FAQ about ShopBack’s Research Process (Part 2/3)
My team had a great time recently sharing about our working culture in a local design community — Friends of Figma. We enjoyed the session and were heartened by the positive reception. We’re grateful for the opportunity and appreciate the organisers’ help in preparing the session. If you’re keen to watch the session, you may catch it below.
During the talk, we received tons of questions and we couldn’t respond to all of them due to time constraints. We reckon these are good (and hard! 😆) questions. I’ve compiled the questions and shared the answers here. This post is a continuation from our previous blogpost.
Democratising Research Process
How do you make research processes scalable?
How to democratise user research? Do you delegate logistic tasks to non-research fellows and let them join research sessions or what?
What’s the annual research project cadence like? Larger vs smaller projects? How many qual projects would you say you carry out a year?
We are looking for ways to democratise research in ShopBack. Not because we want to lepak and chill, but we need to educate our stakeholders on our research, and we want to show that it’s not difficult to interact with the users to get feedback from them.
Democratising the research process is also important in scaling the research process more sustainably. Our team is not going to grow as much as other teams in the company (not complaining about my boss here, but that’s just the reality in the industry at the moment 🥲). However, the demand for research will always grow as the user-centered culture is already strong in ShopBack and we make a lot of effort to advocate for the users. Apart from conducting research, we also ensure that the operational process and infrastructure are easy enough so stakeholders will feel comfortable conducting research too.
What are the differences between research done by the UXR team and by the design team?
With a dedicated research team, do the designers conduct their research as well? how does the process work between designers x researchers?
In ShopBack, our product designers are researchers too! We train them closely during onboarding, when they are learning more about the products they will be working on, and when they are looking at getting feedback on their designs. Recently, we ran a research training session for our graphic designers too as we are looking for ways to get feedback on our banners and key visuals.
We believe that the designers can research on their own. This will help to:
- decentralise the practice, and increase the efficiency and agility of the research process. They don’t have to rely on the research team’s centralised resources for small decisions.
- let the full-time researchers focus on bigger research questions and complete foundational understanding about our users.
- have a better understanding of who exactly is our users. This can help us design the experience in a more targeted way instead of brute force usability testing multiple times to fine-tune the designs.
Stakeholders
What are some good ways to involve stakeholders in our research as observers?
How have you guided/taught other roles to do their own research of sufficient quality?
Can you share more about handling stakeholders’ questions when sharing the results? Especially when they doubt your research tools/plans/capabilities. How should one handle such situations?
Our stakeholders are our team members too. I have been trying to address them as ‘team members’ more than ‘stakeholders’. It is not us versus them; we are supposed to work together to provide the best outcome for our users. It is our job to make them more aware and informed about our users, and also educate them on UX Research. If your stakeholders are questioning your sample size, it may be because they are only familiar with market research and not UX Research. We can’t go to them and say that UX Research is the proper way to do research. There is no right or wrong here; it is just a different approach which we have to explain to them. This is also why we try to validate our insights with any data that we have in the company. If our stakeholders question our insights from the qualitative research, we will find other sources of data to triangulate so that we can give richer insights.
Stakeholders should be treated in a similar way to how we engage our users. We believe that making them more user-centered doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to support us in every single step of our research process. Throughout the research process, we invite them to our research sessions. Most of them are also very involved in the analysis process and we work closely with them to generate the most actionable recommendations. Outside of the research process, we give research trainings, both in person or even asynchronously through our documentations and videos in Confluence. For those who conducted research, we also observe their interviews and give feedback on how they can facilitate the conversations better in future. We also encourage our stakeholders to observe the customer service agents replying to enquiries from the users.
Research Repository & Tools
How do you document and maintain your past research repository?
As we work with user data and feedback, we take data safety seriously. When it comes to research operations, we’ve been trying to use the existing tools in the company to limit places where we store user’s data. We use Confluence as this tool has been used in ShopBack even before our team was founded. Our repository is available to all ShopBackers. We classify the insights based on the market, business units, and products.
Fortunately, we’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback from new hires and our stakeholders on our repository. It seems like we have many silent lurkers who’s obsessed about the users in ShopBack.
What are your tools of trade?
What research tools do ShopBack use? eg. Amplitude, Hotjar, Contentsquare
Did you use transcription app? Which one?
How does the team transcribe user interviews?
How do you use Figma in your research craft? Do you draft your research plans, discussion guides and findings in Figma?
The tools that we use now are the existing tools that ShopBack is using. We use Google tools as ShopBack uses Google Suite. We use Figma as this is the main tool that the Product Design Team uses. Metabase and Amplitude are also tools that the data team have been using even before our team was founded.
For research and analysis, we use Google Sheets, Metabase, Amplitude, and Figjam. We use Google Slides to create the slides. We have slightly different ways in analysing findings. I personally prefer to use a spreadsheet, where I explain my approach in detail here. The rest of the researchers use Figjam to analyse findings as you can create a more in-depth analysis, and it is also more visual when it comes to tagging and clustering the data compared to using a spreadsheet.
For scheduling sessions with the users, we recently discovered that Google Calendar can work just like Calendly to help us book sessions with users. You can send the link to the users, and the user can choose their preferred time. You can learn more about this feature here.
Small pro tip for transcription, you can actually transcribe an interview recording using YouTube.
They can automatically generate subtitles and you can download the raw subtitles from YouTube studio. We log in to YouTube using our ShopBack enterprise account and keep all the videos private.
As for knowledge base, we use Google Drive and Confluence to store research plan and reports. Google Drive is where we store all the Google Documents and the recordings. We embed the Google Sheet, Slides, and Figjam board in the Confluence page.
We’ve used research tools in the past too. However, there was a lot of time spent maintaining the tools that should have been used to do research instead. More tools also meant more places where we store user data. So we have stopped using them.
Retrospective
How did the research retrospective influenced and benefitted you? (Anyone can take on this question :’) )
I personally use retrospectives to monitor our team health and engage with my team members, which is crucial as our team is distributed in the region. We conduct a session regularly every 2 weeks on Friday afternoons. It has also been a good opportunity to get to know each other. It may not be the same retrospective as the one in the scrum process. However, I personally find it extremely useful for our team and me as a lead. You can learn more in this post on how we do retrospectives in our team.
You can read our previous post here and next post here. Don’t forget to follow ShopBack tech blog for updates!
Huge thank you to Rachel, our content strategist for restructuring and editing my brain fart. If you think my writing is nice, it wasn’t me. I was just farting my thoughts from my brain.
If you have stayed till the end of this post, know that I am super thankful for your time. I hope you’ll take a thing or two away from our experiences! Anyway, I’m always excited to meet new people, so hit me up for coffee or tea anytime. You may also find me in ADPList. 😁
❗️ Interested in what else we work on?
Follow us (ShopBack Tech blog | ShopBack LinkedIn page) now to get further insights on what our tech teams do!
❗❗️ Or… interested in us? (definitely, we hope 😂)
Check out here how you might be able to fit into ShopBack — we’re excited to start our journey together!
