Rethinking how UX research helps to manage risk.
Who are the “users” of the results of UX research? I’ve always known it to be the end users of the product or service. Today, I’m not so sure.
Over the past few months, thanks to the new direction the research team at Normative has taken, I’ve come to subtly shifting the way I understand the goals of UX research. By aligning with the objectives and pain points of research users (i.e., our client, my team), the projects becomes richer endeavors.
It is a common belief that doing UX research contributes to managing risk. But what if how we did research or even thought about research allowed us to put risk management front and center of our work?
Rephrasing the research question
Last summer, I was charged with designing a preliminary research methodology for a dating app geared towards people who identified as non-binary. The budget for the exploratory stage was minimal, and for further stages unclear. The initial question was: What’s the most effective way to develop a valuable precursory view of the environment that this proposed technology would work to improve?
Valid question to start with, but I was now asked to take one step back. The real goal of this preliminary UX research had to focus on identifying our client’s risks. Seeing our work through this lens allowed me to further clarify our initial question:
- Given our constraints, how can we generate research insights that will be sufficient for our client to mitigate risk down the road?
- What kind of evidence does our client need in order to make project decisions right now?
Together with my Research Director, we came up with a solution. My first study of the non-binary dating scene required no sourcing and no interviews. At the same time, it did what I needed it to do: It disrupted the way I thought about dating technology and gender, and helped me develop a study and design questions.
I engaged in a systematic and organized study of the online space surrounding the non-binary phenomenon. In my study of this dating space, I had access to YouTube videos of app reviews and personal dating stories, comments to the articles on online dating experiences in queer online magazines, and apps themselves, in which people were attempting to identify themselves and what they were looking for using the tools at hand.
Thus, as part of this exploratory work, I got to practice a form of cyber ethnography — a study of online platforms as spaces where human behavior happens. My presence as a researcher was invisible as I observed the conversations of the “locals.” My Director suggested I consider what I observed as artifacts — exhibited behaviors that spoke of motivation, constraints, sources of stress or discomfort. As in other forms of UX research work, I was to seek out patterns, behaviors, and ways of thinking that were shared.
The most important insight that this work generated was this:
Rather than thinking of the dating app as an app for non-binary people, I had to start thinking of the app as a non-binary kind of technology.
The tools for defining oneself outside of the binary of male and female are quite limited, since that kind of a self-definition relies on its opposition to the established polarities of male or female. In other words, one is required to define oneself as “not that” (as in “somewhat male” or “not quite female”) as opposed to saying “these are the things that are me” or “this is how I understand myself.” Instead of developing my own idea of gender and then prescribing it to users, I realized I needed to understand the properties of a space that would be organized around a different kind of logic — a technology that understood gender as an open-ended phenomenon.
This insight was exciting for me, and I was eager to move onto the next stage of research. On the inside, however, I was still resenting this new approach. The idea of matching clients’ needs with the best resources we had available, rather than looking to golden principles of research as a guiding star in all my decision-making — it was a hard pill to swallow.
Then, a light bulb went off in my head
One day, a client we were working with on a different project told us they would agree to the research strategy I proposed based on similar preliminary work. The client was actually happy.
The work I was complaining about, in fact, was exactly the evidence they needed in order to size up potential risks, substantiate further product development choices, and arm them with the kinds of questions they should be asking potential users. The best result of all? My work ensured that our team was moving on, with embedded empathy for our app’s users early in the process.
This week, I opened a meeting with the client by asking questions like:
“What worries you the most about your product right now?”
“What kind of evidence do you need to resolve these issues?”
“What, ideally, would you like the research report to focus on?”
The shift in research perspective here at Normative solidified our thinking about researchers as strategic partners in the product development process. And, almost in real-time, I am seeing it produce a ripple effect that transforms the methods we choose, how we engage other parts of the team in the research process, and how we present our findings.
