How Do You Know You’ve Done Enough Research?
I was in the research lab with my team when one of the developers asked a great question: “How do you know you’ve done enough research?” My automatic answer was, “When you find yourself absolutely humbled by somebody’s hope or dream and pledge yourself to be in their service. You become the Sir Francis Drake to their Queen Elizabeth, knowing your role in life is to spread your cape over all of their financial mud puddles.”
His response was a Head Nod of Understanding.
Getting to The Head Nod of Understanding is the most important goal of research. But, I can’t turn it into a spreadsheet, cool infographic, or really even write a research plan for it, so getting buy-in or time in a sprint cycle to do it is difficult.
It’s difficult, but I’m going to advocate that you fight to do it anyway, because it is the foundational research of user-centered design. At its core, user-centered design is about service. Agile, in its first tenet, is about “satisfying the customer.” If you haven’t found a reason to be in service of people and aren’t organizing your work around satisfying the customer, you aren’t practicing either.
Get thee back to research until you have found your mission of service, a.k.a. the Head Nod of Understanding. User-centered design isn’t just about finding out what the user needs—the goal, it’s also about realizing your role. Where do you get to be Sir Francis Drake?
So how do you make this sort of research happen?
And when do you know you need it? We’re navigating the fuzzy world of empathy research, but here are a few steps to getting to enough empathy to reach the Head Nod of Understanding.
Step One: Watch Your Language
The biggest indicator we haven’t done enough research is how the team and I talk about our users. Hearing any phrase that indicates the people you are making things for are “other” and not “YOUR PEOPLE” means you aren’t there yet.
One of our products is designed for Millennials, a.k.a the easiest people to stereotype in the universe. Our team sometimes referred to one of our personas as “flaky”. This was a huge indicator we didn’t understand our people well enough because we were using language to separate “them” from “us”. So, we did more research. Digging into the scary bit about “flaky” unearthed a treasure trove of valuable truths and differentiating insights. Now, we don’t design for Millennials, we design for OUR PEOPLE. If you need a metric, count how many times you and your team refer to your users in negative or “other” language in your next meeting. When the count has reach zero, you’ve done enough empathy research and are on your way to the Head Nod of Understanding.
Step Two: Experiment on Yourself
Another common phrase about empathy involves being able to “walk around in someone else’s shoes.” As a researcher, I’m trained to understand human behavior. Yet, I was frustrated by this strange, frequent-traveling human* who lives in my house leaving half-packed suitcases in our living room. Often, instead of ever unpacking, he’d simply update the contents and get on another airplane. I had no empathy for this until I started traveling frequently myself and realized that I was the one leaving half-packed suitcases in the middle of the living room because my brain switched to “travel mode”. Automatic empathy and this researcher was schooled at her own game.
But Beth, I don’t have two years to be dumb like you were and this sounds expensive. We can’t take entire teams to Guam or spend weeks on research. We have stuff to code and deadlines.
Clever people, remember that research is a science: If you can’t gain empathy through life or don’t have travel time or a budget, design yourself a lightweight experiment. Right now, if I happened to be on a team who needed to understand frequent travelers with no budget or time, we could send teams to couch surf at each other’s houses for a week, experiencing both “travel” and “home” roles while taking turns acting as guests and hosts. Zero dollars, very little extra time, and if colleagues on your couch can’t help you find your inner Sir Francis Drake, I don’t know what will.
*Confession: I run research experiments on my partner, Joshua, all the time.
Step Three: Seek Out Being Wrong
After you’ve achieved the Head Nod of Understanding, it gets a lot easier to want to seek out ways to make life better for OUR PEOPLE. The research usually becomes self-perpetuating, because the team of Head Nodders starts actively seeking to understand all the weird, cool stuff about OUR PEOPLE. This involves being wrong. A lot. In fact, it involves actively charging up hills of being wrong.
If you’ve given a research presentation, you probably have a canned line like I do that’s something like, “Hey, this is what we previously thought people did, but we were total arses and missed this baseline thing about OUR PEOPLE.” If your team has achieved Head Nodding space, this conversation is congratulatory and turns to opportunity. If your team isn’t there, it’s the worst presentation in the world and your team leaves feeling like the bad guy who ruined everybody’s plans. Get your team to Head Nodding space so you don’t miss the juicy opportunities.
From years of research, I can tell you that being curious and investigating everything you think is weird about your users will lead you to the best treasure troves of product insights. A lot of the time, they are there because other teams were too attached to being right or too deadline-driven to look for them.
It’s the Head Nodding/Sir Francis Drake empathy research that inspires your team’s inner design drive because it allows you to understand both your user and your role of service. Look for that moment in research where something in life that was black and white turns to technicolor (think Wizard of Oz). They’ll change how you make products and change your life.
