Aligning stakeholder expectations when conducting user research.
Story from a user researcher at a fintech
Making a career shift is never easy. I had been planning to become a therapist for a long time, so when I decided to explore how to use my psychology background in another field, the path was uncertain.
I came across user research and felt an immediate connection. I had experience conducting interviews, surveys, understanding people’s behaviors, context, and motivations. I also knew what advocating for the user and developing empathy meant.
I refocused my career and started studying about research and how to use these methods to inform product, design, and business decisions. I learned a lot about designing digital products, the product life cycle, mixed methods, and so on. Finally, I started working as an Associate User Researcher.
In my role, I had to consider many internal stakeholders. When discussing the product that we were building, the words “user,” “understanding,” and “human-centered approach” were thrown in the room. What I failed to see is that even if people know about user research, it doesn’t mean they fully understand the purpose of what we do or how we do it. There were a lot of misconceptions; some of the things I hear the most were:
“We are users, we know what we need,”
“Ask users if they want or like feature X or Y,”
“We need to deliver fast, research will make us slower,”
“If we do any research, it needs to be fast, and result in exciting revelations from users.”
Getting people familiar with user research and aligning their expectations saves time, makes outcomes more valuable, and helps to get buy-in.
The Shinny Pebbles Jar Workshop
To tackle the misalignment, I created a hands-on exercise to share what user research is and the value it brings. It allows for a less imparting knowledge approach and provides all the elements for participants to come to their conclusions.
Workshop materials per participant:
- A set of chopsticks
- A spoon
- A straw
- Pebble pieces with the letters I, T, I, S, G, H, N
- A color code palette paper that matches the letter pieces
Step 1: Write down their definition and expectations of user research.
Ask participants to write on a post-it what user research is and what they expect from it. Having this as a starting point opens the conversation and helps you prioritize what aspects to focus on during the exercise in order to clarify or challenge their conceptions. Also, you might be positively surprised by what you can learn from your stakeholders’ perspective.
Step 2: Ask participants to use the tools to pick out the ‘shiniest pebbles’, those that provide the most information.
Each participant gets a complete set of materials. Ask them to use the spoon, chopsticks, and straw to look for the ‘shinny pebbles’, and by ‘shine,’ I meant the parts that provide the most information.
Participants will start using the chopsticks to quickly uncover the lettered pieces and the spoon to grab them out of the jar. At some point, they will also find the color pallet paper and realize they can use it as a guide to arrange the pebbles on.
Participants often jump to conclusions and start guessing different words that could be formed with the letters. But when taking the time and following the paper guideline they finally discover the word: INSIGHT.
Step 3: Reflect — How does finding lettered pebbles relates to user research?
At the end of the challenge, have an open conversation by asking them what their experience was like? Were the tools useful? What were they looking for? Finally, ask them how does this exercise relate to user research?
5 key Lessons:
The Shinny Pebble Jar is a great exercise to learn about user research. Usually, the conversation leads to interesting points like the importance of defining what one is looking for, using the right tool for the challenge, or how biases can drive us to jump to conclusions and even make us see things that are not necessarily there. Here are some key takeaways from the exercise:
Embrace uncertainty: just as participants at the start of the exercise will not be sure what pebbles to look for, there is always a level of uncertainty when conducting research; we cannot fully anticipate which insights will be uncovered, how users will react, or use a product. But as researchers, we must embrace uncertainty and learn how to work with it.
Define your research goal and key research questions: having a clear and agreed research plan is key to ensure that research is focused and delivers value. Moreover, it is a critical tool to navigate uncertainty. Just like the piece of paper served as a guideline to participants to accomplish their goal by providing direction.
Prioritize information: the jar represents the user, full of ‘shiny pieces’ like emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and so on. These are constantly calling the researcher’s attention, just like shiny objects in the jar. Still, that does not necessarily mean they are all valuable. Researchers need to prioritize and find the pieces that provide relevant information to accomplish the set goal and answer the questions/hypotheses.
Choose the right tools: there are many research tools and methods available, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. It is the researcher’s responsibility to choose those that are coherent with their research objective while meeting other concerns such as budget and time frame. The same way that the chopsticks were efficient to give the letter pieces visibility and the spoon was helpful to get the pieces out.
Take your time to connect the dots, don’t jump to conclusions: insights surface when researchers take sufficient time to digest and synthesize all the pieces of information. Connecting the dots takes time and rushing the process may result in jumping to false conclusions or subduing to biases.
Team alignment is an ongoing process that requires constant and consistent work. Through this workshop, I was able to have an open discussion about user research, expectations, and how we want to work together. More importantly, I was able to identify the aspects and topics we needed to work on to grow in their understanding of user research.
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