Remote UX Research Without Sacrifices: 5 Best Practices for Conducting Research and Collaborating Online
In March, Flexport employees, including myself, started working from home in response to the Global Pandemic. As a result, so did many of our logistics customers with whom I conduct research. This was a brave new world for us given that the majority of our research up until this point has been conducted in person. UX researchers and the core team would visit customers and other platform users for qualitative research in the US and abroad. We would visit their places of work, such as offices and warehouses, where we could interview users in context.
This post will highlight 5 adjustments I made to adapt to the new reality without sacrificing quality on insights and implications. These learnings are based on a large qualitative study I ran earlier this year with 10 Flexport customers and 10+ internal subject matter experts (SME).
1. Filling the voids: Use downtime to build domain knowledge.
Because customers were busy keeping their supply chain afloat given the impacts of COVID-19, we were not always able to conduct remote research exactly when we wanted. Instead, we used this “downtime” to conduct a thorough competitive analysis from online resources and internal subject matter experts (SME) from our operations and sales teams. Their first hand experience of working with different customers and at other logistics companies provided us with valuable insights into the competitive landscape that we were not able to obtain elsewhere.
Inspired by my product manager’s work in management consulting, my research assistant and I employed multiple frameworks to evaluate existing solutions and gaps in the market. We also conducted analogous research and documented best UX/UI practices in other industries that could inspire our designs. These efforts established a solid foundation for our design concepts, product strategy, and go to market strategy. Because of the value this brought to our team I would encourage anyone to make time for conducting a thorough competitive analysis or literature review. You can do this in a week, involve your team so they are learning too, and this will save you and the organization time in the long run.
2. Make it visual: Be engaging when conducting remote sessions.
My visual artifacts and research activities in this major project included,
1. Journey Mapping
2. Screen Share Show & Tell
3. Card Sorting
4. Design Concepts Walk Through
Be as visual as possible. Remote communication is inherently limited and can often feel less engaging. However, I found that by implementing more visual activities we were able to improve our remote interactions. Visual artifacts helped ground the conversation. Some tools you can use include Figma and Miro. You can screen share these programs with participants during the interview. Having used both, my preference is Miro because it’s intuitive and designed for digital whiteboard and collaboration.
Our first activity was live journey mapping. The goal was to define and capture the customers’ end-to-end experience, goals, needs, and pain-points that exist today. While I was conducting the interview, my product manager (PM) was taking notes on digital post-its along a journey map. This showed the customers we are actively listening and as a result, they felt heard! In addition, using digital post-its in real time meant there was no need for subsequent transcription of written or typed notes into this (post-it note) format used later for synthesis.
To minimize bias and start the conversation, I would first start by asking open ended questions, for example, “What does supply chain visibility mean to you?” before starting the screen share and revealing the journey map.
The other extremely useful research activity is Show & Tell from the user via screen sharing. We asked users to show us the tools they use today to get their jobs done. Not only was it insightful to see their digital workspace and workflow, we found it effective to discuss the pros and cons of each tool and how everything fit together. We asked for permission to record these sessions including the tools they showed us so that we could revisit the clips when it came time for deeper analysis and “Popcorn Time”.
An unexpected upside of remote research is everything is recorded in high quality. End-to-end recordings include team/customer intros, conversations, activities led by the researcher, and walkthroughs of our user’s tools led by them. This makes documentation and sharing of quality recordings easy especially with Google Meet which also has a transcript feature. The video is already in the cloud and I can send share links for easy reference.
With more visualization tools also mean more screens. My perfected setup consists of:
- Large monitor for screen share of journey map, card sorting activity, and concepts for user feedback.
- Laptop monitor for video where I can see everyone on the call.
- iPad with the discussion guide on it.
- Not a screen but a notebook to capture key points — you could also take digital field notes on one of the monitors.
3. Popcorn Time: Getting creative with ways to engage your team and share highlights from user interviews.
Not everyone on the team could take part in all of the remote research sessions. I limit Flexport viewers to 4 (including myself) so as to not overwhelm the customer participant. We had 10 generative research interviews in this project, which can be very time consuming to attend if your job is not a full time researcher!
My two research colleagues and I teamed up to pick highlights from the recorded interviews to show at what I called PopCorn Time. We selected video clips (1–3 minutes long) that addressed key research questions, was a surprising learning, and shed light into our user’s day and life.
