Unveiling impactful insights
Last week, we hosted our second webinar with a world-class user researcher Gregg Bernstein at Cousto, our new UX Research training!
We talked about Research and how to unveil insights that will get your product in the right direction. Here is a what we learnt.
Gigantic gap between Research needs and Research staff
Listening to users, including users in the product cycle, gathering the information to take better decisions, all of this sounds very familiar to everyone building products. Though, there is still a gigantic gap between the needs organisation have for Research and the staff dedicated to this task. It’s up to us to start applying the Research skills we use everyday in our personal life (e.g planning a trip, picking up a birthday place) to our work and improve our decisions.
Break the silos of your organisation
Information is everywhere: Support, Sales, Marketing, Operations are all research partners gathering new data everyday. We need to break the silos between those information sources and encourage people to spread their knowledge and help other teams.
Gregg built a solid relationship between support and his team at MailChimp to improve the product decisions taken, you can read more about this story on HelpScout blog.
Be the one who asks for new perspective
Go beyond the information and insights you already have to get the entire story. Most researches are bringing new and better questions, those questions should help to get a better sense of who are our users and dive deeper. Breaking the silos and challenging the perspective with better questions will allow us to reveal impactful insights.
“Ask yourself what are the things to create a truly wonderful experience and it will give you the priorities.” Gregg Bernstein
Empower your teams to conduct Research
Gregg has recently joined Webflow to set up the Research practice. Here are the different pieces of advice he shared with us to empower teams to conduct research:
1. Build a getting started guide for non-researchers (e.g “you are a designer and you have this question, here is the method to use).
2. Find the right tools for your team to conduct research and store data
3. Train teams through workshops
4. Figure out a taxonomy to share insights across the organisation
5. Generate awareness around research and insigths(e.g Gregg is creating an observation club at Webflow)
Future of Research: from tactical to strategic
Asked about his vision on the future, Gregg shared with us that he believes Research will have more impact on Strategic level in the next years, as also shared by Alec Levin or Matt Gallivan in recent articles.
We will keep using the same research methods and practices for more strategic topics, it will have more influence on the entire direction of a company. The exciting challenge is to adapt for this change and maximize the impact insights can have on the global direction.
Ressources
You can watch the replay of the webinar with Gregg Bernstein here.
You can discover more about Gregg’s book: Research Practice — Perspectives from UX researchers in a changing field here.
Cousto is a 6-week training program to master the fundamentals of UX Research. You will work on real challenges every week and get mentoring sessions from experienced User Researchers. It is part-time (3 to 5 hours per week) and remote, the first cohort will start in April 2021, register here for more info.
