Nailing your UXR OKRs - A framework for maximizing research impact
The ultimate guide to creating meaningful UXR goals that drive real business impact
👋 Hi, this is Nikki with a subscriber-only article from the User Research Strategist. I share content that helps you measure, track, and demonstrate the ROI of your user research.
If you want to see everything I post, subscribe below!
If you’re a user researcher trying to create meaningful OKRs (objectives and key results), you’re not alone if you feel overwhelmed or unsure about where to start. Maybe your company’s goals are unclear, or you’re working in a team that doesn’t directly connect to product development, like marketing or customer support. Or perhaps you’re focusing on improving internal research processes and you’re unsure how to measure your impact effectively.
User research can sometimes feel intangible, and writing OKRs that clearly demonstrate its value can be challenging. But with the right approach, you can create OKRs that are both meaningful and measurable, ensuring your research aligns with broader business objectives, even when those goals aren’t explicitly defined.
This guide will walk you through the exact steps to create OKRs that are actionable, tailored for your role as a user researcher, and adaptable to different organizational structures and team functions. Whether you’re supporting product teams, marketing, customer success, or focusing on improving internal research efficiency, you’ll find everything you need to write OKRs that demonstrate impact and align with key business goals.
Stop piecing it together. Start leading the work.
The Everything UXR Bundle is for researchers who are tired of duct-taping free templates and second-guessing what good looks like.
You get my complete set of toolkits, templates, and strategy guides. used by teams across Google, Spotify, , to run credible research, influence decisions, and actually grow in your role.
It’s built to save you time, raise your game, and make you the person people turn to.
→ Save 140+ hours a year with ready-to-use templates and frameworks
→ Boost productivity by 40% with tools that cut admin and sharpen your focus
→ Increase research adoption by 50% through clearer, faster, more strategic delivery
What are OKRs and why do they matter?
OKRs (objectives and key results) are a goal-setting framework that helps teams set ambitious yet achievable goals and measure progress. They consist of:
Objectives (O): What you want to achieve. These should be clear, ambitious, and inspiring.
Key results (KR): How you will measure progress toward the objective. They should be specific, measurable, and time-bound.
The purpose of OKRs is to help align individual and team efforts with broader organizational goals, ensuring that everyone is working toward a common vision.
User research often operates in the background, influencing decisions indirectly. OKRs can help by:
Prioritizing what matters most and avoid spreading efforts too thin
Making it easier to communicate the value of research to stakeholders
Aligning with and contributing to business goals, even if company goals are vague
Providing a clear framework for tracking progress and iterating on research efforts
Step-by-step process to writing effective OKRs
Writing impactful OKRs as a user researcher involves a structured approach. Below is a detailed step-by-step breakdown to guide you through the process.
Step 1: Identify your broad goal
The first step in writing effective OKRs as a user researcher is to identify a broad goal—a high-level focus area that you want to improve, influence, or achieve. This might seem simple at first, but it requires thoughtful consideration and alignment with your role, team priorities, and the broader company vision.
Before you start brainstorming, it’s crucial to understand where your research work fits into the larger picture. Research doesn’t happen in isolation; it impacts multiple areas of the business.
Ask yourself these questions:
How does my research contribute to product development, marketing, sales, or customer support?
What are the biggest challenges my team faces that research could help solve?
Are there recurring themes or pain points that stakeholders frequently mention?
How is user feedback currently influencing decisions (or not influencing them)?
What does success look like for my team, and how can research contribute to it?
Key focus areas
Research can support various aspects of the business. Consider focusing your broad goals in one of these categories:
Product impact:
How can research support better product decisions?
What areas of the user experience need improvement?
Where are users struggling the most?
Stakeholder engagement:
How can I make research insights more actionable for teams?
Are stakeholders engaging with research in meaningful ways?
How can I educate the organization about the value of research?
Process improvement:
Are our research processes efficient and scalable?
Do we have standardized ways to document and share findings?
Are we duplicating efforts or working in silos?
Personal growth:
What skills do I want to develop as a researcher?
How can I become more effective in my role?
Are there methodologies I need to learn to enhance my work?
Gathering input
Creating research goals shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. You should gather insights from multiple sources to inform your goals and ensure they align with business needs.
Who to talk to:
Product managers:
What are their biggest challenges when it comes to user insights?
Are they satisfied with the current level of research support?
Designers:
Do they have enough data to make design decisions?
What research findings have been most useful to them?
Engineers:
How can research better support product development?
Are there areas where research could reduce risk in decision-making?
Customer support and success teams:
What common user pain points are they seeing?
Are there gaps in knowledge that research could help address?
Marketing teams:
What are the key messages being communicated to customers?
How can research help validate marketing efforts?
