The UX Academic: Become a User Experience Scholar to Thoroughly Research Your Audience
If you work in content production, chances are you know your audience pretty well: what platforms they prefer, how often they like to hear from you, want tone you should use, and what type of information they’re interested in. What if you knew none of these things? Or rather, you have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, but it was all based on conjecture . . .
If you fall into the latter category, you are not alone in this. With competing deadlines, new projects, and attempts at keeping up with the latest social media algorithms, it can be hard to find the opportunity to sit down and say “who exactly is my audience and what do they want?” This was the case at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), where questions had been floating around for years about our core audience of art history and visual culture scholars and if they were using social media platforms for their work. Internally, there were contradictory thoughts on this topic, but the general sense was that it wasn’t something scholars used because it was too superficial, fleeting, and decidedly unserious.
The GRI currently has a Facebook page and YouTube channel, the latter of which is mainly a repository of past event recordings. Our Facebook page is actively managed with new content regularly published, and currently has over 23,000 followers. Compared to a typical museum’s account, this number isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s substantial for our more niche scholarly audience. And while our following is decently sized, we couldn’t authoritatively say if our followers were our audience, or if our audience were on Facebook (or any social platform for that matter).
Answering these questions would be time consuming. After reviewing the literature on the topic of scholarship and social media we found a lot of good information of a wide range of scholarly disciplines, but nothing directly investigating art history scholars. It was time we found out for ourselves how art history and visual culture scholars use social media.
What follows in this article will take you through the steps we used to understand our audience’s needs and feelings toward social platforms and give pointers on how you can take on something similar the next time you need to research an audience (which might be now!). Whether you create content for public-facing outlets like Facebook or a newsletter, or your work is more internally focused, pinpointing what motivates your audience to interact with any kind of content will help you be more strategic and thoughtful about what you end up creating. And ultimately, it just might save you a lot of time, but we’ll come back to that later. First, you need to determine how to start researching . . .
Why Conduct Research?
If you are a writer and content creator, more likely than not you’re constantly researching information about the topic you’re exploring, hunting down images, and working with subject experts to collect and verify facts. Research projects aren’t much different, but are on a far larger scale. An important first step is to assess what literature is already available on the subject you’re investigating:
1. Has there already been research conducted on the topic?
Unsurprisingly, the Internet is a marvelous place where many research studies and journal articles are freely available. If they aren’t, it is far cheaper and takes less time to buy a copy of a journal article that answers your questions than undertake a multi-month or -year project for yourself.
2. Does any existing research meet your needs?
If there is research, does it answer your questions adequately, or are you left wondering about a few things? For us, there were plenty of studies looking into scholarly use of social platforms, but some had conflicting results.
3. Is someone else working on this too?
Since beginning our research, a number of peers at other institutions sent around surveys along a similar vein. Checking in with your network can be a good way to combine forces to reach a similar goal or point you to literature you missed.
4. Is there a business need to do independent research?
Have you been asked to conduct research? You’ll still need to perform a literature review, but you’re not going to be able to get out of what comes next.
Define Your Goals
It took two full years to complete our research, from initial planning and conducting a survey and 34 interviews to writing it all up in a white paper. If you’ve determined that there is a sizable need for a full research project, be realistic about a time frame for completion so you can keep stakeholders in the loop. Ask how this will fit into your normal workload. It might even be the case that it is such a priority that you’ll need to devote all of your time to it. Importantly, you’ll also want to know how much help you’ll have from other staff.
I had the assistance of a graduate intern, but beyond this, it was just me, myself, and a full schedule of social media posts, eNewsletters, and webpages. A research project can easily grow in size as things progress, so when your resources are already less than optimal (which they often are in the non-profit sector) it is especially important to define your project’s scope at the very beginning. Work with you manager to identify what work is a priority (and what isn’t), interview stakeholders to find out where their questions lie so the final research leaves no stone unturned, and regularly check in and communicate with said stakeholders to ensure the original goals are being met.
After conducting interviews with our senior staff members to pin down the goals of our research we determined that our key questions were:
• Is our audience on social media?
• What are their underlying perceptions, attitudes, biases, and fears toward social platforms?
• What are their biggest challenges faced when working and researching?
• How and where does social media fits into their lives?
I’m Not a Sociologist, How Do I Answer These Questions?
I’m a content producer. I write and edit, I manage projects and calendars and all that comes with creating content. Logistically speaking, I knew how to plan this research, but how to conduct this research was a different challenge.
Luckily, a content producer is not without research ability: on a daily basis, you hunt down information and images for writing as discussed, and if you’re building products or websites, there’s the magic of User Experience (UX) design techniques! To optimally produce the digital projects our team manages, we’ve been attending workshops and training in UX for a number of years that have allowed us to build an arsenal of techniques and best practices for uncovering user insights, including journey mapping, personas, and design workshops.
The results of the UX process helps highlight what problems your product or site can solve for the end user along with a thorough understanding of who your audience is and their needs. Through research and synthesis of results, it allows you to articulate the results in a way that anyone can understand (including stakeholders) so they can get behind your plans and goals. We’ve used some of these techniques for planning purposes, designing online exhibition websites, and guiding our content strategies.