The idea was to drive engagement and allow the voices of our users to be heard without watching 15 hours of videos. I invited the cross-disciplinary core team as well as other product teams that had overlaps with the new product concept. Stakeholders as well as the sales and ops teams who connected us with their customers were invited. During the viewing, I asked attendees to jot down insights in Figma on tagged post-its I created (can use Miro too) that stood out to them, and write how might we (HMW) prompts.
4. Don’t just wing it: Prepare your collaboration boards for facilitating remote synthesis.
Two days after Popcorn Time I ran a live remote synthesis session with 16 cross-disciplinary team members, including designers, product managers, engineers, sales and operations. The session was 2 hours total with breaks.
During synthesis I had the core team present top learnings from each user interview and listeners would take notes in Figma on insights and form “how might we” opportunity statements. We then walked through the journey map framework in Figma and started to share out and cluster patterns with digital post-its, adding post-its from Popcorn Time as well. The journey was pre-populated with key themes that my PM and I pre identified to help guide the conversation. As we went through these themes, others added to it and new themes also emerged.
Some team members were less familiar with Figma so at the beginning I gave a mini tutorial on how to create post-its and move them on the art board.
Normally, in an in-person setting I allow patterns to emerge naturally as others share their notes on post-its across the room, then cluster post-it notes of insights/facts/quotes/HMWs. However, with remote synthesis I was worried about the number of people online and that could become chaotic when sharing and clustering because you can’t see who’s going to speak next and read body/facial cues. My PM and I also wanted to make sure we covered key areas that needed cross disciplinary group discussion especially between tech and ops teams.
Another way of managing synthesis with a large group, which was successful for my colleague
, is to break the group into smaller teams and have them cluster sections of the insight/HMW post-its then rotate to another section after ~10 minutes. So after several rotations all the post-its will have been reviewed by all the groups and clustered. This method still allows for patterns to emerge from the findings like it would in an in person synthesis.The session ended with digital dot voting and we scheduled additional time to discuss the voting results. We voted on areas that had the highest value for users. Miro has a decent tool for voting and there’s a count down.
Another tool used during synthesis is the chat feature. This supplements the communication in two ways. One, fielding questions from the audience during the presentation of user stories. Two, facilitating polls from the audience.
5. Stay fresh: Avoid Zoom fatigue by spacing out sessions.
Remote collaboration can feel intense, so having a clear agenda, complete with scheduled breaks, good time keeping, and strong facilitation, will increase success. In a fast paced environment, we tend to want to move at lightning speed. However, in a “remote world” my suggestion is to give your team enough time to digest interviews and learnings, brainstorm outcomes, and reflect on any collaborative sessions to increase absorption of learnings and productivity.
The B2B logistics space is highly complex with dozens to hundred of users and vendors and so I only conducted one customer interview a day. Before the interview I scheduled briefings with their account ops and sales team in order to learn about their customer who we’re speaking to, what they care about, their existing vendors, and any needs and pain-points they have expressed.
Something I’ve been doing pre Covid-19 that has been very effective is that after the customer interview I scheduled a half hour debrief with the team that was on the call and with the customer’s ops and sales team. We each took our time to write top 5 learnings, shared, and clustered patterns then created what we call Post Cards to share broadly.
In the future, when we may go back to work physically, my plan is to include these new practices to our research process making in-person research even better.
Bonus Point
In addition to speaking with existing customers, we also spoke to prospective customers. Their sales leads were invited to the remote research session as a fly on the wall. Knowing our purpose was to listen, learn, and create products that served customers needs, customers shared openly. This helped with relationship building. The sales team was able to better understand the prospective customer and hear insights that may not have come up from a typical sales call.
“Having the opportunity to listen in on the research call was so enlightening from a sales perspective. Once the customer realized we were not trying to sell them anything — they completely opened up sharing more than we could have expected. I would personally recommend we consider this as part of our strategy in the sales process when trying to penetrate large complex prospects and break down barriers.” Angel, a Global Account Executive at Flexport
That’s all I got for you for now. If you’re interested in sharing or discussing remote research tips and tricks, please find me on LinkedIn!
Want to make global trade easy for everyone? Take a look at the available opportunities on our career page.
Big thank-you’s to my team for being flexible and trying new ways of doing things as well as giving constructive feedback on the process and this blog post!
, , , . Also thank you for brainstorming with me on remote synthesis with a large group.
