
Cards Against Calamity
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
Recently, the Redbubble Research team road-tested a tool we’ve developed for product teams who are engaged in or interested in conducting user research. We’ve called it Cards Against Calamity. It will help you fail softly. It’s deliberately open source and free to download.
Our hope is that this playful activity will help teams identify and control the small but significant loose threads that unravel a research session.
Even a deceptively simple and short usability test is laden with potential calamity. Solid research management and hard won experience can mitigate the risks. But you also need a good dose of empathy for everyone involved: researcher, participant, stakeholder, designer and more.

Vaccinating against calamity
In our small (but mighty) team at Redbubble Research, we’re part of the larger pie of Research Ops debate emerging globally. We regularly get into research nerd chats about operational topics such as:
- how to scale and maintain quality
- what a research maturity model looks like
- can insight/issue knowledge management be deep and broad
- how can consistency get us closer to reliability.
But the Cards Against Calamity actually came from something other.
We wanted to build a scaffold for thoughtful and reflective research practice. We wanted to put ‘care’ up front and centre. Not in isolation but with the people we want participating in, observing, preparing for and responding to design research. We believe that understanding the research experience from the perspective of the different players involved will make a big difference to the quality and impact of our research.
As Jay Hasbrouck reminds us in ‘Inverting Empathy’, “Empathizing with your colleagues in the same way that ethnographers do with research participants in the field might feel a bit counterintuitive at first, but the results of ‘inverting’ empathy in this way are quite tangible.”
That’s why we’re developing these tools and why we want you to use them too. So download, use and tell us how it went. Think of it like a vaccination against calamity.
Try it yourself
We’ve had some great suggestions on instructional resources or case studies to accompany the Cards. We’ll keep working on that. But in the meantime, please download, use and let us know how you go.

There are two options for session format:
- small groups of 5–8 where everyone acts a role
- large group watches a small group perform
You can download the pdf files for either the the small or large group format at http://rdbl.co/calamitycards.
Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Testing the cards
Thanks to everyone who attended Experience Design Doers (XD2) and Product Camp 2018 in Melbourne, Australia for being our guinea pigs. We trialled the cards as part of our presentation ‘The power of pessimism: Using research ops to avoid calamity in user testing’ and really appreciate all the feedback received so far.
We’d love to hear more on how how the cards perform in the field. Contact emily.murray@redbubble.com, tag or leave a comment below.

About the Redbubble Research team
Redbubble is an online marketplace whose mission is to bring more creativity into the world. Our Design & Research team is instrumental in bringing this mission to fruition.
Half a year ago, the Redbubble Research was a team of one. Today, we are a team of five. Along the way we have built an accountable, ethical and inclusive design research practice with an ever-advancing toolkit of methods and approaches. As we grow, we want a sustainable, scalable research practice that gives us the confidence to flex, pivot, and explore.

Emily Murray is a design researcher with over 15 years of experience with corporate, government and education clients, both in-house and as a consultant. She spent too long at university studying architecture, cultural studies and creative writing. But in return, she is rarely bored and gets very animated about details such as front lawns, letterboxes and street signs. She is naturally inclined toward in-context research but has delivered many, many user tests and made plenty of mistakes.
Jo Lumsden has been a design researcher at Redbubble since early 2017, and comes from a background in design and research consulting. In addition to her passion for in-depth understanding of the needs and behaviours of people through qualitative research, she is excited about all things ResearchOps; especially the scaling and democratisation of research.
Ana Maria Kresina has recently moved into the research team at Redbubble after many years of experience in marketing and communications. She is a vagabond hailing from Vancouver, who embraces adversity, obsesses over learning, is an experience-seeker, and a self-proclaimed badass. When she isn’t pursuing design research she’s most likely looking after her plants, working out, or eating cheese.
Naomi Civins is a qualitative customer research specialist and HCD manager with experience across industries from banking and finance to food manufacturing. She’s worked end-to-end, from exploratory research through to waterfall and agile detailed design, test and launch, and knows that design is only as good as it is useful. She’s a runner and uses her morning runs to connect with her energy, bring it back to the team and find ways to keep moving forward, no matter what. She has also completed a PhD in ethnography.
Anna Moreno has been a passionate translator and localiser for the past 8 years and only recently joined the Redbubble research team. She’s focused on exploring the impact of cultural differences in the user experience and excited to finally be allowed to ask “why?” as many times as she wants.

