A budding UX researcher insights on remote research
My journey in the world of User Experience officially began after I’ve got my first UX Research internship in Campaign.com last December.
Campaign.com is a social start-up in Indonesia. Our product is an app called Campaign #ForChange, available on iOS and Android. It’s a social action platform, where users can participate to support campaign organizers by completing certain missions to unlock donations for the organizers. To complete the mission, users need to upload photos or videos as proof of their actions.
As a UX Researcher Intern, I assist the Product Team conducting research to support the development of Campaign #ForChange App. Since Campaign.com is a fully remote company, everything is done online including the research projects assigned to me.
I’ve never met my supervisors and coworkers in person since I live thousands of kilometers away, separated by islands, and a time zone. It was quite challenging for a newbie UX Researcher, but working fully remote taught me so many lessons.
Upon receiving my first assignment from Team Product, I knew that conducting remote UX research is going to be challenging especially for a first-timer like me. Back in my days as a psychology student, I always did my research projects in the old school way, using printout survey forms or conducting psychological experiments in a lab.
I was quite conservative when it comes to psychological research. I used to be a firm believer that remote research or experiments using online platforms wouldn’t give the best results and experience either for the researchers or the participants.
I rarely took chances on utilizing online platforms for research because it feels like a gamble to me. There were always things that might go wrong and mess up the whole process, so I tried to avoid remote research as much as I could. Then, Covid-19 Pandemic hit the world..
Everything that I thought couldn’t be done effectively online turned out can be done just fine with solid preparations.
I wouldn’t deny that conducting in-person research would probably deliver better results than a remote one. But, as a researcher, we need to be creative and come up with solutions in the world full of uncertainties these days. That’s why my opinion about remote research completely changed after I managed to conduct 5 user interviews remotely.
During the research planning, I tried to refresh everything I learned back at school about interview techniques. I read tons of articles about remote research to understand what the challenges are, the things that I need to prepare beforehand, building rapport with participants online, etc.
Some of the most useful articles were from People Nerds by DScout. I also scoured down some UX Research Slack communities to gain insights about remote research from the professionals UX Researchers. Those forums are a life-saver throughout my internship!
After 1,5 months of research planning, consulting with my supervisors, recruiting and screening participants, finally in mid-February 2021, we conducted the remote user interviews sessions with 5 participants. The sessions were done virtually using Zoom. During the sessions, usually at least one of my supervisors would attend to monitor, observe, and later give feedback about the interview session.
I tried to come prepared with backup plans just in case I found some technical issues during the sessions. Glad that I took my supervisor’s advice into account quite seriously, because things did happen during the session.
In one of the user interview sessions, my internet connection suddenly disconnected because of a rainstorm. I was disconnected from Zoom. Luckily, I had a backup and connected my phone tethering to my laptop straight away.
I was saved by my supervisor who took over when I was out for about 5 minutes. Since things might go wrong, having 2 interviewers in a session is handy especially if you face a situation like mine.
Besides connection issues on the researcher side sometimes the connection issues could also happen on our participant sides. That thing is absolutely beyond our control.
Sometimes the first 5–10 minutes everything ran smoothly, then suddenly the connection became unstable. No matter how prepared you are, you couldn’t always be sure about your participant’s network during the session.
Throughout the journey, I realized that there were things beyond my control no matter how prepared I am. All I can do was make peace with the circumstances. Keep myself calm and carry on. Then, think about finding an alternative way of collecting data.
There are always be something that is beyond our control in remote research. Make peace, keep calm, carry on, and find alternatives.
In my cases, to connect the dots and find the missing pieces, I reached out to my participants through WhatsApp to clarify things that were unclear or unanswered due to poor internet network during the session. I probably would never be able to complete my data collection if I didn’t build enough rapport with my participants.
So, what is a rapport? Merriam-Webster defines rapport as a relationship characterized by agreement, mutual understanding, or empathy that makes communication possible or easy.
As a psychology alumna, I hear this word all the time since day one. I was quite confident in my rapport-building skills. Now, as a budding UX Researcher, I realized that the concept of a rapport that I used to grasp was different. After conducting a remote UX research project, I realized my comprehension of rapport needs to be updated.
Throughout my journey as a psychology student, I had met at least 400 people that I recruited to be my research participants. A huge number was it? I used to recruit people to participate in quantitative research, qualitative research, cognitive psychology experiments, counseling, etc as part of school assignments.
I was quite used to build rapport with research participants but it only happens before and within the projects. Right after, my participants received incentives for their participation, I didn’t really bother to check in with them and they also rarely try to contact me after I sent them “thank you” messages.
However, in my case as a UX Researcher, I realized that building rapport should be done before, during, and beyond the research project because your participants or users are your customers.
There might be a chance that you are going to be their go-to person if they find some issues with your product. They might contact you if they want to send some feedback, appreciation, or even questions. You might be one of the touchpoints in their journey map with your product. That’s why as a researcher, you need to sharpen your people management skill as well.
As a UX Researcher, building rapport should be done before, during, and beyond the research project.
Long story short, two weeks post-interview, our app had a major UI revamp on its latest update. Unexpectedly, my participant reached out to me on WhatsApp just to give an appreciation regarding the update. She told me to pass on the message to the Product Team because she likes and appreciates the new design.
It was eye-opening for me regarding the importance of building rapport. I realized that my participant wouldn’t bother to send me the chat if she didn’t feel connected enough with me.
It made me aware that a good researcher needs to build rapport and connection with his/her participants beyond the research project. This experience also taught me that as a UX Researcher, research skills matter but it’d be much better if you can brush up on your people skills as well because chances are you’re going to be an ambassador for the product you’re working with.
Here is the summary:
- Have a backup of backup plans (back up internet connection, have your interview guidelines ready, ask for a favor from coworker to be backup interviewer)
- Be calm and make peace on things beyond your control, there will always be alternatives.
- Build and maintain a good relationship with your participants, you are the ambassador of the product!
I hope my insight sharing can be useful for fellow budding UX Researchers out there. Feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn, or reach out to me by email: chelseffendi@gmail.com.
Leave some comments if you want to share your experiences as well. Thanks for coming!
