A Listening Tour Playbook
For DesignOps practitioners and beyond
The Back Story
When I started working at REI as their Senior Design Program Manager on their first DesignOps team I knew performing a listening tour would be one of my first projects. My focus in the early months was to build the foundation of our team and identify the initiatives we would focus on — and that is just what I did.
A listening tour helps you learn what your team’s priorities are, and how much awareness and support for UX currently exists.
- UX Method of the Week: Listening Tour. Leah Buley
In building the foundation of our DesignOps team we looked to gain insights and alignment on the needs of the Design practice we would be supporting.
I spoke with various members of the Design practice, including managers, directors, designers, researchers, and content writers. From these conversations clear pain points, opportunities, and needs emerged and I were able to define the foci for our DesignOps team and start to develop a backlog of work.
I socialized this work across the practice and with our cross-functional partners to 1.) create visibility into the work and 2.) understand if others have heard similar pain points. The Listening Tour gave the DesignOps Team the ability to better define and understand the needs of the Design practice, which helped us to more efficiently prioritize the work we would be doing.
Our cross-functional partners recognized the value in this work and wanted to conduct their own Listening Tours within their organization. Additionally they were interested in the opportunity to compare data and explore ways to collaborate on joint initiatives to address common pain points between teams.
To support this request from my partners I documented the processes and guidelines for conducting a listening tour in my DesignOps Listening Tour Playbook.
Before you get started
1. What the playbook provides
✅ This playbook provides you with guidelines, templates, and additional resources to help you in executing your own Listening Tour — plain and simple.
❌ This playbook is not all encompassing. There is no way for me to predict the specifics within in your organization, or to be aware of your level of experience with conducting research. I highly recommend reading the additional resources provided in each section and asking for help in areas that fall outside of your expertise.
2. Start by asking yourself the hard question
What will you do with the information you collect?
You will see this is a warning in the first section of the playbook. It is important that you take the time to answer this questions before continuing on. If you can not answer this question, pause, and take some time to land on it before getting started.
One of the potential goals you may have, as I had, was to build relationships and trust between yourself and the practitioners you will be supporting. If you move ahead with a listening tour without being able to take action after completing your research, then you will be doing more harm than good, and ultimately undermining the relationships and trust you were hoping to build. Participants who have given you their time, thoughts, and feedback may get quite frustrated if you don’t have a plan for how to act on the information you gather.
Diving into the Playbook
The playbook is broken up into five sections that will walk you through the five phases of a Listening Tour:
- I: Planning
- II: Set-Up
- III: Interviewing
- IV: Analyzing
- V: Sharing
Each section will provide you with an overview of what action needs to be conducted, best practices, tips, resources, and some additional templates that I created.
Section I: 🏁 Planning
Before you dive into all of your interviews you’ll want to take some time to plan your Listening Tour. You will need to identify your participants, plan your research goals, and draft your interview guide.
Don’t overlook this stage! Just like any traditional UX Research project, it is important to set the foundation of your work to make sure that you have an anchor to reference as you move through the follow-up stages of the research.
Section II: 🎥 Set-Up the Interview
As you outline your interview, you will want to clearly communicate to your participants the goals of the research, and why they should be willing to take time out of their busy schedule to speak with you.
To help with this I have created a couple of Email Templates to use when inviting your participants to participate. Here’s one example:
Section III: 🎙 Interviewing
Interviewers all have their own style and way of structuring their interview. That being said, there are a number of important guidelines to follow when conducting interviews:
- Make sure that these are 1:1 Conversations — this is not a time to include a manager or other colleagues
- You should have clear communication — the interviewee should know what how the interview will run
- Reassure them that there are no right or wrong answers — you want their honest feedback
- Be aware of leading questions — these can greatly impact the results of your interview
- Thank the interviewees for their time — let them know what is next so that they don’t feel as though their time has been wasted and this information will go into a void.
Section IV: 🔎 Analyzing Your Findings
WARNING ⚠️ — This is a big process, and it takes time. If you are familiar with analyzing qualitative data than this might be something you are more comfortable with. If not, I have tried to provide high level guidance for conducting the Affinity Mapping exercise.
There are many ways to review your interview notes and analyze them. For example, I work in a remote environment and have used Mural to create a virtual white-boarding space to analyze all of my data. Feel free to use this Mural template, or create your own. Perhaps you’re working in-person and have the opportunity to use real sticky notes.
Section V: 🖥 Sharing Your Findings
Sharing the work you’ve done is the important final step in conducting any Listening Tour. Even if it’s too early to know how you will action on your insights, the findings must be shared.
At the risk of repeating myself — it is important to share your work!
- Sharing your findings with participants allows them to benefit from the body of work they helped to create. It’s also an ethical responsibility of the researcher, when possible, to benefit the community whose time and knowledge they’re benefiting from.
- Sharing with your stakeholders, team, and organization allows them to have visibility into the insights you’ve collected. It is additionally important to share with these groups because you will likely need their buy in to make change. Bring them along on the journey.
- Finally, sharing your findings with everyone can help them to understand how you will be moving forward with this information, why it is important, and how they can help.
I truly believe in developing resources, sharing them with the community, and collecting feedback. One of the major outcomes at REI, and the reason I developed this playbook, was that others saw how impactful this work was and wanted to go do it themselves!
I hope that this helps you in your work, and if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.
