I stumbled across a slideshow from David Sherwin of frog design, giving an excellent introduction to user research and how to incorporate it into the design process.  In the presentation, he answers the following questions:

1. What is user research?
2. Why should I include user research on projects?
3. When should user research be part of projects?
4. Who do we include in user research?
5. Where should I conduct user research?
6. How do I get started doing user research?

There’s so much great material in here.  Check it out.