User Research & Design Thinking: using mini-museums and hands-on workshops
Early in my career, I supported product design with insights I delivered in User Research Reports filled with bullet points and bite-size clips or quotes. The implicit idea was that I could quickly hand over knowledge in a few choice words. The reality of learning looks different. Reports are easy to scan, but they’re also easy to forget or misconstrue. This article describes how I now create mini-museums and facilitate hands-on workshops, and why it’s much more impactful and fun for everyone. Hope this helps you out.
In the summer of 2016 I went from being Credit Karma’s first UX Designer to building their first User Research team. I found that I was being asked to follow up with other designers, copywriters and PM’s to “make sure they’re reacting to the research.” While it was nice for my ego to be the “expert” on user needs, it wasn’t doing enough to help my coworkers make more informed choices for our users on their own: starting with objective observations, developing and owning insights, then working together to create design goals.
Sharing research is essentially teaching, and I have a background in teaching art and design in high schools, college and museums. The best way to teach people is to make space for them to construct insights on their own, not tell them what to think. Yet here I found myself, years later, playing that authority figure.
I looked for inspiration. Over that summer, Facebook held a small symposium called Elegant Tools where Shivani Mohan shared the creative ways she’d been engaging people with her research, including Mini-Museums. I tucked Mohan’s techniques into my mental tool box.
A few weeks later I had a big study to share, and I was struggling. The study results were negative, and it can be tricky being the bearer of bad news even if you’re coupling it with clear opportunities for improvement. If people are resistant to the bad news, they won’t take those opportunities. To make it even harder, my key stakeholders had not been able to attend the user research sessions. I knew that walking them through a report of the outcomes sprinkled with a few choice user quotes or video clips could be met with defensiveness if I didn’t get them deeply engaged and feeling empowered. As they often are, the findings were complex. It’s nice and easy when you can point to one concrete thing that threw a wrench in the works, but the results are not usually that convenient. I needed my stakeholders to quickly (within 60–90 minutes) immerse themselves in what had happened in this funnel — the good and the bad — take ownership of the analysis and draw the conclusion for themselves.
So, I decided to put together a hands-on mini-museum and facilitate a workshop instead of a deck-review and I drew inspiration from my own research process. Instead of cooking an insights “meal” and serving it up, I captured my process Blue-Apron style and presented them with materials and instructions for assembling the insights themselves in “Synthesis Workshops.”
So, what does that recipe look like? When I perform a study, I annotate transcripts and organize them in a specific way to help me curb any confirmation bias I may have. Here’s what that looks like:
In cases where the key stakeholders were able to participate in the study and the issues are fairly straightforward, I might pull together a report capturing the insights like this:
In my big study this summer, things were not so straightforward. My observations tend to fall under the category of: Trust, Comprehension, Relevance and Discovery (users’ ability to follow along and find things). The grid above is a screen shot from the actual study. Following the color coding, you can see that the last couple of steps really took a negative turn. What you can’t see is that users were losing trust because they didn’t understand things. Stakeholders need to deeply empathize, or they won’t be able to work together effectively to solve the problem.
So, how did I get people to engage deeply with all of this in 90 minutes? I literally recreated my grid on a giant blackboard:
The next crucial step was finding a way to get people to interact with the quotes in a way that would help them deeply empathize and synthesize what was happening. Below you can see under each screen there’s a line for trust and a line for comprehension.
At the start of the workshop, the quotes from users were just hanging out below the screen they refer to.
The lines for trust & comprehension had a positive side and negative side.
I asked my stakeholders (max 6 per session) to break up into small groups and work their way through the funnel, moving the quotes to the appropriate line, and to choose whether that quote belongs on the positive or negative side. A demonstration always helps, so I pick a quote and read it out loud:
“I’m not sure why you’re asking me to do this. Seems fishy.” — Rebecca, 24, Austin TX
Now.. that’s clearly a negative quote. But does it represent negative trust or negative comprehension? Which category should this quote get moved to? Trust or comprehension? In truth, it didn’t really matter. What happened next does: the small groups started to have a real conversation about the relationship between trust and comprehension. They were on their feet, walking around, curious and invested.
People took ownership of the synthesis, and everyone was engaged and having fun. No eyes were wandering to phones or laptops. Because learning is fun and this is how you learn: by putting things together, disagreeing, finding common ground and coming to your own conclusions.
I also learned to mix it up. For example, in another workshop where I knew several of the stakeholders had done this already, I assigned each of them to a couple of users. The board was set up similarly, just without the lines. Instead of asking them to move quotes to a line, I asked them to simply read through what each user said throughout the experience, take notes and then present that user’s point of view to the group and act as their advocate for the remaining discussion on what was working and what wasn’t in this experience. It’s an old teacher’s trick you might remember from school: learn by teaching others.
The purpose of design research is to help improve the product UX for users. While pulling together workshops was a lot more work up-front, it greatly reduced the catch-up work I usually had to do after publishing a report. I no longer felt I was being pulled in to play quality-control referee (which is not a fun place to sit), and when I was pulled in for consultations, I could have a much lighter presence because stakeholders understood what I had seen in the research more deeply. In short, my up-front work helped stakeholders internalize the research findings and think more dynamically about how users experienced their products.
