A Perfect Match: Anthropology meets User Experience (UX)
Part 3: Becoming Resilient
by Kelsie Gillig, Co-Founder and UX Researcher at Spark Research Collective
“Change begins at the end of your comfort zone” — as Zimbabwean politician Roy T. Bennett famously said. Anthropologists, however, count change well within their comfort zones.
Anthropologists become experts at adapting to changing situations and evolving problems because rarely do their research subjects– people, cultural practices, and social issues– remain the same. In fact, my PhD advisor always said, if the project you set out to complete in your research is the one you end up doing once you are in the field (in your research field site), then you’re doing the work wrong.
Similarly, UX researchers need to be particularly nimble and adaptive to changing priorities (and budgets), product changes, office politics and changing stakeholders as well as fast-paced projects with evolving research questions.
In this series, I have already discussed the ways that anthropologists are particularly skilled at cultivating curiosity to solve difficult, complex problems. In addition to being skilled at knowing the right questions to ask, anthropologists and UX researchers alike also have to juggle complex projects with many moving parts and multiple stakeholders day-to-day making them intuitively skilled in project management.
And being skilled at pivoting and adapting to change is a major foundation of the agile project management skillset– which is absolutely necessary to achieving successful communication among and meeting the goals of all stakeholders involved in any project or initiative.
To be successfully adaptive and agile though, anthropologists have to learn the art of resilience. By resilience, I mean being able to deal with situations without totally losing your shit or breaking down, taking something too personally and becoming depressed or angry at your stakeholders and/or your colleagues and clients.
Becoming Resilient
In anthropological research, you have to learn resiliency early and often in your project work. Oftentimes, the research projects anthropologists choose to pursue involve uncovering the belly of massive social justice issues to gain holistic understanding of a problem and frame solutions or understand how communities are organizing to solve a problem themselves. This kind of work requires resilience to build relationships with empathy, listen intently with an open mind and process emotional reactions and others’ trauma.
For example, our Spark co-founder Kelton Sheridan studies the contemporary impact of historical colonial experiences on Central Texas descendent communities. By documenting their stories and listening to their perspectives, previously unheard voices are prioritized and their stories are documented for future generations.
Bottom line, cultivating resilience to successfully and continually adapt in various situations is hard but has big pay-off for those that can figure out how to be resilient in healthy ways.
So right now, you might be thinking, yeah Kelsie, way easier said than done! I completely agree, so I’m going to try to provide a few avenues for “dealing with the shit” to help you become a more resilient UX practitioner that draw from the anthropology toolkit.
Three Tips to become more resilient
Tip #1: Put yourself in your audience’s shoes — stakeholders and users alike
As I’ve already explained in this series, anthropological frameworks take a holistic point of view to understand different points of view on their research topic or problem. One of the things UX practitioners do best is frame and reframe problems in unique and creative ways. Reframing a problem changes the way we experience it and also changes the reactions people have to it.
For example, when met with stakeholder resistance on the results of a user feedback study — instead of focusing on why they don’t get it, ask yourself — how can I reframe these findings to help them understand that these findings, even if not what they want to hear, are important to consider for the company’s continued success and growth. Make them feel like they’re part of a solution, not part of the problem so to speak.
Tip #2: Adapting your approach
While we might wish that every research study could answer all the questions stakeholders have and yield clear and actionable recommendations for an organization, people don’t always tell us the story we expect to hear — or any clearly generalizable story at all. Recognize that qualitative data is sometimes messy and might push you to change your research methods or approach to get the answers you need for others.
And note, if data isn’t telling you a clear story, that too can actually be a really helpful and interesting finding your stakeholders might need to know as well.
Tip #3: Create lasting relationships with research partners and stakeholders
Resiliency is not an isolated effort. To cultivate resilience and integrate it into your approach to work and life generally, build strong relationships rooted in empathy and collaboration with research partners and stakeholders so that you can communicate your needs openly and often. Stakeholders might not always understand the data presented to them, but if they have a strong relationship with the researcher, they are far more willing to react with curiosity and positivity.
Essentially, the stronger the relationship a researcher has with a stakeholder or research partner is, the more likely each is to feel their perspectives are valued and that there is shared purpose and shared goals on a project.
Building lasting partnerships
Here at Spark we strive to not only help businesses achieve their immediate goals, but we seek to establish lasting resilient bonds with our clients, teammates and communities through the three tips outlined above. Using our diverse team skill sets, we aim to become experts on you so that we can understand how your needs may evolve and grow through our continued relationship.
Schedule a free consultation on our website to chat with us about how you can take a more adaptive and resilient approach to research at your company or organization today.
