3 essential skills non-researchers should develop

How we scaled UX research through targeted workshops

By Kimra McPherson and Orly Sibony

Over the years, the NerdWallet UX Research team started encountering two problems that many UX Research teams face. They were good problems to have, but they were problems nonetheless:

• The teams we support needed more questions answered, more often — and not just when launching a new product.
• We needed to ensure that our team of professional researchers was focusing on larger, strategic problems where our expertise would have the most impact.

In essence, we needed to scale.

But scaling research isn’t just about doing more research. We needed partners across our organization to be more informed consumers of research: to understand when, why, and how our studies were happening and why they mattered. We also wanted to increase teams’ baseline knowledge about our core users so they’d feel more confident moving forward without a brand new study for every question.

We tackled this in two ways. First, we developed a handful of ways to get Nerds (that’s what we call our employees!) more access to user voices in a variety of formats. We created a Slack channel to post user quotes and videos and a monthly lunchtime presentation of the most salient clips from recent research projects. We launched an empathy-building program that allows partners from across the company to listen to live user interviews and participate in debriefs so they can better understand our target segments’ needs. And we invited research participants to speak on panels for the whole company about their financial needs and decisions.

And then, for our closest partners — primarily Design, Content Strategy, and Product — we launched a training program for research skills. Our partners go through a series of hands-on activities that mirror the process of planning, running, and synthesizing a study — and at the end of it all, we want them to come away with these three core skills:

1. Knowing when and why to do research in the first place

We start with the basics: what’s UX research, where in the product development process do we use it, and how do we decide what questions to answer?

Although some of this is a bit 101 for some partners, it’s helpful to review these topics to get everyone on the same page and lay the foundation for the rest of the research skills we’ll teach.

After that, we guide our Nerds through the following:

• Figuring out if a product/idea even needs research
• Creating a research objective that will get you the answer you need (Pro tip: we have them use actual questions from their daily work to make it most relevant.)
• Deciding who you’re going to run the study on (Pro trip: try a MadLibs-style approach where partners fill in the target user and objective of the study. For example, “How do [Americans between the ages of 18–65 with 2+ kids] [balance saving money for both retirement and their kids’ college fund?]”)
• Creating a basic outline of open-ended, non-leading tasks and questions
• Piecing it all together into a research plan

2. Taking great research notes

In our everyday work as researchers, we encourage our partners to sit in on interviews and watch videos of unmoderated sessions — not just so they can experience what users say for themselves, but also so they can take notes that become part of the record of the session. When we started building out our training program, we thought we’d teach our partners to interview, but it turned out that what they really wanted to learn was how to take good notes. That meant improving their ability to listen actively, capture important moments, and observe users’ subtle cues.

So we doubled down on teaching our colleagues how to take great notes with tips like:

• Separate facts from feelings
• Pay attention to what users say, think, do, and feel
• Capture thoughts, actions, words, and reactions
• Include direct quotes like “This is really cool!”
• Record actions (e.g., “user clicked on GET RATES button”)
• Capture signs of feelings (e.g., “leaned into the screen, expression changed” or “user sighed” or “user’s tone of voice changed”)
• Capture thoughts (e.g., “I think this is how I’d get back to the home page, but I’m not really sure”)

Then, to start practicing their new skills, we have them take notes on a video of a real participant working through an unmoderated study script.

3. Making sense of all that data

Interpreting what participants say and do (or don’t say and don’t do) is where so much of research’s magic happens. And it’s also really hard, especially for partners who haven’t had a ton of practice. So we built a workshop to teach a step-by-step, templatized process for analyzing and synthesizing data.

In this workshop, we start with our partners’ own notes from the notetaking practice session, and we work through a series of straightforward, methodological exercises to look for insights and then turn them into recommendations.

To start, we encourage our partners to comb their notes for things users said many times (frequency) or with particular emotion or intensity (severity). We also have them look for “aha” moments — which are the moments when users understand the value of an element of a concept or design (or all of it!).

Then, in small groups, they write those takeaways, “aha” moments, and other observations on post-its (real or digital), and they start grouping them into themes, a.k.a. insights. Finally, we help them turn insights into recommendations and assign those recommendations priority in terms of what to tackle next.

We’ve found that following this process keeps recommendations grounded in data. Otherwise, it’s easy for partners to jump to conclusions about their study.

It seems like a lot, but scaling research skills is a win-win for researchers and non-researchers alike

If you’re a researcher reading this, you may be thinking “wow, teaching these essential research skills to non-researchers is a big investment of time!” But we promise, it’s worthwhile. Whether you follow a similar workshop format or coach your partners one-on-one, it’ll definitely take you more time upfront than it would to run the study yourself. But you’re making an investment: you’re teaching people to fish.

Not only will your teammates learn how to run their own studies, but they’ll gain ownership of the insights. This makes them more likely to make the insights actionable because they understand them better and are more excited about them. Plus, you’ll create grassroots advocates for research and what it can bring to the table, which is always a good thing.

Want to be part of a team that writes about stuff like this? Check out open roles in Design + User Experience at NerdWallet.