The hunt statement

This post is #2 in a series of posts about my UX research about UX Maturity. For all other posts, see my UX Strategy page.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve recently started researching how companies relate to UX Maturity.

Since that first post, I’ve been in brainstorming mode. I’ve been jotting down tons of questions, as well as a huge list of people that I might like to ask those questions to. At first it was exciting to get into writing all of the possibilities that were in my mind, but it quickly became a little overwhelming.

Narrowing things down

Enter my fearless mentor Meaghan. When we last sat down together, we had the goal of focusing my list of questions. But how?

The hunt statement

As Meaghan says, the hunt statement is your ‘north star’ that you align all of your research towards to keep your research focused. The format is a what followed by a why. Meaghan suggested filling in the blanks in the following way:

I want to learn ____________

So that I might ____________.

This is going to come in very handy, because I’m really quite curious.

While no one actually calls me Whiskeres, I’m also curious like a cat.

Just this week, when I tried Guerrilla User Research for the first time (in a work project), my research partner kept pointing out how long I was taking. I didn’t understand why he thought it was a problem- as long as the people I was talking to were happy to continue, why not keep asking questions?

But now I realize that some of my questions weren’t especially relevant to the problem that we were investigating. If we did have an explicit hunt statement for that study, we would have been on the same page I wouldn’t have been pulling on threads that my partner wasn’t interested in.

So for this UX Maturity Research project, I’m going to have a hunt statement to keep me in line.

My hunt statement

I want to learn how decision-makers at enterprise software companies understand what UX design is, and how it fits into the success of their business;

So that I might develop more effective approaches for increasing investment in UX and getting the company to move further along the scale of UX maturity.

Next steps

Using this hunt statement, I’m going to create an initial discussion guide, do a couple interviews this week, then refine the guide if necessary and continue the research from there!

Stay tuned for future updates 🙂