GPT Prompt Guides

User Research Plans

Product Management User Experience

Without this insight, you’re just shooting in the dark, hoping to hit the target. Unfortunately, many projects start this way.

So, early research and a solid plan for gaining early insights aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re essentials. They set the foundation for features that resonate with users, ultimately driving engagement and success for your app.

AI Assistants can give you a good draft of what a plan could look like, which you can then tailor to your feature needs.

Start with the Domain

A broad prompt lets you gather data from surveys, interviews, and observations and helps you choose the best methods to build a strong base for more focused research. It also helps avoid biases that might arise from a narrow initial scope, ensuring that no critical aspects are overlooked.

This comprehensive understanding helps to guide the development of user personas and journey maps, leading to an end-product that effectively addresses real user needs. In short, starting wide ensures a well-rounded, user-centered design that drives engagement and satisfaction.

For this chapter’s example, we’re working to build a customer relationship management system.

Prompt

Create a user discovery plan for a customer relationship management system.

Add User Personas

Now let’s add more context to the prompt, like user personas.

Adding more context provides clarity and direction. Specifying user personas helps focus the research, ensuring that the plan addresses their unique needs and challenges. This context ensures that the discovery plan is not generic but specifically designed to enhance the productivity and satisfaction of these key users.

If you want to provide even more context, you can upload user persona documents to the prompt so it trains on your data instead of relying solely on what’s available on the web. It’s extra credit, but it’s something I’ve experimented with, and it has made a difference in creating more tailored content.

Prompt

Create a user discovery plan for a customer relationship management system, using sales managers and business development representatives as user personas. Consider their goals, motivations, and behaviors.

Add the Feature

Let’s get more specific by focusing on account management within the system.

With this focus, we can tailor our research to understand how these users handle their interactions and relationships when working on accounts daily. This includes identifying pain points, necessary features, and improvements directly related to managing contacts within accounts.

This focused approach ensures tasks are finely tuned to support users in their daily activities, enhancing efficiency and user satisfaction. By addressing contact management explicitly, the plan becomes more actionable and aligned with the real-world needs of its users, leading to more effective research.

Prompt

Create a user discovery plan for a customer relationship management system, using sales managers and business development representatives as user personas. Consider their goals, motivations, and behaviors. Target account management as the use case.

Add Constraints

Now let’s focus on adding constraints such as: adding a timeline, removing certain activities and using templates:

• Establishing a timeline ensures the project stays on track and that all activities are completed promptly. Specifying a four-week timeline helps set clear expectations and allows for efficient planning and resource allocation.
• Removing the most time-consuming activities based on initial recommendations focuses the plan on more direct and actionable tasks like user interviews, which can provide deeper insights in a shorter period.
• Including recommended templates for feedback collection ensures consistency and efficiency in gathering and analyzing user input. These deliverables, where you’ve captured the impact, are valuable for showing what the recommendations are.

This context helps create a more targeted and streamlined user research plan, making it easier to execute and more likely to yield valuable insights.

Additionally, many of the templates you may need are available here.

Prompt

Create a user discovery plan for a customer relationship management system with sales managers and business development representatives as the user personas. Consider their goals, motivations, and behaviors. Target account management as the use case. Remove the three most time-consuming activities and explain why they should be removed. This should be on a four-week timeline. Add templates that would be useful in collecting feedback. Rate each activity based on effort, usefulness, and impact.