No Users, No Problem!
Written by: Kanika Khosla & Tab Chao — February 11th 2018
It’s all about getting those creative juices flowing… and one little secret.
If you don’t have access to your users how do you go about conducting primary research? The answer is — you get creative. We faced such a dilemma earlier this week when we realized we wouldn’t be able to observe our primary users for another week or two. We were annoyed, confused, and lost. We grumbled, sighed and rolled our eyes. Knowing that we had to move forward, we changed our attitudes and decided to look at alternative ways we could conduct research to gain more expertise in the field and information about our users.
Here are 6 things you can do if you don’t have access to your primary users:
- Conduct Guerrilla Research by reaching out to all the possible local Pittsburgh companies, such as UPMC, Giant Eagles, to conduct the guerrilla research to better understand their process of procure-to-pay
- Create lo-fi prototypes from the guerrilla research insights
- Use the research as a to create a plan for observing primary users
- Learn from online tutorials to master the process of procure-to-pay using
- Examine demos, and find areas of design opportunities
- Join neighbourhood apps, such as Nextdoor to find people in the community who have experience in the area
Let’s rewind and tell you how we got here.
It was 10:00am on Wednesday, we were ready to present our research proposal to our clients and finally schedule user observations. We had our latest, extremely detailed iteration of our research plan and a simpler proposal that we had shared with the client. Prior to our client meeting, we met with Lee Hillamn, the MHCI executive director for his thought on our proposal. His positive feedback only further motivated us for the call that afternoon.
2:00pm rolled around. We were all excited to see a live demo of the product we had read so much about, and dialed in for the Pinacle demo. Before we knew it, it was 2:55pm, our brains were saturated. But nonetheless we hoped into our client meeting. We started by explaining how the research proposal defines the 3 main areas and the methods we would use to explore the client journey, service flow, and PNC products. 15 minutes into the conversation, we realized there was concern that our research plan was spreading us too thin across products not related to Procure to Pay. With this information and the understanding that client observations were still out of reach, the call ended with the team a little confused and a lower morale.
It’s was 3:55pm and time for a much needed break. 5 minutes of fresh air did us well. We started debriefing and brainstorming. We decided to narrow down the direction that clients had insisted on, while simultaneously exploring alternative ways to collect data and conduct research.
Fast forward to Friday morning — with stress and uncertainty, we met with our faculty advisors, one who was nice enough to join us from France. We presented our constraints and suggested methods to continue research in the meantime. The meeting not only solidified our 6 identified research methods and way forward but also left us with great advice:
- Be flexible and elastic enough to deal with their needs and expectation.
- Create prototypes
- Fail quickly
- Lead the way for user centered design
All this being said, we do have a team secret which lifts us up when we are down and gets our creative juices flowing — FOOD! This week, we did a mini celebration of our one-month anniversary as a team spread across the floor of our newly organized den. To start off we had the burnt almond torte from Prantl’s bakery, which was followed by a variety of snacks. Thanks to Mika, we always get to try something new — this week it was Matcha chocolate and not to forget potato chips covered in chocolate. Mind blown! Honestly it was the best thing we had tasted. It’s chocolate and chips — how can you go wrong. Well there is our little secret in getting creative.
Till next week …
