Design + UX Research: The case for collaboration and separation
The road from point A (a great idea) to point B (a product that works for and with the user) is a long one. No collaboration is more important along that road than between designers and researchers.
In the spirit of 100% collaboration, this story was co-written by both Sarah Kettles (Director of Research at The Zebra) and myself (Product Designer at The Zebra).
The Zebra hails from Austin, Texas. You probably know Austin for its great live music, BBQ that will make you question whether you’ve ever truly eaten BBQ before, and a lot of roles at tech companies for design-researchers.
Why the hyphenated title? Many companies hire someone for a combined role because they’ve been burned by organizational boundaries that keep designers and researchers apart, even though they typically work best together. We get that, and we also understand that we’re privileged to be small enough that those separation issues just haven’t affected us yet.
Still, we believe having designers and researchers perform separate functions and serve separate roles makes our collaboration stronger, and the products we build even better for our users. Why? Designers and researchers bring fundamentally different skill sets to the table that, combined together, form a mutual responsibility to make decisions, build things, and test things with the user’s best interests in mind.
How do designers and researchers differ?
MARIVI: A designer, at its core, is a problem solver. Designers must have an eye for color and shape, be able to translate requirements into practical product features, and be an expert on accessibility standards.
At The Zebra, our largest hurdle is making car insurance shopping simple while differentiating our product as an honest, user-focused service. Our designers work on creating slick and seamless digital experiences that provide the user with an easy to use interface and advocate to simplify the confusing world of car insurance through streamlining the comparison process.
SARAH: A researcher’s job is to study how people use the things your team has built. At the core of our role are skills like listening, empathy, and an ability to analyze data that is often chock full of nuance.
As a discipline, we pride ourselves on bringing our stakeholders closer to the people who use what they built through qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and we offer directional insight about what next steps might reduce the uncertainty all of our teams have when putting something new into the world. We shy away from terms like “intuition”, and we love finding patterns in what we learn from people and communicating those creatively to our many audiences at work.
By investing in these two separate roles at The Zebra, we enable our entire team to benefit from deep learning and exploration because we free up time for our two roles to excel independently, and address key limitations that other teams with combined design-researcher roles might experience.
By investing in these two separate roles at The Zebra, we enable our entire team to benefit from deep learning and exploration
SARAH: As a researcher, I go into every interview with my own perception of what our team needs to learn about the product and because I didn’t design it myself, I’m able to look at the broader picture more easily, and take critical feedback from our users without taking that feedback personally.
MARIVI: As a designer, I use previous learnings from research to build new designs. At this point in the process, we are still making assumptions, so having an unbiased person doing research on new prototypes is key for us to get the purest information we can. We can argue that designers can be unbiased when performing research, but the reality is, that when you design something you’re naturally attached to it and could unintentionally coerce your interviews.
How we collaborate together
- We sit together on the same team, encouraging ad hoc conversation and staying up-to-date about product changes easy.
- We participate in the research and design together, making it easier to assess the data we get from a similar lens but with entirely different views. This makes it easier to come to the table with insights from both our perspectives to tell a richer story.
- Our designers watch every user interview and make changes on the fly that enable greater learnings between participants.
- During research interviews, we encourage everyone in our team (designers, PMs, engineers, etc) to watch the interviews, take notes and generate “How Might We…” ideas, a nifty way to reframe problems into questions we could explore later (inspired by Design Sprint by GV and Google).
- Our researchers have the “meeting before the meeting” to communicate insights from research to designers and other key stakeholders, enabling definition of messages that can often be tough to deliver to leadership. We do this together, making our design/research collaboration a united front for users.
- We participate in the design and research critique together. Designers provide feedback on discussion guides and the scope of our studies, and researchers provide a design critique based on user feedback.
Our team is a big fan of harnessing the power of designers and researchers in separate roles. At the core of this decision was the humility to recognize that each of our roles has limitations and separating them, we feel, has become increasingly important to our ability to move fast with more confidence.
One consequence of this separation is that our company is no longer under the guise that any one person can hold the keys to user wisdom and design prowess. But it has made it easier for our stakeholders to better understand the value we each bring to the process of building great products.
