What I learned from my first user research role.
As part of my work on the Civil Service Fast Stream, in November 2019 I joined Action for Children on secondment. My role was as a User Researcher, working directly with the UX lead Kate Stulberg. In the five months I spent there I learned that research is not only essential for good digital services, but it also is incredibly valuable in a more traditional third sector setting. I quickly discovered that as a User Researcher, my most important responsibility was to help the team and the wider organisation better understand their users, their goals, and motivations, in order to create impactful services and run successful fundraising campaigns. My goal was to guide them through that learning process with confidence and enthusiasm and steer them towards decisions based on user needs and insights.
Path to creating insights
About four months ago, I began a user research discovery project for an upcoming fundraising campaign. At that time Action for Children already understood that adopting a more audience-focused approach is essential for delivering compelling cases for support and ensure better fundraising in return. To build on that understanding, my task was to gather insights on what motivates people to support us as a charity and why. In this case I would define insights as the interpretation of how our audience thinks and feels and why they feel this way. In particular, I was looking for insights which could help us better frame the problems that children face and the role we play, as a charity, in solving these problems. We didn’t want to miss an opportunity to truly connect with our audience and unlock nuanced messaging around those topics.
Helping the team understand the user
After three months of recruitment, focus groups, affinity-mapping and so on, the insights were packaged in neat slides, ready to be shared with the wider team. For me, this step marked a massive change in my day-to-day work. Up to this point I had been spending my days poring over quotes and analysing comments and behaviours. From then on, I was faced with the enormous task of putting this knowledge to use and embedding it across the organisation. I delivered multiple face to face sessions, presenting my findings with true enthusiasm and with clear direction for why they are so important. This communication piece was crucial to getting people on board with the research. As a researcher in a charity I interacted with many people beyond the digital and fundraising team. For instance, we also held workshops with media and policy to bring them along on that journey and connect them with a shared understanding of our audience and their goals.
One of the perks of conducting new research for an organisation which only recently embarked on a user research journey is that your findings will have implications beyond its initial scope and will impact several work areas — maybe for years to come.
In my case, communicating the insights with the content team at the right time, meant that the in-house content strategy could be built using what we learned. I validated assumptions around urgent language and how this is perceived by the target supporter audience, while also sense-checking whether our users and the charity speak the same language when we talk about children’s issues. For example, we now know that what we refer to as “early intervention” is different to how our audience understands the term, therefore potentially shifting the way we talk about some of our services.
In addition to informing the upcoming campaign messaging, the research findings from this discovery piece are also benefiting the new product development process. Our innovation team builds new products around such findings, and by learning even more about the target audience from my research, together we have begun to discover the wider environment within which those products exist. Ultimately the process is a two-way street, where knowledge of our audience allows us to build better products, while digging deeper into the products we have allows us to also learn more about the nuance and characteristics of our existing users.
Being the grit in the oyster
Building on my user research experience in Action for Children, I joined the innovation team in working with an external agency on a flagship fundraising product for the charity. It was essential in this context to ensure that we are bringing in research and knowledge from within the organisation. I entered the workshops as the ‘voice of the user’ and my role was to ensure that whatever creation our innovation team came up with was aligned with our understanding of the target audiences. Having the space to showcase my research with this team also meant that by starting with user needs we got the right ideas flowing.
Apart from learning a great deal about ideation from these workshops, I was also able to practice “being the grit in the oyster”, or to explain it plainly, I was there to act as the grit which in turn pushes our internal team to produce something great. I focused my attention on attempting to find areas that needed probing within the product propositions, ensuring they fit the identified user needs.
For instance, I questioned whether our target users would resonate with a family sport event, when their support is motivation-led and not activity-led. I put into perspective the use of social media within our audience, as previous research showed that while our target audience was active on Facebook, they wouldn’t necessarily participate in a solely online-based fundraising activity. I was also able to point out specific quirks in language that our users connect with. As a bit of grit, stuck inside the oyster, I continued irritating the process with the hope that at the end of the day this oyster would produce a pearl — a shiny new fundraising product that reflects what users are looking for.
Moving forward
Using research to improve proposition ideas was my fundamental purpose within that team and I strongly believe that by doing this work with the agency and my colleagues I pushed them to understand our users as well as possible and therefore create a product founded in knowledge and insights.
The past five months were saturated with new learning, hard work, collaboration and quiet synthesis time. Somewhere in the process of researching our users, I grew a sense of respect and admiration for the discipline of user research and what it brings to services — both digital and analogue. Throughout the process, Kate, the UX Lead in Action for Children, showed me time and time again that our responsibility to help the team and the wider organisation better understand their users is essential. I am moving forward in the Civil Service but now with a new understanding and appreciation for the work of user research, not only within the internal organisation, but externally as well.
