Research Perspectives
Research in harmony: Team members as partners throughout your research journey
At Red Hat, collaboration colors everything we do. Here’s how our researchers join forces with other team members to supercharge user research impact.
User research is a journey, one that’s more fun with company! At Red Hat, we believe everything is better with collaboration — and user research is no exception.
We think it’s important to partner with and engage product role players early on and work closely with them along the way, no matter your research team’s size or role. What can you expect to gain through teaming up with your team members and incorporating user needs into your development process?
Based on our journey at Red Hat, here are five strides you can expect to make as you research and collaborate in harmony.
1) Your research efforts will become more focused and outcome-driven.
It is no secret that us researchers love focus and a clear sense of research scope. But, in real life, we rarely encounter research projects where there is a clear understanding of research goals from the start. It usually takes one or two iterations and a review session with stakeholders to create and refine specific research objectives and obtain a clear sense of expected outcomes. Setting the expectations in the early stages of planning will be a tremendous help when it comes to designing your experiments and delivering results. You’ll know what exactly you will need to highlight in your research deliverables and what the priorities should look like.
For instance, I started a research project with the impression that the team wanted to know which design variation users prefer, A or B or C. After a meeting with the stakeholders to better understand the “why” behind the research request, we figured out that the actual question was whether users would need a new way to create a set of system configurations (that we created three variations of) and if this new way solved any problems for them. This collaboration with stakeholders helped us to focus our research on the questions that matter to the team.
Clarifying research scope and objectives with stakeholders also helps with managing your time and resources in situations where you have multiple priorities. We’ve all fallen victim to unexpected changes; sometimes actual events swerve from our previous expectations. Familiarizing yourself with stakeholder priorities from the start will help you act fast and adjust your research approach accordingly.
2) You’ll accelerate your research with speedier turnarounds.
Finding and recruiting the right research participants can become tedious, especially when you are dealing with busy technical users. Chances are, stakeholders already have a group of people in mind or have some leads on where to begin.
Transcribing interviews is another research task that can be time-consuming. As an alternative to transcription, you can invite stakeholders to join your research sessions to observe and take notes while you moderate them. This allows them to observe your findings in real-time, condensing some communication and speeding the process along. User research is often criticized for slow speeds; integrating your stakeholders into your research journey allows you to create a more nimble and dynamic process.
At Red Hat, we’ve seen real-world results from integrating stakeholders throughout our research process. In a recent time sensitive study where we had only 10 working days to the release date, we managed to conduct and analyze a series of interviews in only 4 days; a study that would typically take 2–3 weeks. This was mainly due to the connection one of the stakeholders had with a community of contributors as well as the product team’s presence and participation in the live sessions. After each day of interviews, we met for a debrief session where we shared our learnings from the day and collectively listed highlights.
3) You’ll build a community of research advocates (or even, a community of researchers).
On Red Hat UXD’s research team, one of our goals is to attract and find internal talents who are interested in conducting research. Our hope is that we can inspire, enable, and empower our team members to infuse more user research into their work and become more problem and user centric in their approaches. We see research projects as opportunities for team members to get first hand experience with planning, executing, and analyzing research studies. Their initial involvement and observations prepares them to start practicing research on their own.
Additionally, by engaging your team members throughout the research process, they will be able to directly observe and experience research’s impact. This can eventually result in building and expanding a community of research advocates, which can translate into more budget and resources for your research team: hence more research! This foundational approach to building trust and credibility is more powerful than any other forms of marketing materials or awareness sessions. (As an open-source and community driven company, you can take our word for it.)
In my own experience, our partnership with team members on research projects not only helped us gain more visibility to our work and grow our network of research advocates, but it has also expanded our research team into a larger group of devoted researchers.
4) You’ll spend less time negotiating and more time doing.
Simply inviting different team members to observe research sessions can go a long way. It’s a great way to enable and inspire team members to build first hand empathy with users. Direct observation goes miles above research deliverables. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to engage directly with your users. This interaction will also help your product team shift from a solution-driven to an experience-driven approach.
Including your stakeholders and other team members in research sessions ensures they’re already well-informed by the time you prepare deliverables. Hands-on research also encourages your team to launch into iteration mode sooner — personal engagement with users will likely inspire and convince them to take action. As a result, you’ll counter less surprises and less resistance. In the time you’d usually spend persuading others about the results during your research report presentation, you can focus on what you’ve learned from your research and how you can use these findings to implement meaningful changes.
We experienced how this stakeholder involvement streamlines acting on research findings through a collaborative effort with the product team. In a follow-up conversation after sharing research findings with stakeholders, one of the managers said “… By the time I had the call to ‘make’ the final decision, they [the product team] were already reverting the changes” and that “there was limited room for Disagreement -> Arguing -> Negotiating -> Agreement.” In this example, the close collaboration between the researcher and stakeholders enabled the design and development teams to act quickly on the findings without any push-back or lengthy debates.
5) Your collaborative user research will emphasize and elevate collective learning.
As researchers, we know that research is a balancing act between rigor, speed, cost, resources, and limitations. And this balancing act often moves fast: Close collaboration with team members helps us better find our footing.
Research projects go beyond the scope of research itself. They chart collaborative learning journeys. Researching in harmony enables:
- Product teams and researchers to learn about the people who use their tools and services.
- Researchers to learn about the business and product team’s priorities and objectives.
- Team members to learn about researcher’s journeys, impact, challenges, and perspectives.
- Team members to learn about the science behind research projects so that they can practice conducting research studies alongside researchers.
In user research, we are all learning partners.
I hope this article has inspired you to approach your research projects more collaboratively. Ask your team to join you on your next research journey — your products, team, and research will be all the better for it.
Curious about Red Hat’s UXD research team? Check out our interview with PatternFly to learn more about who we are and what we do.
Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.
