You already have a great feature where you have what research is needed to take advantage of a item or to colonise a planet.



Why don't you have a button next to that red text that says reasearch skill and the system will queue up all the research items to research that item?

Although that sounds great you can also see it causing chaos, by people clicking it and then finding out 50 turns later that they've been researching many irrelevant techs just to get to one slightly useful tech. Perhaps just a list of what techs you need to get the required tech or an image highlighting where it is in the tree.

This has already been suggested