Training others to do Design Research
It’s easy to get someone excited about the idea of talking to customers to get feedback. It’s another matter to train people to do their own user research; real, meaningful studies that are more rigorous and productive than asking people to “look at this design and give me your feedback”…
I’m a Design Researcher at ConsenSys, a blockchain start up incubator for businesses building on Ethereum. The company has ~50 ‘spokes’ or independent teams busy building and delivering consumer apps, developer services, and enterprise solutions, that will eventually bring blockchain to the masses.
I’m one of a handful of researchers, supporting close to 100 designers. We’re a busy research team! We all work remote, so this is what our team meetings look like...
At ConsenSys we encourage each other to experiment and innovate. I’m exploring ways to better support the spokes by up-skilling the designers on those teams; teaching them to do their own design research.
I’m going to pilot a design research education program. The purpose of the program is to:
- Help designers be strong strategic influencers in their start ups, empowered to challenge traditional thinking and ensure that the products they help build are solving real problems for users (by training designers, we hope the knowledge will ripple out to the rest of their team).
- Make teams more self-sufficient, therefore increasing the total number of teams we researchers can provide advisory support to.
- Explore the “how might we” for training designers, to learn from our processes, reflect, and create a program that can be templated and extended for larger cohorts, and delivered by different researchers.
- Raise the bar in blockchain tech, across the entire industry; one which has notoriously complex UX challenges.
I have some reservations:
- The challenge of teaching people the right information, in the right way is a little daunting. I will be using a number of resources to help me.
- I’ll be piloting the program with two designers. How do I know if they’re the right guinea pigs? What makes the ideal designer for this sort of training? I’m hoping the pilot will help me figure that out.
- How will I know the program is a success? How do you measure both the short and long term effects of training? I’ll be talking about this in a later post.
Having spoken to other researchers across different sectors, I know many are being tasked by their organizations to up-skill design teams in research practice, so I hope my reflections throughout this process will be of interest to others, and I hope to begin a conversation about suitable teaching methods and tools. Please get involved!
In my next article, I’ll be describing my methodological approach. See you then.
