ABSTRACT
The foundation of a good user experience is research. In addition, a user experience leader will understand how the business makes money and how user experience can help grow the business. He or she will be able to speak the language of business. Any professional person needs a core set of technical skills, and the field of user experience is no exception. New user experience practitioners tend to confuse writing a proposal with creating a research plan. A research plan simply lists the steps in the project, calculates how long each one will take and then provides an overall cost. The team needs to appreciate that there are different groups of users, that some of these groups are more important than others and that one, or maybe two, of these groups will be the design target. Tasks are the activities that users do with a product in order to achieve their goals.
