How do we survive without a full-time researcher
As a small UX design team working on a product for SAP named Build, we rely on the knowledge of our users. However, research resources are not always available. We currently conduct a minimum of two user research sessions per month — all without a full-time researcher. You may have heard the quote, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” We’ll share our process for conducting user research without the luxury of a researcher, along with our plan to improve it.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” –Plato
Once upon a time, we had three super-talented researchers on the team: Amir, Michelle, and Leili. As a designer, I lived in paradise. When I had a research topic, I would tell them about the topic, participate in some planning meetings and wait for the report out.
I thought we would live happily ever after, but unlike the fairy tale, two of them said “’bye,” and left the team to pursue other ventures.
We have a large product team of around 200 people comprising designers, product managers, marketing, and development. Not only did we have UX topics that we wanted to test, but we also got user research requests from other groups on the team. We needed to conduct not just usability testing, but also generative research. You see, we had a lot of topics we wanted to learn about. Unfortunately, none of them were short tasks, and how many researchers were supporting us? One!
It was time for a change — a revolution! So we devised a plan!
We called this: How to help Michelle not die
Since Michelle was our sole user researcher, we started a process called “How to help Michelle not die,” aka how to be a researcher. This is a guide to lightweight design research that we can do for ourselves. And this is the general research process that the whole team is following right now.
Step 1: Create a research plan
Why is this research being conducted?
What are you studying?
Any previous research?
What questions do you have on the topic?
Ideally, anyone on the team should be able to read the research plan months or years from now, and be able to gain a general idea of the research’s purpose, even if they weren’t involved.
Check our research plan template here: https://goo.gl/mSPMrX
Step 2: Create a research script and corresponding assets
It’s time to move to the research script and assets. The script generally includes four parts: intro, background questions, tasks, and closing questions.
Here is an example you can see: https://goo.gl/g1w7zM
Step 3: Recruitment and pilot sessions
We usually run a pilot session and recruit people in parallel. Recruiting is the most challenging part of all the tasks. The recruiting could take a long time since we have the problem to reach out to our real user of the tool.
Step 4: Get a note-taker and go testing!
During the session, there should be a note-taker. Before we only invited colleagues within the design team to help, but we realized how important collaboration is to the process, we now involve non-designers and topic related stakeholders to be a note-taker for one or more sessions.
We created a note-taking template that allows us to write down the relevant questions, and it provides some guidance to facilitate the note-taking process.
For testing, all we need is practice, practice, and practice.
Step 5: Synthesizing as a group
After all the sessions, we invite all the people who joined the testing to finish the synthesis together. We use the KJ-technique to synthesize the research findings and vote for the most critical findings.
The report out is created as the final delivery.
Based on the scale of research topics and timelines we have, the entire process can be wrapped up within three weeks or at least two months.
What is the researcher doing?
You may be asking — if everyone is doing their research then what is the researcher doing? After Leili left, Michelle became more like a checkpoint and consultant for us.
She made sure we didn’t replicate any efforts and also validated our research plans and scripts. She also helped to choose the right methods to synthesize and support any difficulties we had. Michelle then had more time to focus on the research strategy work. After Michelle left, we invited a colleague from other teams to be our research coach.
Enthusiasm for user research is rising!
From September 2016 to March 2018, we conducted 35 research sessions following this flow, and 10 out of them were run after Michelle had left the team. We organized a one-day research workshop last year, and the whole Palo Alto team joined. Some of us also attended the note-taking session that SAP organized.
Why is the enthusiasm rising? Because being a researcher is amazing!
As a researcher, you can listen to your users directly. You hear, first hand, every comment on design (good or bad). You can empathize with them — see their facial expressions, feel their excitement, hesitation or confusion. Conducting user research as a designer not only surfaces the information you need for the design, but is also a powerful motivator for the next iteration. And that feels amazing!
Challenges we’re still facing
We wanted to share the excitement with the entire team, but we’re facing two challenges:
1. How do we involve more stakeholders, developers, QAs and PMs in the process?
We wanted to involve more stakeholders in the research process so that they, too, can empathize with the experience of users. Currently, we not only invite stakeholders to be note-takers, but we have also organized Friday events to watch research recordings with developers, QAs, and PMs together. Here is a quick outline of these events:
- Spend 10 mins walking them through the research plan and script.
- Breakout colleagues into groups of three, mixed with devs, designers, PMs and QAs. Each group picks one research recording to view together.
- After an hour, everyone comes together to share their observations and findings.
The events went successfully!
The great thing about these Friday events is that even if a colleague cannot conduct user-research directly, they can still participate and, through observation, eventually generate empathy.
We also received feedback about how to improve the session. Therefore, we’re currently in the process of designing the event so that it can be more exciting and more valuable for stakeholders. For example, instead of asking them to watch the full recording, we can pick the clips that show the feature they worked on. Another idea is to assign multiple roles to the participants, so they can focus on various things while watching and share more in group discussions.
2. How do we involve colleagues from other locations?
We’re also trying to find a way to involve colleagues from our other locations. We have a distributed design team, so how can we pass the enthusiasm of our research to our colleagues in Dublin, Paris, and Bangalore? We’re still working on that, and we will share it once we have some good solutions.
So, going back to the question we posed at the beginning:
How do we survive without a full-time researcher? Be the researcher!
