Historian to User Researcher
Pursuing my interest in people
After I graduated with a degree in history, I was considering going back to school to continue my studies. I loved history. It satisfied my passion for learning about people, ideas, and culture. The study of history has the ability to shed light onto past experiences that inform the way we as people see and shape the world.
Through some exploration in childhood education, computer programming, and psychology after graduation, I stumbled upon user research. Although ostensibly different than history, its human-centered approach to learning and solving problems grabbed my interest. As a history student, I researched, wrote, and presented about different historical events, their implications, and how they affected and influenced people. As a user researcher, I could see the potential to apply those skills to current problems we face in technology.
While the methods are not always the same, both history and user research seek to build understanding, tell people’s stories, and expose experiences that can inform the way we look at the future.
As a user research intern at Salesforce, here’s a snapshot of my experience and a few ways I applied my skills as a Historian to the job.
The Domain
I put my skills to use this summer on Salesforce’s Service Cloud. Think about a time when you needed to get an item repaired, or were having an issue with your phone service. You probably emailed, called, or tweeted the company for help with the issue.
Most companies use a tool like Service Cloud to track and resolve requests in their queue. As an agent, success is measured by different metrics, but can include average handle time, their Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or their time to first response. In many of these metrics, mere seconds can differentiate a successful interaction from an unsuccessful interaction and your performance is highly influenced by the tools and technology that you use.
Salesforce’s Service Cloud is a powerful and complex platform. Organizations that use Salesforce do not use it uniformly. Use cases and scale can vary market-to-market, company-to-company. For example, a large organization that provides tax and financial services will have different needs than a smaller organization that sells automotive parts.
Enterprise user research has to take into account different workflows, organizational priorities, and unique company processes. The result is that Salesforce is highly customizable to accommodate all those variables. Like any historian, I knew understanding the space, its key players, and the environmental factors that push influence progress would be crucial.
Building a Foundation
I first started to learn about the domain space, soaking in much as I could through articles, videos tutorials, presentations, blogs, past research reports… anything that could paint a fuller picture of the environment I would be interacting with. This process felt a lot like the one that I engaged in when studying history as an undergraduate. Conducting foundational research, sifting through the “noise,” and picking out major themes are critical parts of any new research endeavor.
When I studied history, I often read multiple accounts that highlighted different perspectives of historical time periods. To learn about the space, I had to corroborate and consult other reports and accounts to pick out the underlying story and deduce the commonalities.
As my internship developed, I got to read research reports, attend a customer advisory board, and interview users to help lay my foundation for my own research activities to understand Service users, their context, and their goals.
Mixing both quantitative and qualitative approaches that I learned in school, I tried to develop a more holistic view of my users. Through the work of personas, the research team was able to capture both the data and the intangibles that make our users unique.
Similar to my studies in history, where it was imperative to keep the human experience at the forefront, keeping the user at the center of the research and design process was critical to develop empathy and understanding. When I was an undergrad, I studied time periods that were vastly different from my own. However, always remembering that you are learning about living, breathing people makes empathizing with their experiences much easier.
Employing Research Methods
I engaged in multiple research activities, but one of the most indicative examples of the overlap of history and user research can be found in conducting usability studies. For both usability and history research, creating and defining hypotheses is critical.
In history, you get your hypotheses from studying the scholarship of historians who have written on the subject before you. You refer to the primary sources with a critical eye and finally you review your findings to validate them with your peers. In usability studies, you refer to current designs and interactions and validate them with users.
A few weeks into the internship, I got to conduct some of my own usability studies. First, I had to come up with a testable hypothesis and research questions that were aligned with business and engineering goals. In usability testing, you put yourself into the shoes of the user to come up with a hypothesis about how your users will engage with the product. Then you facilitate the study sessions with target users to test your hypothesis. Finally, you determine whether the hypothesis has been rejected or further informed, which is similar to the process of researching and writing about history.
In one of my usability studies, I saw that participants had trouble toggling between screens, which was necessary to use the product. Before conducting the studies, I had hypothesized that the toggling would create issues for users. After multiple sessions, it became clear that there was difficulty with toggling because of the context switch that stemmed from a lack of clarity in the product directions.
Once the problem was revealed, it was easy to remedy, underscoring the importance of listening to our participants. Much like history, having a hypothesis and testing helps you understand your research and the overall experience. When I conducted historical research, I’d devise a baseline to go from. It was important to assess what I knew about the time period and what I wanted to know, but always be amenable to the unknowns. It is important to be open to the unknowns, because in good research, finding those unknowns makes your research more holistic and thoughtful.
Understanding through Discussion
In addition to usability evaluations, another key research activity was interviewing users. To learn more about the user’s day-to-day experiences and their mental models, the Service UX team and I conducted workshops with support agents and their leadership. In those workshops, we had participants create service blueprints.
In their service blueprints, participants outlined their daily interactions in their jobs, both in and outside of Salesforce. During those workshops, we took a lot of notes, listened for pain points, and paid attention to the positive areas of their daily experiences with Service Cloud. The service blueprints were an effective way to yield insight into the lives of service agents and leadership day to day because they provided a structured way to for participants to talk about their experiences.
While conducting historical research, I never got to speak with actual people who live in the experience I’m trying to delve into. However, the kind of questions that I would ask is similar to the ones I bring up in user research. Probing to understand the why and how things occur is something both historians and user researchers do, but with different methods and sources.
In our workshops, slowly, patterns emerged. Like historians, who need to create objective scholarship, user researchers have to flush out the underlying story from divergent accounts. The insights that emerge address problems, themes, and patterns across different users. That can be a fertile place for product innovation to occur.
Refining Skills
I developed my research skills in graduate school, and this summer I practiced and refined what I had learned with the guidance of the research team at Salesforce. In addition to usability methods and the service blueprint sessions, I engaged in other research endeavors like a literature review on snow blindness and compiling best practices for social customer service. Seeing the methods I learned in class put into action was an invaluable experience. I learned new ways to explore instrumented data and how to problem solve for enterprise systems.
At the end of the day, I love people. My desire to learn about their needs, motivations, and behaviors is what drew me into history, but also what made me pursue user research. Before I entered this field, I was uncertain how well my history skills and background would translate into the product design space and user research. But I can confidently confirm that my range of experiences and skills that I honed from my undergrad in history (in addition to my other experiences) have helped my transition into user research.
I am excited for what’s to come next in the field of user research, and I am happy to have found my path as a user researcher. It’s so exciting for me because I still get to learn about people like I did in history, but now I can learn directly from them and tell their stories even more vividly. My background in history and my current path in research have proven to be complementary, and the fit between the two couldn’t be better.
I’d like to thank Ian Schoen, Kathy Baxter, Doug Molidor, and Raymon Sutedjo-The for all their help in this post. And thanks to the entire Salesforce UX team for giving me the opportunity to grow as a user researcher this past summer!
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