Sharpen your d*mn axe.
or, how I learned to stop creating discovery artifacts and to love research deliverables.
Most design books and conference talks take an internal-team, product-focused approach to talking about design research. An artifact-centric approach. “We have so much time and so much money and so many people and all the leadership committed to design thinking and customer experience. Let’s do all the things! Yay!”
That’s bullsh*t.
Your d*mn axe & you.
Freelancers, startups, & small agencies don’t work in the same world as internal product teams. (Ain’t that the d*mn truth)
As a designer, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. But your axe — in this case — is your research. It’s your ability to do the d*mn job. Because before you can get to job of creating effective solutions, you need to sharpen your d*mn axe on some good discovery.
Creative professionals can probably all agree: research is critical to the design process. But for freelancers, small companies, startups, and most agencies, we don’t always have the time, money, people, or resources we want to make exhaustive research a part of our process. Even when we have clients invested in design thinking or customer experience, project-based schedules and budgets often don’t give us the flexibility to accommodate any activity that isn’t immediately relatable to ROI or which doesn’t propel us toward an immovable deadline.
This tendency to rush forward without research is doubly frustrating since most of the literature written about the design process, user and usability research, and design thinking is written from an internal, artifact-driven perspective by well-equipped, well-intentioned people who have enough time to write books about a process the rest of us have to arm-wrestle into existence.
Looks like we’re going to need a more nimble, deliverable-centric approach.
So let’s chat about…
- Creating space in your process for research and discovery (especially when projects and clients really don’t want to give you any).
- Making research actionable and meaningful for clients and teams.
- The iceberg approach to following up on your research with a big ole’ tease of your recommended solutions.
It’s incumbent on us as design professionals to make research indispensable and actionable for our teams and for our clients. Without it, we’re not validating problems and we’re not really designing — we’re just having craft day at our client’s expense.
Make time for your d*mn axe.
Freelancers, startups, & small agencies can’t take research for granted. (Ain’t that the d*mn truth)
The purpose of design research is manifold: to validate the presumed problem; to identify as many issues surrounding that problem as possible; to learn the needs, pain points, and opportunities associated with impacted users, customers, and stakeholders; and to get a solid bead on market expectations, the competition, and how other creative minds have solved similar problems.
Design research activities typically include:
– Analytics analysis
– Comparative analysis
– Competitive analysis
– Current-state analysis
– Stakeholder research (interviews, prioritization, RACI, workshops, etc)
– Usability testing
– User research (interviews, surveys, etc)
Each of these activities has their own catalog of subtasks and artifacts. And all of them take time. Time that delays design deliverables. Time that most project-based challenges are hard pressed to accommodate.
“But wait,” you ask, “can’t we just tell the clients/stakeholders we need more time to do research and discovery, up front?”
No… of course not.
Most clients and stakeholders think they already know what they need to and they don’t feel they should have to pay for us to onboard ourselves. They’re experts in their industry. Who are we to tell them anything different?
But designers don’t do research for onboarding purposes. We trust our clients—they’re subject-matter experts, after all. But so are we. We’re experts in a process. And research is the part of that process lets us validate the problem and make sure we’re designing the right thing.
So how do we get the client to make more time for research? We don’t.
We have to make the time for it.
Let’s look at a hypothetical project schedule to see what I mean:
We begin our projects simply enough. With a fixed deadline, a sense of the scope of the expected deliverable, and all the time in the world, starting today…
Clearly, we need some time at the end of the project to test our concepts (hopefully in prototype form, before development debt is incurred). Clients are usually very excited about this type of research because they understand the need to iterate, resolve any usability issues, and accommodate missed requirements. They also love the validation of a project on target.
So, we’ll walk back a bit from that deadline…
But wait! What are we really designing? We know we can’t ask clients to push their deadline out to accommodate up-front research. So, we’ll need take a little of our time off the front of the project to accommodate research that must happen before creative can begin…
But the design process is iterative. If we were an internal product team, living with a product for months or years, we could handle architecture, low-fidelity wireframing, and high-fidelity visual design successively, sprint-over-sprint. But as a creative partner working on a project basis, our engagement is dramatically smaller. We’ll need to split our schedule so we have time to deliver, iterate, and deliver again. So…
Oh! And we’ll need some time to package up the final output for presentations, delivery to development…
You can see how quickly all that luxurious design time is eroded at the margins by necessary steps in the design process. As designers, we’re wont to lament this ever-shrinking creative window because that’s the fun part where we move pixels around and create usable, pretty things. And it’s the part of the project most clients get excited about—seeing their project brought to life by you, their badass design professional.