While the end goal of our research was not to build a website, or app, or product, ultimately it was going to guide how we approach using social platforms and improve our outreach strategy in the future to improve our audience’s use of and relationship to our content. We decided that the best way to achieve this was a combination of survey questions (for quantifiable measurements) and one-on-one interviews (to uncover the meaning behind the numbers).
Conducting Research
Our survey ran for exactly one month and during that time we gathered 998 responses and made some really interesting discoveries. Art history scholars are on a number of social platforms and are most active on Facebook. While logged in they are typically performing passive tasks, such as reading and liking posts, rather than commenting. And a surprising 64% said they find social media useful for their work!
But, despite all of this interesting info, this doesn’t tell us why they lean toward passivity or how it’s useful. We knew that interviewing would be the best way to dig deeper into some of the patters we uncovered in the survey. Interviewing is a technique we had used previously when building sites and mobile tours to discover user needs and requirements for the end product.
Interviewing is particularly ideal for:
- Understanding real-world contexts of what you’re investigating.
This can be something as simple as if someone has a smart phone that they check religiously or if they spend as much time away from screens as possible.
- Identifying behavioral patterns, challenges, and pain points.
Perhaps your audience is frustrated by how hard it is to find something online and they build their own work-around is to get the information they need.
- Learning why people think and feel the way they do.
This is what drives them, what motivates them, what inspires them, and ultimately what determines whether or not they’re going to want whatever it is you’re offering them.
There are a lot of resources online on conducting successful interviews, but a few key tips to keep in mind:
1. Be open to iteration
You’ll have an interview script, but by the third to fifth interview you’ll know what questions are working, which aren’t, and can adjust as necessary.
2. Ask open-ended questions
An hour of “yes” and “no” is as useful as the survey. These responses are quantifiable, and you already have your numbers. You want qualitative responses that add color to the numbers you’re seeing.
3. Don’t overly structure the flow of the interview
It is inevitable that you’ll leave out some questions and want to dig deeper on others, it all depends on who you’re interviewing. Some people may need questions asked very directly. Some won’t need any prompting to start talking. A question may get answered earlier than you expect. If you know your questions like the back of your hand and understand what you’re trying to uncover, you can go off script and uncover some gems.
4. Don’t be afraid of awkward silences
People usually feel compelled to fill any gaps in conversation, and when they do, get ready for the best quotes and insights come out when you let a silence fall.
Making Sense of It All
Now that you’ve toiled for two years and have hundreds of insights to sort through, you’ll need to write up your findings in a way that anyone can understand. This process is called synthesis and with some organization (outlined below), it will bring the most important findings from your research to the forefront. This step is essential in:
- Bringing clarity from the chaos
We had hundreds of insights from 34 interviews, synthesis helps identify key themes and focuses your thoughts.
- Making meaning out of the results: Not just the what but they why.
For example, we learned that many of our scholars are in fact on Facebook, but very few actively post because they are worried about how it will reflect on them professionally . . . which we’ll come to in a minute.
- Taking you out of your own head
When you’re working so closely on a project for that long, you’re going to start thinking of outcomes before you’ve conducted your last interview. It’s important to take a step back and talk to others who aren’t as close to the work as you are to help see things you might have otherwise missed.
A few tips for conducting a successful synthesis:
1. Prime your notes: This is easily the most tedious part, but it will help immeasurably if you’re organized ahead of time.
2. Externalize what you’ve heard: Take all of your insights and individually print them out so you when you start sorting them each can be moved around where it needs to be.
3. Organize information into topics: Before you start sorting your notes, give the sorting some structure with categories that help define what each belongs to. Is it an attitude or feeling? A goal? A process? Or a need?
4. Refine topics into meaningful insights: Your notes will start grouping into different themes as you progress. Once you’re all finished, these groups will be the foundation for your insights and will be the main research takeaways
We discovered five key motivations for why art history and visual culture scholars use social media.
1. Access
2. Time
3. Advancement
4. Trust
5. Professional Reputation
You have your answers, now what?
We were tasked with writing up a white paper to communicate our results to our senior staff members and make it easy for anyone with an interest to read the results. Depending on your goals, you can take this further and make models, journey maps, personas, or wireframes, but we weren’t building a product, so we felt it was best to stop there not only to keep the scope from exploding, but because we had answered our questions!
While a full-blown research project may seem like an overwhelming endeavor, a lot of planning and being realistic about how long it will take can make the process go smoothly and deliver the best possible results. We now have evidence to answer any questions that may come our way about our audience and substantive results that will help shape our social strategy for years to come. As for it saving time, now that we know what platforms our scholarly audience prefers, we can put our efforts into those and know which we might expand to in the future, rather than futilely experiment on Snapchat or even Twitter (since we know that our audience is not spending much time on the former, and are more actively engaged on platforms other than Twitter, like Instagram).
You don’t have to keep yourself in the dark anymore about who your audience is. With the methodologies outlined above, you can at least start chipping away at your goals with a small survey or interviewing 5 to 10 of your user group. The results will provide you with more than you knew before about your audience, and when it comes to creating content for the socialsphere, that can mean the difference between simply keeping followers and providing your audience with truly engaging information.
