Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
User research during a pandemic
Call for Customer Closeness
Building a deep understanding of customers’ motivations helps us place bets on which products and services to invest in and sustains a competitive edge. At Fluxx we believe that we build better products and services when we get close to and empathise with the people we’re designing for. Yet, 2020 has forced us to think about and run user research differently.
Since lockdown, companies have lost or acquired entire customer groups, practically overnight. In the period of April — June 2020, Ocado saw a hundred-fold spike in demand, while The Gym Group reported it had lost 178,000 gym-goers. We invested in loungewear, gardening and DIY items, all the flours for baking, at-home fitness subscriptions and demand for jigsaw puzzles soared by 370%.
For companies to keep in step, there’s never been a bigger need for user research, but how do you do ‘customer closeness’ at a time where we’re mandated to be 1m+ away? How do you get to the same depth of insight?
Is research harder in 2020? Absolutely — versus pre-covid research it requires a bit more consideration and planning to make it truly valuable. However, user research is also better, faster and stronger than before. Here’s how, and a few techniques that have worked for us:
- Build in observational techniques. At Fluxx, we design research to get to the ‘why’ — the underlying customer motivation. That’s because as humans, we self-edit. We rationalise our behaviour, sometimes even as we explain it — to appear the best version of ourselves. That’s why it’s important to pay as much attention to customer behaviours as to what they say. Often, we’re irrational, particularly when it comes to the decisions that really matter. That’s a problem for user research, where you’re trying to get to the customer ‘why’.
- Pivot irl to virtual. Pre-lockdown, we’d tag along with boiler repair teams on home visits, jump in the car with ride-sharing commuters, or do the weekly shop with parents and very hungry kids. For today’s world, we’ve had to be more meditated about designing in these observational techniques — the ones that get us to the moment of truth, when a user is experiencing a product or service. Consider if this can be done virtually — can you zoom into customers unpacking the weekly shop instead, or virtually accompany someone on their shift or commute?
- Day 1 of lockdown we started The Great WFH Experiment. Over a 6 — week period we used human-centred research techniques to understand more about the impact remote working is having on behaviours and habits. Over 100 people took part in the study from a wide variety of industries. Some considered themselves ‘seasoned pros’ others had never worked from home before. One set up their office using an ironing board in the downstairs loo! We used a mixture of research techniques including video diaries, daily mood check-ins, diary studies, photograph challenges as well as depth interviews for sense checking our insights. This made sure we could capture the ‘as-is’ behaviour and get a rounded output in our Great WFH study.
- Another way is to get eyes and ears on the ground. This summer, working on a customer closeness project around shopper attitudes to returning to stores, the team had the idea of creating a ‘squad’ of shopping centre staff and shop assistants, our ‘eyes on the ground’ to report back unexpected shopper behaviour. They told us that older shoppers and shoppers with mobility issues were walking up to 10metres out of their way, to avoid others congregating in groups. They also observed shoppers arriving and queueing up to 45 minutes before opening time, to get in at the least busy times and socially distance as safely as possible. These observations were vital to generating customer-led solutions at pace — we quickly experimented with a virtual booking system, and reconfigured the one way system.
- Make a call on when you need to physically be there. Sometimes, there is no substitute for being with customers face to face for that vital, qualitative steer. If you need to speak to users, see their body language, gauge their emotions or if you’re at a pivotal point in change for your project. For the project mentioned above, the team elected to run socially distanced vox-pops in the week stores reopened.
Top tips for socially distanced research -
£5 face visors allow you to connect and smile at people, selfie sticks are the perfect 1m+ filming and distancing enforcers and virtual incentives through platforms such as Love2Shop minimise contact and paperwork. Plus you’re supporting the Great British high street!
There’s no excuses for making lazy assumptions about user groups
What do they say — the assumption is the mother of all… **** ups? It sure is — especially in 2020 where making assumptions about how users are feeling and behaving is a dangerous game. Fluxxers are huge believers in testing our assumptions.
- Before you kick off user research and invest time and money — capture the assumptions you’re making about how users are feeling and behaving with your team (this is always good innovation practice). Customer assumptions might be “ our customers are saving more at the moment” or “our customers will want to keep socialising online in lockdown wave 2” or perhaps “our staff will want to come back to the office a few days a week”.
- There’s a goldmine of behavioural and sentiment trackers online — here’s some favourite sources right now:
- Google’s Mobility Study — See how communities are moving around and which public places are up and down yoy in terms of visits with Google’s mobility study.
- YouGov — bringing us the UK’s mood week, and covering topics from retail to education to politics.
- Public opinion on C-19 — Ipsos Mori publishes a weekly snapshot.
- Barclaycard — tells us what people are spending money on and how much vs 2019
Use these to quickly validate or dispel your assumptions, or think about how they can help you to ask better questions.
Validate insights with users in real time
Co-creation is essential. We’ve started to build in more of what we call ‘insight co-creation’ earlier in our projects, in the Discovery phase. This means we get user feedback much faster, as there’s less logistics involved in setup vs a face to face, bells and whistles user co-creation. Plus we can absorb, question and iterate based on user feedback at lightning speed.
When Fluxx worked on the launch of a new gum for 18–24 year olds, the team had a bunch of existing insights from previous research. This happens a lot. We recruited users and asked them to join us on a digital whiteboard, where we played back these insights. They quickly picked out and dropped insights they couldn’t relate to, and for those they did, we rebuilt them shoulder-to-shoulder with the client team, reframing them in their own words. A day later, the team invited them back to pitch their ideas, again rebuilding them, in real-time based on user feedback. The jury, however, is out on whether this was more or less scary than pitching to their bosses!
We’re firm believers in bringing users into the creative process early, both for validation and to empower them to hold the project team to task on the value of what we’re creating. Why waste time and money on products and services that your audience doesn’t want?
In a remote research world, lean on collaboration tools. We’ve used Miro to create all kinds of customer research exercises that keep sessions fun for users. If you don’t know about Miro (where have you been?) -it’s a digital whiteboard and Fluxx’s go-to collaboration tool. That’s why we’ve partnered with Miro to become one of their trusted experts.
With Miro you can replicate many of the most valuable face-to-face research techniques — diary studies, themed collages, image sorting, creative writing for comms, sketching for ideation. Card sorting exercises are rapidly emerging as a winner. They are great for getting users to prioritise; as you can see below where we asked newsreaders in the UK and US to design their perfect packages for a new global news service. Look how you can observe a user’s decision-making process in real-time.
So why not get experimenting! And now Miro’s even added emojis to boot. 🥾
A recap of how you and your team can think differently to get the most out of user research for 2020:
Before you kick-off, which customer assumptions can you validate or dispel instantly with trusted online trackers?
Build in the vital observational techniques that cut to the customer ‘why’
If possible, pivot IRL to virtual observations.
Validate your insights in real-time with users, bringing them into the early creative process.
Keep research smart and engaging by migrating tried and tested face to face research techniques into Miro.
We’re finding at Fluxx that with a creative approach to designing research, teams can get to insight faster, in an equally deep and meaningful way — and keep it fun for participants too!
We’d love to hear how you’ve thought about or designed user research differently in 2020. Please comment or reach out to gemma.stafford@fluxx.uk.com and we’ll put the research worlds to rights over a virtual coffee.
Happy researching.
Gemma Stafford is a consultant at Fluxx. To find out more about the company check out these useful links.