But these time-management issues aren’t bad things at all. I challenge every designer to consider:
- It’s all design. From the first stakeholder interview to the final Keynote presentation. This is the process. It makes what we do possible. Trust it.
- You don’t need all that time. You think you do, because you’re a beautiful and unique unicorn who can do everything your clients need if you have enough time. But you’re not a unicorn...
You’re a goldfish.
Give us three months to design a product? We’ll navel gaze until the deadline scares us enough, then we’ll deliver something amazing because we’re professionals and we don’t miss deadlines.
But if you give us three weeks? We’ll panic and complain. And then? We’ll deliver something amazing because we’re professionals and we don’t miss deadlines. If we’ve done our research and listened to our users, we’ll discover we had enough time.
Make your d*mn axe actionable.
Freelancers, startups, & small agencies have to make research a deliverable, not an artifact. (Ain’t that the d*mn truth)
Research as an artifact has its uses. I’ll never argue it doesn’t. I’ve been on the receiving end of duffle bags full of raw data and it’s very empowering. But, as a designer, I know what do with raw data: pivoting, paring, segmenting, visualizing, affinity mapping, etc.
Our users—not the project’s end user, but our clients and stakeholders—often don’t work in the same space we do. Remember, we’re experts in the design process. They’re experts in their industry.
We need to remember the first rule of design:
You are not the user.
Our users are business leaders, startup founders, marketing communications professionals, product owners, project managers, venture capitalists… anyone who might hire us to innovate for them. And they don’t need book reports of everything we did during the research phase—especially if they already think they know much of it! Our users need us to synthesize our research into something they can immediately use to make decisions about how to move forward. And they need it to make sense when we’re not with them to explain it.
But who are our clients and stakeholders? What do they need?
If only we had personae for them…
The big wig
The executive, the founder, the C-something-something…
Needs
– Big-picture perspectives
– Tangible results
– Actionable inputs
Pain Points
– Not detail-oriented
– Dislikes repetition
– Dislikes focusing on problems
Opportunities
– Empower to make decisions
– Excite with opportunities for change and success
– Equip with assets and talking points
The creative
The visionary, the idea owner, the creative or design director…
Needs
– Their ideas to be heard and validated
– Friendly rapport
– Flexibility and spontaneity
Pain Points
– Not detail oriented
– Fear of rejection (personal & professional, conflated)
– Capturing their ideas to communicate with others
Opportunities
– Elicit feedback and creative solutions
– Equip with assets to encourage and motivate others
– Leverage their ability to bypass process and hierarchy
The manager
The project or program manager, the product owner, the consultant…
Needs
– Harmonious schedules
– Trusted colleagues
– Patience
Pain Points
– Possessiveness
– Confrontation
– The vagaries of design process
Opportunities
– Arm with all the details
– Make a champion of your process-based approach
– Elicit schedule and resource information
The collabs
The developers, the launch team, the marketing and usability partners…
Needs
– Well-researched information
– A discrete list of to-dos
– Clear objectives
Pain Points
– Passive
– Gets bogged down in details
– Very high standard for quality
Opportunities
– Validate details, schedules, and reality
– Arm with research to back up their role
– Get lost in the (technical) weeds
The research deliverables your clients need are probably things you’re already synthesizing. But how you curate them and filter them will depend on what your user needs to see and how they can best consume what you’re reporting to them.
Research synthesis deliverables typically include:
– Competitive and comparative matrixes
– Current-state assessments (including usability results)
– Data-informed personae (just the facts—no fiction!)
– Maps (journey, experience, and service)
– Prioritized business and technical requirements
– Stakeholder feedback
– User requirements
Normally, when I talk about this at conferences, I show lots of sample deliverables I probably shouldn’t to illustrate some simple truths:
- Don’t show a list of all the great things the competition is doing unless you’re also prepared to list how your recommendations answer them.
- Don’t show personae unless you can prioritize them—not just segment them—and connect their needs, pain points, and opportunities directly to your recommended user requirements.
- Never, ever, mistake your current-state assessment for an opportunity to call the baby ugly. Even if you think you know your client’s role in creating those materials.
