Designing your Research Process

December 2016

User research is a user experience of it’s own. User Researchers are responsible for researching the users of their product, but also the users of their research. The users could range from your user research colleagues, interaction and visual designers, developers, product managers, or anyone who is trying to empathize with a persona and understand how a product feature is solving a particular pain point. Each one of these users has a particular need/motivation as they participate-in, interact with, and access your research artifacts (interview scripts, user research Presentations, persona infographics, etc).

Every user will experience your research differently, for each user is searching through your research with different needs and expectations. However all users are essentially trying to empathize with our products users. So how do we solve our users pain points? How do we understand the needs of our wide range of teammates who will be “experiencing” our research?

At the IBM Design studio, researchers and designers are constantly iterating on their design process to meet the needs of the designers, user researchers, developers, and users. User researchers work closest with user experience designers. We followed the human-centered design process and designed our research for our target users: user experience designers.

I created an empathy map and as-is scenario of the research/design collaboration process.

These empathy maps were created after conducting a quick research study. The purpose of the study was to redefine our research process “how we would conduct and share our research”, after understanding the needs and pain points of user experience designers interacting with our research. We began with a general “focus group”. We asked interaction and visual designers to post-it note how they felt, what they said, what they did, or what they saw (Empathy Mapping) when collaborating with researcher. People quickly jotted down their answers and posted them up on the wall.

We then began recruiting participants into our study. We interviewed ever member of our team, asking them to take a moment to reflect on specific instances when user research has helped their job.

Here are some of the questions we included in the interview:

• When you’ve used research during your job, what types of information was most useful for you?
• What particular research artifacts or assets stand out and why do they stand out?
• What challenges could be remedied by access to better (user research) resources?
• How do you currently get the user research you need to get your work done?
• Imagine you had access to an incredibly useful and usable user research repository tool. What does it include? How does it work? Please describe your ideal tool.

I created an as-is journey map of the user research process:

I mapped out pain points in the as-is process and ideated a to-be scenario to improve future collaboration processes: