The Second One Team Gov User Research Unconference

Find out more about our recent event at HMRC Shipley on 4 February 2020 as part of Services Week 2020

A photo of a poster advertising the User Research Unconference

This was the second One Team Gov User Research Unconference following our debut in May 2019. We took on board the feedback from the first event; attendees wanted more time to discuss user research with like-minded individuals so this event was a full day of unconferencing.

Read more about our first unconference:

One Team Gov User Research Unconference

It was also Services Week, a whole week dedicated to cross-government events celebrating the value of user centred service design, so what better time than this to have a user research meet-up?

What happened on the day?

26 people attended, a mix of people from Local Government, HMRC, NHS, Home Office and Third Sector. Some attendees were User Researchers and worked alongside researchers and wanted to find out more. An unconference provided the ideal opportunity for these two groups to come together.

We used post-it notes to generate ideas for discussion on the day. This gave everyone the opportunity to contribute their ideas, with no need to stand up and pitch in front of everyone which some can find intimidating.

All these ideas were then grouped into themes to identify what topics we all wanted to discuss. These included:

• stakeholder buy-in,
• methods and participant recruitment,
• getting started in research,
• team working,
• sharing findings, and,
• wellbeing.

Find out more in the session summaries below…

What did we learn?

It was great to spend time discussing all things user research. This gave us the opportunity to share problems (a problem shared, is a problem halved, right?) and learn from one another.

We asked participants to add their post-its to the wall to show what they had learned on the day. These post-its are shown in the photo below and summarised further on.

Photo of post-its showing learning so far

People told us they learned about:

• Having the whole team participate in research analysis
• All about collaboration / openness
• We’re not the only ones with a particular problem
• Red, Amber, Green rating for hypothesis
• Getting stakeholders to reframe discussion
• “Good to hear some challenges elsewhere, thank you” / “Good to know others have similar issues” / “Nice to know that others are having the same kinds of issues, don't feel so ‘isolated’”
• “We would love to get involved with a Service UR community in Sheffield”
• User Research communities tools to help and share learnings
• We still need to break down some silos

Tweet from Rochelle Gold that sums up how we all feel following the Unconference

Feedback

In true user research style we took the opportunity to get feedback at the end of the day, did we meet the needs of our attendees?

Photo of feedback post-its

Attendees told us that they enjoyed:

• The format, pace and relaxed environment.
• Having a full day.
• The opportunity to share information and learn from others.
• Being able to influence the agenda, cover relevant topics and choose which session to go to.
• Meeting a good mix of people with different levels of experience from different organisations.

But there were also a number of suggestions for next time, including (but not limited to):

• Include training/ practicalities of specific research techniques.
• Include a blend of pre-planned more structured sessions and unconference sessions.
• Allow more time for networking outside of discussions.
• Provide a contact card with all social media channels to take away.
• Have an icebreaker at the beginning, and,
• have another one soon!

We can’t wait to build on all this, so watch this space for the next One Team Gov User Research Unconference!

In the meantime, our conversations will continue on Slack
oneteamgovernment.slack.com

#oneteamgovnorth #leeds-breakfast

Session summaries

There were a number of discussions around the themes listed above, we have summarised the key elements for people to refer back to, and would love to hear your thoughts on any of the below, please comment below with your thoughts!

1.Stakeholder buy-in

• How do we overcome resistance from stakeholders?
• Stakeholders often don’t understand user research and the value it can bring.
• Balancing user needs and business requirements can be tricky.
• Persuading stakeholders to buy into research before they delve into developing and designing solutions is important.
• User research should drive decisions not internal assumptions and findings should not being made to fit pre-proposed solutions.
• Using the right language is the best way to get stakeholders onboard, what is the risk of not doing research?
• Freeing up time for stakeholders to engage with primary research is a must.
• Quantifying the value of research and what can be achieved helps to engage stakeholders.
• Resource limitations, research is often the first thing to go, this is a challenge we all share.

2. Methods and participant recruitment

2.A — GDPR: Consent to user research and use data of ethics

• Use an online feedback form on services and include a tick box to be recontacted to help with participant recruitment. Bad feedback from forms is gold dust. People only tend to fill them in when they’ve had a super experience, or a really bad one, so this won’t get the people in the middle.
• Stakeholder relationship manager/Research Ops can ensure that contacts aren’t overused, using more than one way (one contact /charity/ org etc) to recruit particular users can ensure that contacts don’t get exhausted.

