Achieve More Research, More Frequently
Try these approaches to convince your senior stakeholders to sign off on more design research for better products across the organization
Among designers, the battle of whether needing research or not has been won. It’s not whether teams need research, but how much, or through what methods or channels we’ll use to better understand our customers’ needs and expectations.
But that doesn’t mean it’s time to schedule the victory parade. Too often research is a one-shot usability test only to confirm the assumptions of the business, or is only testing the efficacy of a few specific workflows — or worse, just features — rather than understanding how the full experience of a product or service meets the needs of a diverse customer base.
It’s not easy to ask business stakeholders or management for more testing or more time for additional campaigns, or to test more often. But there are a number of methods we’ve been using at Nasdaq that have been working to significantly increase our exposure to customers over the last few years.
And at conferences such as Prototypes, Process & Play, UX Advantage, and UX Week, I’ve been hearing from a number of attendees who are struggling to convince their executive teams and stakeholders to greenlight more research, and more frequent exposure to customers.
To establish an expectation that research will be involved at every step of the product development process, try adding these approaches to how you plan and conduct research and you’ll likely see an increase in the frequency, scope, and depth of your research campaigns for your design and product teams.
- Plan for iterative research
- Full transparency before, during, & after research
- Encourage cross-team participation
- Make sales, marketing, and service teams your ally
- Promote customer feedback to executive stakeholders
- Tie research to larger business needs
- Don’t pull the ladder up
Plan for iterative research
One of the best, if not simplest methods of making sure your work gets in front of customers throughout the product development process is to account for it in project plans. When senior stakeholders and project management meet to estimate delivery dates and milestones, make sure they’re taking into account not just usability testing, but also the development work to implement any changes that come out of the usability testing or other research, and to test it again.
At Nasdaq, our first year or two found us basically planning for research by just realizing we wanted to show some work to customers at the conclusion of the current sprint. Such an ad-hoc approach can look like you’re not taking research seriously, or that the merits of research are insignificant to the product.
Giving usability testing and design research the gravitas that it should be accounted for in early stage planning inherently shows you’re treating it strategically and not just as an ad-hoc activity dispersed throughout the design process. `
Full transparency before, during, & after research
At Nasdaq, we’ve been trying to mature our research practice from whipping together a script in the days leading up to an interview into a comprehensive planning phase.
Don’t think of this as big-organization overhead that can’t get out of its own way.
Rather, this planning phase allows us to slow down and identify the right people we need to talk to, make sure we’re covering the unknowns and themes we’re interested in exploring, and to review the big picture of how we’re going to use what we learn, and settle on the time to share this across different groups within the project team.
Then we share it with our development leads, commercial leads, and product management.
Our design research strategy documentation is still pretty sparse, despite it sounding like yet another powerpoint deck or PDF collecting dust in a large company.
While each campaign may be slightly different, most of these plans include the following:
- Primary Research Lead and other roles
- Themes to explore
- Duration of campaign
- Qualifying criteria for participants
- Confirmed participants
- Methods to be used
- Script, if available (in some cases our research strategy doc is drafted prior to scripts being fully prepared)
- Estimated date to deliver findings
Include those representatives from other teams when you’re preparing such a document — not just at the meeting where you present or walk through what you want to learn.
In addition, having an artifact describing what you want to learn is a good stake in the ground to determine if, at the end of the campaign, your observations were conclusive to what you wanted to learn.
Basically these post-campaign summary documents should reveal one of a few outcomes of research:
- We learned what we wanted to learn, and continue as planned
- The research refuted our assumptions and we need to shift our plans
- The research led us to a different path altogether that warrants additional prioritization relative to current demands
Showing your process and approach to one research campaign will more than likely lead to being approached by those other stakeholders for additional research later.
Encourage cross-team participation
Planning and document-sharing is just the start of a collaborative approach to design research, and you shouldn’t stop at just those people working directly on your project.
Inviting other stakeholders and participants from other development teams, other product managers, and other designers not working on the project undergoing research is an opportunity to demystify design research in a safe environment.
#Protip: Because we encourage these folks from other teams to actually sit in on interviews and in some cases ask follow-up questions, we go over ground rules about appropriate behavior long before the actual interview. Consider a brief run through of things to avoid, such as interrupting the speaker, asking yes or no questions, and leading the participant to one desired answer.
Ask what they would want to know, what they think a customer would say, or what they’re curious they could learn if a customer saw their work sooner than later.
And after you’ve been conducting research, tease out how the research outcomes of the current campaign can relate to or influence other projects, and you’re already setting the table for more research.
Make sales, marketing, and service teams your ally
In many organizations the sales and account management teams have the most access to customers, but they’re unfamiliar with design research or why designers may want to talk to “their” customers.
Try to schedule brown-bag lunch meetings with no more than 10 reps where you show them how important their relationships with clients can be to the product development process.
- Show an example of when a design has changed as a result of user research.
- Encourage them to listen in on a usability test or discovery interview.
- Volunteer to attend or even participate in a sales demo or client call to show you can gather useful information without donning a white lab coat.
