In my last post of the series for sharing hands-on experience of what I’ve learned as a junior researcher, I summarized the things to do to have an effective meeting of collecting research requests into three keywords -listening, consultation, and documentation. With this article, I will dive into the topic — UX research project kick-off meeting.
After the phase — collecting research requests where the stakeholders talked about the project background, things expected to be addressed, and the product feature proposal or prototypes based on assumptions, holding a project kick-off meeting is the step to formally launch a UX research project. In the kick-off meeting, the stakeholders will get the research plan to review the details about the research goals, the users to be recruited, and the research method and how it will be used (such as questions, scenarios, or tasks). Also, the meeting is a time for the stakeholders and the researcher to resolve any disagreements and reach consensus before jumping to collect user data.
To comprehensively share my experience of having project kick-off meetings, I’d like to stretch the step to include the gaps before and after the UX research project kick-off meeting.
- Before the kick-off meeting
While the information I learned from the stakeholders gives me the context to think about how to use research to help them achieve business goals, accurate, detailed content needs to be decided and reviewed with the stakeholders before launching the research to collect data. Before the kick-off meeting, scoping the research is an essential step in which I would write down the details based upon the research requests from stakeholders. The artifact that I use to communicate the details of scoping the research is a research plan. I believe the term sounds familiar to you.
Crafting a draft research plan allows me to scope the research project by formulating research objectives and research questions, choosing the research methods, justifying the user sampling size, and displaying the logistics of collecting data. The One-Pager UX research plan guideline shared by Tomer is very helpful resources.
I have applied this one-pager format to craft research plans for different projects. The thing that I find needs to be handled more carefully is the script placeholder where stakeholders can view concrete questions (scenarios and tasks) brought to test with users. To ensure that the user data to be collected aligns with stakeholders’ needs, I would include all script questions and the rationale behind the sequence of those questions. For example, the warm-up session for collecting more open-ended user data, the feature-focused session for probing around how users interact with some feature.
After putting the details of the research project to the research plan, I would share the draft with the stakeholder at least a few days before the kick-off meeting. Even though stakeholders with pretty packed schedules might treat the draft research plan as FYI and not read until I start walking them through the plan in the kick-off meeting, I would like to optimistically assume that stakeholders would review and add comments on the places to be discussed in the kick-off meeting.
- During the kick-off meeting
As mentioned in the beginning that the kick-off meeting is a time for the team (stakeholders and researchers) to review the research plan for resolving any disagreements and reaching consensus, I usually set an agenda to keep the meeting as focused and productive as possible. Also, hosting the kick-off meeting gives me the opportunity of developing leadership skills.
While the meeting agenda varies based on different projects, I would like to share three agenda topics that apply to most of my projects:
- Walk through the research plan
Let’s assume that the time you initially met with the stakeholders to collect research requests was a week ago, now you meet with them in another meeting. I love starting the kick-off meeting with walking the stakeholders through the draft research plan. Reasons why I make it as the first topic are: First, your stakeholders could take advantage of the research plan walk-through time to refresh their memory and get ready to immerse themselves in the details of research. Second, I use the walk-through to build a connection with the previous research request collecting meeting to achieve a cohesive conversation with the stakeholders.
- Discuss the comments and resolve disagreements
The team got exposed to the details after the research plan walk-through. I would transition to discussing the stakeholders’ comments and addressing questions that were raised in the walk-through. To be honest, I could become defensive when stakeholders questioned things that I proposed in the research plan. Thanks to the advice I received from Dr. Steve Fadden, my mentor in UXR community, I treat stakeholder’s comments and questions as opportunities to identify gaps and resolve disagreements. Also, it is a time to use my solid knowledge of how to learn about users to educate stakeholders about UX research.
For example, in a previous research project, I encountered a product manager with strong personality who questioned the comparative usability testing method and insisted on preference testing to make users compare two design alternatives to get the user data for making product decisions. Nonetheless, I justified the comparative usability testing (bring both design alternatives to collect user feedback) by explaining how this research method can fit the research scope and objective — qualitative research aims to identify more obvious usability issues of the designs. Also, I let the product manager know that the research method could accommodate the part of making users compare design alternatives. More importantly, strong UX research evidence could be gathered with the comparative usability testing.
- Invite stakeholders to engage
After resolving stakeholders’ comments, I would use the wrap-up time to invite stakeholders to join testing sessions for observing. I believe you might have heard the mantra “user research is a team sport”.
To establish a collaborative atmosphere of the research, I would encourage stakeholders to observe at least a few testing sessions. Of course, I would let them know what great output they could expect from observing the testing sessions. Things such as capturing how users interact with their product and bringing their own questions to users could motivate stakeholders to get involved with the testing sessions.
The product manager who preferred making users compare designs changed to embrace the comparative usability testing after observing how users share thoughts about designs in testing sessions.
- After the kick-off meeting
Completely finalizing the research plan during the kick-off meeting is a bit unrealistic. Therefore, with the gap after the kick-off meeting, I would update the research plan based on things that the team discussed and reached consensus. What’s more, I would let the team know their last-minute changes could be accommodated by providing a certain time period.
In summary, the UX project kick-off meeting indicates the time of launching a user research project. After the whole team reached consensus regarding the details of research, the upcoming phase would be getting connected to users and collecting user data.
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