A few years ago you’d hear “move fast and break things” up and down the halls of tech startups and the big companies trying to emulate them. I watched product folks, designers and engineers move fast. I watched them break things. A lot of times, they broke team morale along the way. Sometimes they lost the trust of their audience.
Trust is fragile, people.
Protect it.
Yes, our jobs are fun, we get to solve big problems. It’s exciting. Don’t let that excitement get the best of you. Slow down. If you only read two more lines of this article read these:
Don’t start initiatives by pitching solutions. Pitch problems to solve.
Do your homework.
Do it with others. Don’t formally present “shower ideas” developed alone.
Design Thinking is a framework that helps teams do 3 things:
1 Place researched human stories, big and small, at the center of strategy.
2 Align on identifying the real problem to solve before coming up with solutions.
3 Then, work iteratively toward designing the most powerful solutions.
Building trust with your peers and customers is a vague task so it helps to have these 3 “rails” to keep you on track practicing solid Design Thinking. Each of these rails has essential components, which I’ll boil down in this article as well as adjacent articles.
Step one: looking at stories big and small.
To truly understand quantitative data, we need to authentically understand the human stories behind the numbers. It can be hard to see there is a missing story. Similar to the physical phenomena that happens when we look at an object and our brain fills in the space around it, we fill in the blanks around numbers without even acknowledging the blanks exist. We project our personal perspective, sometimes turning correlation into causation:
Data Signal: Parents of toddlers are buying pool noodles like crazy!
Fill in the blank: Toddlers love to swim! Let’s create a line of kid swimwear! Wow, we’re so in touch.[Pats self on back]
Qualitative research (observing real people) shows us: New parents put pool noodles under bedsheets to keep toddlers from rolling out of bed. It’s a hack for parents who don’t want to splurge on a crib.
In the “move fast and break things” playbook you rush to launch and iterate after the fact. You can run out and launch that line of baby swim trunks (adorbs!) and improve upon them after they’re on the market, but you’re just improving the solution to the less meaningful problem. When we rush to develop solutions based on a faulty premise, iteration only.. erm, polishes the turd.
When we skip or rush the discovery research phase we also miss out on the moment where we develop a common story rooted in simple human terms that cross-functional teams can speak confidently about.
Think about how much jargon you come across at work. Designers speak their own language. Engineers speak their own language. Sales, Legal, Product.. everyone has their own wheelhouse and accompanying language. When we come together speaking different languages you’ll see a lot of confident head nodding. No one wants to show their hand and scream: speak human please!!
The great thing about qualitative research is that it’s about people and we all speak “people”.
Getting authentic human stories at the center of your strategic narrative creates a touchstone for alignment, which is the first step in working together to identify the right problem to solve.
The first steps made are the most important ones, so start with strong Discovery Research.
Use signals from data to frame a qualitative study.
Read about framing user research with data here.
NEXT: Define a “people- centered” challenge.
DISCOVERY STEP 2: Enhance quantitative data by observing people in a strong qualitative study.
The depth of your challenge will determine the depth of your discovery research. Also known as generative or foundational research.
- FOUNDATIONAL DEEP DIVE: observe people in a specific context in order to develop a deeper shared understanding of their experience and identify opportunities to make your product and its messaging stronger. This is not an area to rush or skimp. This is where you pull out the big ux guns: ethnographic research. Just a fancy way of saying: observe people on their own turf, spend a lot of time there and get their stories. Not getting what you need from a standard interview? You may need to develop “show not tell” exercises, diary studies, etc. More on this later.
- MEDIUM DEPTH, i.e. understand motivation and intent. You’ve already done the deep dive research and built some features or messaging that sticks. Perhaps you need to prioritize your feature roadmap and you still need to understand: what motivates people in this space when it comes to this bit here? What detracts them? Where do they lean in or get hung up? You need to speak with them in a live conversation — maybe more than one over a period of time (aka diary study). Remote video interviews are great because you get face to face time and can speak with a handful of people from all over the country — or globe — in a day.
- QUICK & DIRTY: guerrilla research. You and your team know your space really well. You have some light questions to clear up some confusion. Guerrilla research can be as easy as going down to the mall, park or busy intersection and getting quick snapshots of people’s experiences to add to your picture of what’s going on in a space. Some people get excited by the idea of doing guerrilla research and feel like it’s all you need. They’re often reacting to tight deadlines, executive pressure, an engineering pipeline that needs to be constantly filled, etc. But being reactive is no substitute for being proactive. When it comes to research & design remember: garbage in, garbage out. So, can guerrilla research replace deeper research? Nope. It’s just a supplement.