In addition to stakeholder conversations, leverage data to identify research opportunities. Look at:
Analyze customer complaints, reviews, and survey responses
Identify where users are dropping off or struggling through product analytics
Look for recurring themes that haven’t been fully addressed in past research
Consider what competitors are doing and how user needs are evolving
Brainstorming goals
Once you’ve gathered insights from stakeholders and data, it’s time to start brainstorming broad goals. Here are some techniques to help generate ideas:
Technique 1: Pain point mapping
Write down major challenges your team or users are facing (e.g., “Users find it difficult to navigate our app”).
Identify areas where research could provide solutions (e.g., “Conduct usability testing to identify friction points”).
Translate those into broad goals (e.g., “Improve the usability of our core features to reduce user frustration”).
Example output:
Pain point: “Users struggle with checkout.”
Research focus: “Conduct usability tests to improve conversion rates.”
Broad goal: “Enhance the checkout experience to reduce cart abandonment.”
Technique 2: Reverse engineering success
Think about what a successful outcome would look like and work backward to identify what research can do to contribute to that success.
Ask yourself:
If our product team achieved their goals, how would research have played a role?
If the company’s revenue increased, how could research insights have contributed?
Example:
Success = Faster product development cycles.
Research contribution = More efficient stakeholder alignment with research findings.
Broad Goal: “Improve research communication to accelerate product development.”
Technique 3: The “So That” method
A great way to ensure your goals have a clear purpose is to keep asking “so that” after every goal you write down. This helps tie your research activities to a larger impact.
Example:
Goal: “Improve usability testing.”
So That → “Users have a smoother onboarding experience.”
So That → “New users activate more quickly.”
Final Broad Goal: “Enhance onboarding usability to increase user activation.”
Technique 4: Stakeholder alignment sessions
Organize short brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders (product, design, marketing) and ask:
What’s the one thing research could do to help you make better decisions?
If you had unlimited research support, what would you prioritize?
Where do you feel uncertain about our users?
These conversations often uncover valuable focus areas you might not have considered.
Prioritizing your broad goals
By now, you’ll probably have a list of potential goals. It’s time to prioritize them based on:
Impact vs. effort: Choose goals that will have the most meaningful impact with reasonable effort.
Alignment with company priorities: Even if goals aren’t clear, align with universal business goals like growth, retention, or customer satisfaction.
Feasibility: Ensure you have the resources and stakeholder buy-in to achieve these goals.
Examples of well-defined goals
To inspire you, here are some solid broad goals based on different areas of focus:
Product-focused goals:
“Improve the usability of the onboarding process to reduce churn.”
“Identify key usability barriers in the core product features.”
“Ensure accessibility compliance across all major features.”
Stakeholder engagement goals:
“Increase collaboration between UX research and cross-functional teams.”
“Develop a research storytelling framework to improve stakeholder buy-in.”
“Create a system for delivering digestible insights to leadership.”
Operational efficiency goals:
“Standardize research processes to improve efficiency and scalability.”
“Create a research repository for better knowledge sharing across teams.”
“Implement research planning frameworks to improve stakeholder engagement.”
Personal development goals:
“Improve public speaking skills to present research findings more effectively.”
“Gain proficiency in survey design to support quantitative research needs.”
“Learn advanced synthesis techniques to provide deeper insights.”
By following these steps, you’ll be well-equipped to brainstorm and define broad goals that are impactful, achievable, and aligned with your role as a user researcher. Once you have these broad goals, you can move to the next step of refining them into actionable objectives and key results.
Step 2: Turning a broad goal into a clear objective
Once you’ve identified your broad goal, the next step is to refine it into a clear, actionable objective that serves as the foundation of your OKRs. A well-crafted objective should inspire action and clearly articulate what you’re trying to achieve without being too vague or too task-oriented.
Why objectives matter
Objectives give direction to your efforts and align them with a larger purpose. They should:
Provide clarity by answering the question “What are we trying to achieve?”
Ensure focus by keeping your efforts aligned with your role and business needs
Motivate action by creating a sense of purpose and progress
Characteristics of a strong objective
A good objective should be:
Actionable
It should drive meaningful activity and inspire progress
Bad example: “make research better”
Good example: “improve how research insights are shared to increase their influence on decision-making”
Impact-driven
Your objective should focus on the why behind the goal, not just what you want to do
Bad example: “conduct usability tests”
Good example: “enhance the onboarding experience so that new users activate faster”
Specific but not restrictive
Keep it broad enough to allow flexibility in execution but focused enough to guide your work
Bad example: “improve usability”
Good example: “identify and address usability barriers to improve product adoption”
Formula to create a strong objective
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The User Research Strategist to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.