5 Common Obstacles that Occur When Managing International Research Teams and How to Overcome Them

by Paulina Carlos, Associate Director, Design Research & Strategy at Insitum

I have spent the better part of six years managing multiple international studies in the USA, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. During my tenure, it has been obvious that most companies and corporations want to understand the scope of their products and services within cross-cultural contexts so they can design for as many people as possible.

Today, it is standard practice to receive requests from clients to create a research strategy that crosses borders and provides cross-cultural analysis, insights, and as a result, solutions. That desire showcases a client’s will to learn and understand the hyperlocal nuances of a place in order to design globalized, user-centric solutions; however, this is much easier said than done. Designing, conducting, and analyzing international research is tough and messy.

So What Have I Learned?

HUGE obstacles need to be overcome when planning and conducting international research. There are so many nuances and unique factors when developing research strategies for clients on a global scale; however, it does not have to be entirely complicated. Below are 5 key pain points — and recommendations for dealing with them — that I have experienced and used while managing international research teams.

Pain Point #1: RESEARCH OPTIMIZED FOR SPEED VS. IMMERSION

Most of the time when planning international research, research teams create timelines optimized for speed. Research teams traveling to other countries will often arrive, conduct the interviews, and leave. There is often not enough time spent in actively experiencing and understanding the idiosyncrasies of a place or culture. By de-prioritizing this cultural immersion, we are more likely to bring our cultural biases into the situation. This kind of unconscious ethnocentrism can pollute the data we are trying to collect. We are more likely to make inferences on the way a product or service is used based on how it is routinely used in our country of origin, glossing over important insights. It takes an active will to overcome our own biases.

Recommendation #1: I found that traveling to your research destination a few days in advance is a beneficial way to observe and immerse yourself in a culture. Of course, you will not learn everything in a few days, but it will help you look at a culture objectively and help you deconstruct your own biases. It will help you put a participant’s words into context, too. Even using an AirBnB for quick immersion prior to starting research can be helpful. During a research trip in India, I allotted one full day to exploring the city. I hired a taxi driver that took me everywhere. I ate at his favorite spot and shopped at his local street market. Deep diving into the day-to-day movements of another culture is key to understanding the context of your interviews.

Pain Point #2: MEANING, LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION DEFICIENCIES

Language barriers are the most important obstacle when trying to compile accurate research data. To overcome the language barrier, teams require the addition of translators and moderators. This is challenging because translators will have a huge impact on the framing of the questions and the gathering of research data. Making sure nothing gets lost in translation between writing the question protocol and what really gets asked in an interview is a supremely difficult task to manage. In such a high pressure and time sensitive environment such as an interview, sentences are often translated literally without consideration for the implied or associative meaning of a sentence as a whole. If your words are getting lost in translation, so is all of your precious data. Double check those translations.

Recommendation #2: Make the translator or moderator your best friend. It does not matter how much you listened or took notes, the moderator and translator always have a better understanding of the conversation. After every interview, make sure to debrief and chat with them about what they heard. Building rapport with the translator and moderator is equally as important as building rapport with research participants. I find that this key step is sometimes overlooked due to the rushed, imposing force of deadlines. When conducting research in India, I had a great experience with my moderator and translator. We would usually go out for chai at the end of a long research day and chat about our work that day, as well as what was going on in our lives. These off the clock conversations had a great deal of importance when conducting analysis after the research was completed.

Paint Point #3: LIMITED AND VARIED TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE

Oftentimes, the technology and infrastructure in the countries we travel to varies. In developing markets, there’s often a dearth of modern Wi-Fi access or facilities that are not set up for the client’s research needs. It’s not always possible to take all of your favorite research equipment with you to effectively execute remote research. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who travel with the most up-to-date research equipment, the participants you are interviewing might be unfamiliar with the equipment, leading to distractions and increasing the possibility for distorted data as their unfamiliarity will influence their thoughts and emotions. Sometimes they even distrust the technology you are working with.

Recommendation #3: Make sure to consider infrastructure when preparing your research protocol and travel logistics and adjust accordingly. Do not assume that accommodations can be made on the fly or that everyone has the same infrastructure and the ability to use the same technology or platforms. Even the smallest details like the kinds of batteries and plugs are standard and important to consider. Specifically for online research, some tools are not available in other countries. Learn how to leverage the most relevant tools. In the US, we love to use dscout. However, its global presence is still growing. The technical capability of low-end cellphones in developing countries limits our ability to use dscout abroad. During our research for a project in India and the Philippines, we had to leverage a different online tool that uses desktops so people could submit their diary responses.

Pain Point #4: SELECTION BIAS THROUGH SCHEDULING

Holidays and time zones profoundly affect how you will manage international research. When traveling, a consideration of a country’s holidays and religious observances cannot be overlooked. More and more, clients are demanding that design research teams conduct co-current research so that a big research phase can be completed at the same time. When discussing the scope of a project, these are the considerations that fall by the wayside because of client needs, cost, or deadlines. If special events and holidays are not treated with proper respect, it can lead to tension, confusion, and / or late deliverables.

Recommendation #4: Incorporate these considerations into your timeline and research strategy as well as the interview protocol. Do not forget to ask these questions to your local teams. Design research is so dependent on timing and context, it has the power to profoundly influence participants. A big holiday coming up can easily skew responses. Once, we conducted research really close to Mexico’s observance of Christmas. Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country, and even though we wanted to learn about how people attend events in general, most of what we learned was from their Christmas parties and related gatherings. In this case, our research timing intersected with our research findings.

Pain Point #5: DISCONNECTED ANALYSIS STRATEGIES

At this point you should know that there is nothing easy about cross-country analysis. (Easiness was never the point!) It’s almost impossible to have everyone that was involved in the initial research process gather in the same room to talk about what they saw and heard. Each local team usually returns to their part of the world, conducts analysis on their own, and returns with their own conclusions. So much work happens only to find out that everyone has taken a different approach. The frameworks for analysis used might not be the same in two local teams. The layers of organization and complexity at this point can be maddening if the different teams are not aligned on frameworks and methodologies. It may be impossible to compare apples to apples.

Recommendation #5: It is imperative to have an analysis and debrief plan that can help each country analyze the results. Set this process up before the initial research even begins. Make sure to set up time with local team leaders and make sure everyone is on the same page with analysis frameworks, and not just the research protocols. At Insitum, we have developed systems, methods, and tools that we use when debriefing with multiple countries. This system is composed of online collaboration tools like Mural and Google Drive that offer easy ways to input data and visualize that data digitally. We also design note taking and debriefing templates that we share with the foreign teams to guarantee that we are capturing the same buckets of information. We can then share these templates and compare data across borders.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

At Insitum, we’ve created solid research strategies and methods to plan and execute cross-country global research leveraging our talent and partners around the globe. With seven offices around the world in North and South America, Europe, and partners all over Asia, Africa and the Middle East, we have created a network of talent. In our USA office alone, we can speak Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and English. And yet, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure our international management process is as seamless as possible.

I understand that the pain points and solutions I have outlined in this essay are not complete. I did not intend them to be a finished product. I simply want to facilitate and continue the discussion around managing international research. The only way to become better is to share best practices, ideas, and explore together.

We must not forget that the human element to all of our work is the most important part. Above all, we must carry on and go forward into our research with the utmost respect for the diverse ways of life that exist on our planet. It is a complicated and demanding task with a whole lot of complexity and diplomacy involved, but it’s achievable. If we want to truly design solutions and systems that accommodate our goal of making the world more human-centered, we must embrace all of the challenges that go along with it.