Sales teams are also great proxies for research, provided you’re aware of a few potential gotchas that can trip you up. Ask sales teams who the primary decision maker is in the buying process, what features sway a lost deal to the competition, and any trends they see firsthand in the industry.
#Protip: Just be aware in some cases sales folks are only thinking of what they can sell to their clients as soon as possible, so be sure to measure if their comments are inadvertently specific to their own clients’ short-term needs and not for the good of the larger, primary user base and business needs.
By increasing your research participant pipeline, you’ll be prepared to meet the increased demand for design research.
Promote customer feedback to executive stakeholders
One of the best ways to ensure you get more resources and more support for your research efforts is to give the executive team a bite size chunk of positive customer feedback.
If you’re recording the interviews (and you are, right?), edit a clip or two where the customer is really positive about your work.
Celebrating and promoting these clips show that customers are excited about the mission, that you’re on the right track, and that you have some positive momentum.
#Protip: Consider maintaining a shared spreadsheet of these positive, executive-friendly comments so that the team can add and reuse these clips for future needs.
If you’re in a smaller organization, share these clips with the entire company to show that design research can confirm you’re heading in the right direction.
In turn, the executive team will be more likely to support future research endeavors by seeing external validation of your work.
Tie research to larger business needs
Encourage other departments to reuse and repurpose your research
Much of your design research should be valuable to other teams throughout your organization. For instance, perhaps Marketing would be interested to hear how your observations reinforce ways they’re contemplating positioning a new partnership.
Or other teams may want to begin interviewing customers without knowing you’ve spoken to 50 individuals of the same groups of people they’re about to reach out to.
Maybe you’re like us and have been talking to a lot of customers in a variety of different business lines, sizes, industries, and locations. And for as many times as we talk to an early-career administrative professional, we’re also talking to a senior vice president or a CFO who has the purchasing power to close deals.
So how can this be helpful?
Perhaps your customer insights team wants to augment their market segmentation work with your personas — showing patterns and differences between big American corporation pain points and small European organizations that can reveal new ways to position or market your product offering.
Or your sales teams could benefit from knowing more about which personas you’ve already talked to — hopefully over and over again — to know which roles are buyers, influencers, saboteurs. Or perhaps you’ve established patterns that fall into Steve Blank’s segments as user, buyer, payer, and saboteur and lead the way for more nuanced decision-making.
It shouldn’t surprise you that your design research may be a treasure trove of actionable, significant strategic findings that can help your organization in far more ways than confirming you are building the right tools for your customer base.
And once the organization recognizes this opportunity, you’ll be asked to research additional customers and groups to continue learning.
Don’t pull the ladder up. Drop the ladder down.
Help coach other teams in your organization conduct design research.
Because just like other teams can benefit from your research, your own design team can be better prepared for future research campaigns when you build off of what other teams have found.
Instead of protecting design research as the domain only of designers (which is still a rarity in itself), show others in your organization that you can help them become better interviewers, facilitators, note-takers, and ultimately improve at identifying actionable conclusions.
Organize workshops where you break down how you plan a research campaign, including how you determine what you want to learn and the types of people you’ll be reaching out to. Then show what a good interview script looks like and how they can tailor their research interests into a script that can lead to those insights.
Perform role-playing exercises to get less experienced interviewers more comfortable with letting the participant talk, even if it means allowing awkward silences to persist, so the interviewee continues to elaborate.
#Protip: If design research is under the purview of product management, try conducting these workshops as a method of practice for the wider team. It’s unlikely you’ll look like you’re trying to land-grab research from product management, and you’ll get to see where you can help them improve first-hand.
And preparing inexperienced researchers doesn’t have to stop at the interview.
As mentioned in an earlier article about Enabling Design Influence at Scale, we refer to how providing these non-designer based teams with starter artifacts and templates encourages a consistency across these teams.
We’ve found that Word and Powerpoint-format templates work best for relatively simple but important documents that guide teams to a shared understanding of what to build and why.
We provide persona templates, blank journey maps, and goal prioritization documents so teams start off on the right foot before and after their interviews.
And dropping the ladder down applies to your own design team as well. If your team is comprised of specialists rather than generalists, have your research leads work with junior interaction designers or junior visual designers to broaden their exposure to design research. Ask them to be an additional note-taker and observer, and encourage them to participate in a post-interview retro meeting to learn what they perceived as important.
With a practice session or two, you could have these less experienced folks hone their skills with internal stakeholders or sales or account staff prior to facilitating a session with external people.
Conclusion
It should be clear that more participation and increased promotion generally translates into more research.
To benefit from increased exposure to clients, show how the exposure you’ve already had has benefitted the larger organization.
Creating the environment where research is expected is ultimately built on more people counting on research to inform their product development process and how those products can be positioned and sold to your customers.
And as more people learn that design research is ultimately about discovering and validating that you build the right thing, versus designing the planned thing the best way it can be designed, you’ll also soon be expected to use design research to lead your organization to new, future opportunities where you can continue the cycle of more research, more frequently.
