Lucas Lazaro
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Enlightening article Lucas and comforting to see other teams facing similar difficulties and how they’re approaching it. As you asked for contribution I’ll try to give my two cents on the matter, since the design team I currently collaborate also faces similar challenges.

Agile research

As you mentioned including research in the agile development process can get quite tricky, what we’ve done is a type of merge between Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research approach with Jake Knapp's Design Sprint style methodologies.

The outcome is that research is been done all the time, but the progression and stage of the research follows the agile sprint cycle, for instance when a development sprint starts a research sprint is also taking place to address the releases of the previous sprint and assess problem spaces of future business interests.

So the order of activities of a particular product/feature/desire can start of with quick user research, a design sprint, polishing the design and ux (maybe iterating a usability test here and there), developing the minimum, researching again, and there it goes.

Efficient cross-team communication

From what I know about Nubank and the way you guys work I think it will benefit you guys to look at how Airbnb structures it’s teams (if you didn’t already 😄), nevertheless a good way to start is checking Katie Dil’’s interview on the High Resolution podcast. In essence she argues that on multiple teams scenarios (or squads in your case) with designers working “isolated” on those teams, often closer to data scientists and engineers than other designers, it is paramount that the designer also take a role of a facilitator.

The facilitator role can work to bridge gaps of understanding within teams and the company itself, whilst avoiding the production of meaningless reports that never get read. Such action can increase the confidence of non-designers on the process because design thinking methodologies increase overall ownership of solutions and findings, making the stakeholders even more willingly to power through their “sticking post-it’s on the walls is bs” biases.

Out-of-office research

Regarding out-of-office research it was also a necessity for us to move towards different regions and meet users in their context instead of ours. One methodology we apply (and afterwards discovered that Koji Pereira in Google Brazil was also doing it) is interception base user research, a sort of mix between Guerrilla Usability Tests and Coffee Studies. With this approach we’ve found the value of meeting people that were not necessarily groomed for the interview or only interested in the reward offered 🤑 (which sometimes happens on in-office 1:1 interviews).

Although when we need to target a specific demographic or psychographic we try either screen participants before hand and suggest to meet in a location of their choosing or rent a comfortable central place for the interviewees to easily reach.

All a round I wanted to congratulate you guys on the amazing work with insisting on a strong design culture on such a potentially disruptor startup!

Cheers.

    Lucas Lazaro

    Written by

    UX Researcher at Uber

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