Who, what, how? Designing an approach for teaching research skills
This is part 2 of a series of posts exploring how to teach people to do their own design research. You can check out the first post here.
What does a training program need to do?
As any good researcher will know, talking to your end users should happen before you actually start making things for them. So to begin designing a training program, I interviewed 13 different ConsenSys designers over the course of a couple of months. I did this during my ‘business as usual’ provision of research support.
My interviews uncovered some useful insights:
- Designers will need one-on-one training, as their start up contexts may be very different (although possibly some joint-sessions could be considered for topics like ‘getting buy-in’)
- Designers are in delivery mode, so we should work on a real project together during the training, that will bring value to their start up
- Tactical, practical guidance is needed to help designers overcome specific hurdles e.g. finding users and asking good questions
- The training should NOT just focus on usability testing (which is easier to teach), but be more broad to empower the designers to have more strategic influence earlier on in their product development
Designing the approach
Armed with a lot of data about my end users, I designed a 6–8 week program to pilot, broken down into themes, and with a real research project baked into it. Time commitment from the designer will be about 4 hours per week (except for the week when we do the research together).
As we are a completely distributed team, I won’t have any physical time with the people I’ll be training. This means the exercises I create need to be highly engaging, to make sure that the subject matter sticks, so we’ll be using collaborative tools like Mural and shared Google docs for doing the work together, and every session will be done over video.
Teaching somebody about something you know a lot about is a great opportunity to remind yourself that you don’t know everything! So I will be diving back into the myriad books and online resources that have helped me in my own career, to come up with activities and content that will really help a designer develop their research skills.
But it’s not enough to be a good researcher. I need to be a good teacher.
I have the guidance of the Design Research Director at ConsenSys, TJ Blanchflower, who has challenged me to think about pedagogical methods, and I’m currently reading Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTigh), to plan for helping people develop meaningful understanding that can be applied to diverse problems, not just rote learning.
Methods vs mindset
At the end of the training, what level of research proficiency can be expected? Would I rather a designer knew all the methods inside out, but went off and researched the wrong thing? Or is it better for them to continue to come to a researcher for guidance? Multiple times over my career I’ve been asked for a “template” interview guide, or a cheat sheet of tips for asking questions, but have held off from providing these because there is no one right way to do research, and it doesn’t teach people about applying the knowledge. There is a real danger in providing people with tools that are applied to the wrong problems.
With this training program, we’re not trying to create an army of researchers (as attractive as that sounds to me) but create a mindset shift; away from “let’s design something now and then ask some people to look at it”, to “should we be designing this thing in the first place? I don’t know the answer, but I know how to find out”.
Getting feedback
Interrogating your own biases can be painful. I am experiencing that now, noticing how I prefer some methods to others, and am therefore giving them more time in the training plan. Am I going to be too critical of surveys? Yes, probably. I need to find balance, perspective, opportunities for improvement — and you can only get that by putting your work in front of other people.
In the ConsenSys design circle, we share our work every week in a crit. I’ve sought feedback from designers, design thinking facilitators and design researchers. It blows my mind how amazing the people I work with are, and the feedback was invaluable.
It raised some interesting themes and questions:
- Non-designers are excellent candidates for this training, because they are often the first on a project (designers come later). Could we train Business Development people and Engineers to have a curious research-led mindset in the same way?
- When the pilot is over, how can we equip a designer to be able to easily run their own research? What is repeatable and what isn’t?
- Where does quantitative research fit in? How can designers be equipped with quant as well as qual skills?
- For Designers, this training could be an excellent way to level up in their career development.
- “Design Research Education Program” as a name doesn’t convey the usefulness of the training materials, and we should come up with something a little more exciting. Suggestions welcome!
In my next post, I’ll be reflecting on immediate learnings from working with my first training program guinea pig…
Georgia is a Design Researcher at ConsenSys, the blockchain innovation lab and start up incubator. Find out more about the ConsenSys Design Circle and the web 3.0 solutions we’re designing here: https://consensys.design/ and follow us on Twitter.