We call it “generative” research because it generates ideas for what might be effective in this space. It’s based on observing real people outside of your social network. Which is key to developing products you want broad groups to adopt.
A great researcher will make this look easy peasy. It’s just talking to people, right? Don’t be fooled. People research is a craft that requires skill to extract actionable insights that are not biased by the study.
The struggle: generative vs evaluative research.
Naturally, most people want to skip the generative step and go straight to evaluating ideas.
Let’s just put it out into the world and we’ll optimize from there!
Fair enough, and in some circumstances that’s fine. But if you chose the wrong problem to solve — as with the pool parent example above — optimizing will only help you solve the wrong problem better.
Er, more polite way to say it:
You’ll reach a local maximum, probably not a global one.
Ideas generated via research are validated. Once an idea is validated, it makes sense to ideate. Then, evaluate which iterations bring the idea to life most effectively.
Ideas that have not been validated by generative research may still be good ideas. But you’re not ready to start testing prototypes until you’ve tested the premise behind them. This is called a “concept” test.
Testing a concept means you’re trying to see if the premise is effective, not the UI. After the premise is validated, then you can start to prototype and test if the WAY in which you’re trying to pull it off with UI is effective. If you skip the concept test you may get false signals that the premise is good / bad based on the UI. Sure, someone my like a prototype, that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy a product or sign up for a service. On the other hand, maybe they would be into that product or service, but the prototype is hard to understand so you get a false signal that they’re not into it.
A good way to test a concept is to simply talk to people about it. If it’s a complicated concept you may need visual aides. Think: illustrations, diagrams, comic book panel drawings that help describe a situation. Something that describes the premise you are trying to get feedback on.
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Let’s assume you’ve done your research. You had some great learning moments. You’re wheels are turning. How do you get everyone’s wheels’ turning so that you can get them to build the damn thing? Design Sprints are a great way to get everyone immersed and thinking collaboratively.
In a design sprint, you unpack research together. That unpacking should bring the research to life and create opportunities for stakeholders to respond with their own ideas. A simple way to do that is to play video clips from research and ask people to write down anything they find compelling, surprising, or interesting.
So you have a bunch of shared observations, so what?
A key step in taking action as a group is to translate your observations into insights, then translate those insights into opportunities.
First: observations →insights
An insight is just an observation hammered into a more powerful statement.
Start by determining top observations from your generative study.
Cognitive bias is real so make sure you have a note taking framework to ensure you’re being evenhanded about what happened in user interviews across the board. The 4th image here shows a notes matrix I often create to help keep a bird’s eye view on things.
When everyone who joined the research has had a chance to contribute notes to the matrix, you’ll be ready to host a workshop where you can reflect on the top observations and — as a group — transform them into insights.
Silent voting is a popular way to narrow in on your top observations. If you’re going the post-it and sharpie route give people stickers or marker and ask them to quietly vote on the 3 observations they find most interesting / sticky / or important. If your team uses Slack, you can also post your top observations there and ask people to upvote the top 3.
Agree on the top 1–3 observations gained.. next “uplevel” those observations into insights.
Here’s IDEO’s definition of a great insight that I sometimes use in design thinking workshops:
From there, simply reframe your insights into opportunities.
For example… let’s say your company wants develop a vertical that attracts first time car buyers. You do some generative research:
Top Observations: several people told stories about feeling “trapped” at car dealerships for hours working out the financing. Between 3–10 hours // people mentioned that they felt they were at the mercy of whatever rate the dealer offered // Several assumed that this was the only way to finance a car.
Insight: People feel powerless when it comes to financing at car dealerships. They feel like they have to accept whatever rate they’re offered.
Translating the insight into an opportunity is simply a matter of reframing:
Opportunity: How might we empower people to walk into a car dealership feeling informed about the rates they qualify for and the various types of financing available to them?
Ideate: Let your UX folks (UI and Content designers) run with this opportunity and develop several ways to tackle it. They may come up with several approaches when it comes to language and UI architecture.
Evaluate: Test which approaches are most impactful. This testing may have a few layers as you’ll be looking at language, UI as well as learning more about the opportunity (who it’s right for, who it’s not right for) as you get more eyes in front of it.
I hope this helps!
If you have a project you need help with, you can always reach out to me at ServiceDesignRepublic.com