Tailor how you present your research deliverables to your audience. Don’t lie. Don’t ever lie. But the order you reveal things, the context of how it's presented, and how you’re empowering your clients to do their jobs with your research is the first truly valuable design delivery you’re going to make for them.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Make your d*mn axe sexy AF.
Freelancers, startups, & small agencies are always selling. (Ain’t that the d*mn truth)
There are two things any designer should be doing to sell the value of their research. They’re super simple, and super time consuming (but remember, we made time for it).
First, your research needs to look good.
Someone hired you to be their design professional and their reputation is associated with yours for the duration of the project (at least!). And your reputation hangs on every delivery you make. Therefore, every single thing you send or show to your client needs to look like it comes from a design professional.
Every. Single. Thing.
This fact can’t be stressed enough. You have no control over who sees your deliverables once you send them over. You have no idea how they will be used by your client and stakeholders to advocate for the project, for themselves, or for you. Opinions will be made about your client, you, and the value of your work based on the cosmetic quality of your deliverables.
Make time to polish your research report into something usable for your target clients. Make it exceed their expectation in terms of utility, aesthetics, and communication. You spent weeks compiling and synthesizing all that research. You carved precious time out of your project schedule to accommodate it. You can afford to spend a few hours making it sexy.
But keep it simple. You’re not reinventing data visualization. Try using:
– An orderly layout grid
– Two or three complementary type treatments
– High-resolution, unwatermarked photography
– Clear and intelligible icons
– Proofread copy!
And keep your elements consistent within your deliverables so your work looks as d*mn professional as you are. Clients and stakeholders—consciously or not—look for any reason to challenge your results and recommendations. Don’t let your formatting give them one.
Second, back your research up with inspired recommendations.
We can’t assume the client will choose you to execute on your design recommendations unless you also sell them on your specific vision for those recommendations. And no matter how detailed, a requirements list doesn’t get anyone all weak in the knees or eager to sign checks.
So, what do we do? We grab Kate and Leo and their friend: the iceberg.
Showing our stakeholders even a tiny bit of what they can do with the insights we’re giving them is enormously valuable. Among my teams, the techniques we most-frequently employ to demonstrate the value our research reveals are “The gap” and “The menu”.
The gap is the single most important recommendation your research reveals and we usually present it immediately after the research synthesis. No point holding punches—we want to get paid and to prove the clients’ money well-spent. That rhetorical proximity also creates a causal association that demonstrates the business case for design research:
“This thorough research, well-synthesized and clearly-presented, begets this most-important recommendation.”
#dropmic
We follow that with The menu. The menu lists (usually one item per page or slide) all the recommended next steps the research suggests in priority order, connected back to the relevant maps, personae, and user requirements. And all of these menu recommendations include at least one visualization.
Why? To get the client excited about the recommended solution, of course. To trigger their imagination about how the opportunities we identified in the research can be executed.
“But, JD,” you ask, “this sounds like spec work?”
No it f*cking doesn’t. Spec work is done for free. And our research and recommendations work is a paid project, just as much as any other phase of our design process. Our recommended solutions and their inspiring visualizations are informed by that research.
This is the tip of the iceberg: We’re connecting research to tangible next steps to generate enthusiasm for our solutions.
This is a d*mn sexy axe.
TL;DR: Anyone should be able to use your d*mn axe.
What we’re talking about is a lot of work. No doubt. And for some of you, this may represent a mind shift in terms of how you present design research. As a former freelancer, start-up entrepreneur, and small-agency creative, I can vouch for this deliverable-centeric approach. It’s effective as a communications tool, as a sales tool, and as a relationship-growth tool.
There is another side-effect of pivoting from an artifact-centric approach to a delivery-centric approach. One I hadn’t realized until it hacked me right in the face (that’s a axe joke).
Clear synthesis and illustrated insights create accessibility.
As designers, our job is to make everything we touch better. We typically do this for paying clients and their consumer or enterprise products. But we can do this with our research, too.
This is accessibility. If we can make our research intelligible to anyone, we make it intelligible to everyone. Including ourselves.
At Sharpen, innovation is our only business.
Sharpen is an omnichannel experience-design agency whose nimble and diverse team of veteran creatives use empathy and design-thinking to create exceptional solutions for real problems.
Our design-thinking approach identifies the sweet spot between business needs, technical requirements, and user insights. And our veteran design teams create those unique experiences for users and customers across any platform. And behind the scenes.
Explore our capabilities and results at www.sharpen.partners.
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