2. B — Accessibility recruitment

• Automated tools can help check a service is accessible but doesn’t catch everything.
• Staff disability networks at work can be great to work with to understand access needs.

2. C — How to recruit people with low digital skills or people with low appetite?

• Get Advice website has a chatty tone that can help to reassure. Difficult to balance the needs of confident users against those who need content to be written in a different way to reassure. Difficult also to go against design guidelines if the user research suggests that is needed.
• Video content can help provide reassurance and make things less scary too.

2. D — Incentivising users

• Users with direct experience of poverty — how do we incentivise? It can be ethically difficult to know when an incentive starts to influence the consent of the participant.
• For those who are at work so we can’t incentivise: Getting people to come in to work in their spare time so you can incentivise them can be one way of doing it.
• Either way, work out what you can give someone back, if not money.

3.Getting started in research

• If bringing research into the organisation for the first time, manage expectations in the organisation of who the user research is and what they will (and won’t do).
• 20% time can be really valuable, allow the researcher 1 day a week to read a book or shadow a senior researcher in the org or in another org.
• Try new things as a team once a researcher is in place (e.g sprint pace), see what works and don’t be afraid to experiment.
• Change can be fast paced and things can change quickly around the research — how can you say you’ve covered your bases?
• Perhaps it is only possible to say how confident you are in something, rather than say something is ‘done’. Be honest with gaps in research, if there are user groups that haven’t been researched with enough.
• RAG (Red, Amber, Green) rating for hypotheses can help team identify what is most confident and what needs more week
• If there are lots of researchers on a project then a shared log document for user research on a project helps to identity where there has been a lot of user group engagement with particular users, or a particular topic covered in depth.
• Stakeholders can often want to take control of research materials. A good technique to get them to write a statement “as an [X], I want to know [X]”, to help inform the researcher of what the stakeholder themselves want to find out from the project, rather than the stakeholder writing discussion guide questions themselves.
• Pushing back and saying no to work: using a dashboard, went through line by line as a project manager team with senior people, lots of negotiation…agreed prioritisation is important. Researchers can’t do everything. Further to this, concentrating on one project is necessary as a researcher to properly immerse yourself in context and not deal with competitiveness of opposing team requirements for your time.

4. Team working

• Working collaboratively across the organisation so user research is not seen as a separate entity is valuable.
• Sharing user research tasks during service design when you have a few extra people to help.
• How much support and guidance should we provide to other teams (without User Researchers) conducting their own research? Ability to do so often depends on capacity.
• Finding the balance between user research as a team sport and the specific skills and experience required to lead on research; all should have a basic understanding of research but User Researchers should take the lead as they can remain objective.
• Planning user research objectives as a project team is one way to avoid silo working.
• Working as part of a multidisciplinary team is useful and there are limitations of not having a multidisciplinary team in place; it slows down the pace of work.
• It is important to make research visible and have the space to do so, physical and virtual boards are useful.
• There are additional challenges when working as part of a cross-country team, communicating via video conferencing helps.
• Things work better when the Product Owner is fully invested.

5. Sharing findings

• Sharing research findings and outcomes in an engaging way, what one person finds engaging may be different to another. Know your audience.
• Keeping user needs at the forefront and using user stories to inform the scope of research/ present research findings.
• Tools to synthesise data and findings into actionable insights.
• Keeping research objectives in mind when synthesising findings ensures focus.
• Using journey maps to visualise research and identify pain-points works well.
• Quantify research where possible as this helps get buy-in from senior stakeholders.
• User Research library to share findings across organisations would make it easier to avoid duplication but how would we encourage this to be used?
• Getting the right people in the room when running analysis sessions is important, those observing research should also be involved in the analysis. Affinity sorting is a good tool for this.
• Prioritising findings can be done using prioritisation matrix and dot voting.

6. Wellbeing

• Hostility from people in the organisation can be hard work!
• It can be tough to receive dissatisfaction from users and also from stakeholders who aren’t bought into the idea of user research.
• Being a researcher is mentally and emotionally draining.
  It’s important to understand what I have the power to do in this situation, and let things go that aren’t in my control.
• Imposter syndrome: academic knowledge doesn’t outweigh applied experience! Both are valuable.
• Getting the right people in the room, don’t be afraid to cut meetings short if they’re not the right people, get the time back in your day.
• Take time to talk things through with a colleague or someone in the UCD community to let things go and move on from difficult research sessions/workshops/meetings.