Maintenance

It's important to revise the research plan every time new knowledge comes in. Everything is subject to change as your team and the company's understanding of the user's experience grows. The research goals, especially, should be reevaluated, refined, and rewritten to take every piece of additional knowledge into account.

Since every piece of research you do is likely to affect your understanding of a number of different research goals, all knowledge about the user experience should be consolidated whenever possible. A good way to do this is to create a minisite for your intranet that contains all the reports and goals and that links each goal to the information that applies to it, and to enter all problems into the development group's bug-tracking software.

Eventually, you should have a set of interlinked documents that, together, make up a more-or-less complete picture of your user population.