How to know if the project is ready for a user research study

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graph TD
  start{start} --> A
  A[Has the decision already been made?] --> |No| B[Can Google/past research answer the question?]
	A --> |Yes| Z[Go home]
	B --> |No| C[Is it only to get political buy-ins?]
	B --> |Yes| Y[Do it themselves]
	C --> |No| D[Ask the researcher: Can UXR answer the question? ]
  C --> |Yes| Y
  D --> |Yes| F{{Someone is ready for a UXR study!}}
	D --> |No| X[Use other research type]

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class start grey;
class Z,Y,X orange;
class F green;

4 essential questions to ask the project lead before taking the case

1. Why do you request research at this moment in time?
2. What would be the organizational and strategic impact of this project? What would be the impact on the team?
3. What level of support do you anticipate needing for this project? (For my own work, I let them choose one of the following 3: a. Full support, with a researcher embedded in the project from start to finish, providing ongoing assistance through proposal and development stages. b. Research support from planning to oral report, but not involved in the design proposal. c. Consultation services, with written research planning recommendations).
4. Please attach relevant files or links.

Other questions to consider asking:

1. Have you ever done user research before (with the team)? This will help you understand how much education you may need to put into the research project.
2. What are your questions for the research project? This will help you understand what questions the stakeholders have. Knowing this, you are equipped to have an effective meeting asking why these questions are important to stakeholders.
3. What would you like to get out of the research? What is the expected outcome? This question gets everyone on the same page on what the expected outcome of the project could be. This can also help you determine methodology later on.
4. What customer problem/need is your proposed solution trying to solve? If you have any documentation, summarize and link it here. This question ties it back to the customer/user. We want to be doing research that benefits the customer, and this helps highlight whether we are actually looking at customer problems or just researching "cool ideas."
5. How do we know this is a customer problem or a customer need? This gives back-up on the above question, in the form of data or previous research.
6. How have you acted on previously completed research that backs up the solution you’ve designed (User Research, Market Research, Business Intelligence, on-site data, A/B testing, Analytics?) This helps you understand if there has been previous research done and can save you the time of copying research that is already complete
7. What important and unanswered questions do you still have after evaluating past research? This question encourages stakeholders to go through previous research and come up with questions that are still lingering. This way you know you aren't doubling efforts from the past.
8. What recruitment criteria do you have in mind? What types of participants do you need? This question isn't totally necessary but can help save time in meetings by thinking about recruitment needs. Since recruitment can take a long time, the sooner you discuss this, the better!
9. If you have a solution (ex: concepts or prototypes), how did you come to the solution you propose? Please mention any other solutions you have considered and link any prototypes. This can help you understand what type of research the stakeholders are looking for (generative versus evaluative) and if they are too far down into the solution-space.
10. What will you do with the insights generated from this research? Is there someone (ex: designer, developers) “ready” to act on the insights generated from this research? This is another important question - the worst feeling is doing research and then having no one act on it. You want to make sure someone can act on the insights from research.
11. When do you need insights in your hands (i.e. analysis of the research is completed) to move forward? This will give you a better indication of the timeline