, the handover artifacts and the stop conditions; every method rule lives in the specialist that owns it.

Inputs

• The decision: what will be decided differently depending on the result, by whom, by when.
• What exists: prior research, analytics, support data, transcripts.
• Constraints: participant access, time, consent and data-handling rules.

Workflow

1. Frame the decision

Write the decision, the question it needs answered, and the evidence that would change it. If the question is answerable from existing material, skip to step 4. If the decision is not clear, stop and get it clarified; research without a decision produces reports nobody uses.

2. Plan the study

Run research-planning to choose a proportionate method and turn the decision into a research plan, or user-research-cookiy (route "Plan a Study") when you also need the screener and interview guide generated. When consent, data minimisation and retention need explicit treatment, run silver-research for its ethics and data-handling section and merge it in. Confirm the plan is labelled a plan and claims no sessions happened.

Choose the instrument:

• Interviews or contextual sessions: the interview guide from step 2.
• Questionnaire: survey-design, which owns question wording, scales and sample-size guidance.
• Usability sessions on a prototype or product: usability-testing, which owns task design, moderation and severity; synthetic-user-testing only as a rehearsal before real participants, never as a substitute.
• Findability or grouping questions: ia-evaluation, which owns card sorts, tree tests and first-click tests.
• No participants available yet and the question is about the current product's flows: journey-mapper derives a first journey map from the codebase to focus later sessions.

Handover artifact: the plan with instruments attached and the correct answers or hypotheses recorded before fielding.

3. Collect

Field the study per the plan. This skill does not run sessions; record what was collected, from whom (in sanitised form), and any deviation from the plan.

4. Synthesise

• Interview transcripts or notes: user-research-cookiy (route "Synthesize a Report") for coding, themes, personas, opportunities and recommendations with quality gates.
• Mixed evidence (analytics, support tickets, survey results, notes): silver-synthesize for findings and a problem frame.
• Survey data: the analysis plan inside survey-design.

Handover artifact: findings with evidence references, confidence, and the problem frame.

5. Map structure when the question is structural

• Service failures, backstage causes, multi-channel journeys: service-blueprint.
• Navigation, grouping and labels: ia-evaluation results feed a sitemap or navigation recommendation.

6. Turn findings into options and a decision

Run silver-ideate to generate distinct concepts with falsifiable hypotheses and the cheapest test for each, then stop for human selection. When the recommendation meets stakeholder resistance, design-negotiation owns the evidence-based argument.

7. Plan the measurement

Before the chosen option ships, instrumentation-plan defines the metrics and events that will show whether it worked; after launch, silver-measure closes the loop against the hypothesis.

8. Output

One document: decision and question; plan and instruments; collection record; findings with evidence; structural maps if any; options with hypotheses; the recommendation; the measurement plan; and the next study if the evidence was insufficient. List the skills used.

Availability and precedence

Confirm each skill named above is installed before relying on it; if one is missing, name it and describe the manual step the team must do instead. Never reconstruct a missing method from memory. When two specialists disagree (for example on sample size), the skill that owns the instrument wins, and the disagreement is recorded.

Before you finish