A glimpse into user research at Ableton
A discussion with User Research Lead Johannes Russ on the development, tools, and challenges of user research at Ableton.
I first discovered Ableton while researching interesting companies in my new city of Berlin. They stood out to me because of their drive to connect with their users not only through their website, but also through Facebook groups and public events geared towards users and those interested in music production.
Ableton’s user research focus is unique because many of their employees are musicians and passionate users of their product. The company itself was established by a group of musicians who wanted to develop a new music software platform to perform their own music productions in completely new ways. I wanted to learn more about how they worked and what they were passionate about, so I contacted their user research lead Johannes Russ. Johannes was also interested in telling me more about user research at Ableton and invited me over for lunch and a tour of their head office in Berlin.
Ableton is a business that makes things for musicians and producers. They make Ableton Live, a software product which can be used to create beats and melodies, record instruments, edit and finish music and also perform music on stage. They also make Ableton Push, a hardware product which gives users a physical platform to use Live on. Their products have revolutionized opportunities for independent, do-it-yourself producers and musicians. They allow producers to work in both home and professional studios, and can be used as instruments for live performances by DJs, electronic artists, and bands.
I sat down with Johannes to get an idea of how user research at Ableton has developed, and how research takes place today. The way that Ableton and the User Research team work today has been a process that has unfolded quite informally over the past 5 years. Johannes started at the company as an interaction designer, but quickly realized that he could do more if he focussed on research and usability testing. “I had this hunch that there is a lot to learn outside that people here don’t know, or need a new perspective on. It started with simple things: I invited people and did a few light explorative user tests.” With the support of other colleagues, Ableton’s user research focus was able to develop. There was never a big strategy, Johannes explains. “It’s something that develops because people see the need for it and they have the interest, and then things fall into place.”
At the start, the user researchers struggled with how to get feature teams interested and invested in the research they were doing. “We would run usability tests with users and write detailed reports which we then handed over to the teams and product owners. But often nothing happened. Issues didn’t get fixed, and something else was always more important. This was really painful.” It was at that point they realized that they needed to make sure they were a part of the feature team. This meant fully collaborating with the team and making sure all members invested in the research they were conducting.
The User Research Guild
Over the years, user research has become more and more a part of these feature teams. There is no central user research team that creates insights. Instead, the user researchers embed themselves into the feature teams. On top of that, they have developed a “research guild” which meets once a month to share stories and methods and help each other out. At times the user researchers will even pair up to test things and get feedback. They also have a Slack channel where they can discuss issues and ask each other questions. The guild is also a space where they can share and collaborate with external user researchers to gain inspiration. They go on outings to visit other UX teams around Berlin such as Zalando or Soundcloud to check out their labs, talk about how they use methods or exchange neat tools and tactics. “It’s a kind of nerd-exchange,” Johannes calls it. Everyone has their own hacks; small things to make the process better. By sharing processes teams can develop ways these hacks could also help their own products. User researchers need to make sure that they have a space to exchange and think about methods and set priorities, which is something that the guild can provide.
Though the guild is useful, Johannes makes sure to drive the point that the user researchers have to be there to collaborate with the team. “You’re not just the guy who creates insights or creates data that gets handed over to someone else.” Rather, they want to encourage teams to have their own insights and be able to own their research. The teams are the ones who make the decisions, and every developer should invest in making these decisions.
Tools for Sharing Research
One way they have encouraged this collaborative environment is through the development of a user testing tool called Wind. The main features of the tool include a homemade streaming system and user research blog. “We call it Wind because it’s an information stream, a flow you can tap into,” explains Johannes. Through Wind, team members and others in the company can observe the user testing that goes on in the studio via their own laptops or projectors in an observation room. They use Slack as a back-channel where observers can make comments and ask questions during the testing. Tests are always shared with the team to ensure involvement, but they’re also made available to the rest of the company for anyone who wants to tune in. “There’s a lot of engagement and interest around this. People like watching other people make music because they may learn something from it,” Johannes tells me. Wind is important because it supports their goal of making user research at Ableton as collaborative as possible. Everyone on the teams, not only user researchers, are able to make their own research insights and share them with each other.
To share interesting insights from team testing and outings with the rest of the company, Wind also includes a User Research Blog. The blog is an internal platform where the user research team can upload interesting research findings, field trips to users’ studios, or tours of other user research departments to share with the rest of the company and give them an idea of what is going on in the field. Yet through constant collaboration and sharing of their research and motives, user researchers have started to see a positive shift. Teams are starting to get interested in research and asking for it themselves. “They’ll come to us and say, ‘I have this prototype here and I want to learn something about this. What can we do?’ It kind of shifted and it’s great.” The growing challenge they face now is the need to help a lot of teams while only being able to focus on two or three small teams at the same time. Researchers need to be efficient and identify patterns and similarities between teams that have the same interests, so that research can benefit multiple teams.
Ableton now has around three full-time user researchers, along with a few more who hold other positions within the company but also assist with developing user research. These positions tend to cross over with UX design, product expert and ownership roles. “We don’t want to think about user research as a strict position in the end. It’s more a role in a project that someone can take on.” The end goal is for full-time researchers to take on a sort of mentor role and coach those interested in conducting research. Johannes emphasizes that this goal can only come through collaboration and being part of teams.
Being Involved from Start to Finish
Ideally, user researchers will be with the team from the first moment, so they can begin to think about the feature or issue at hand and do strategic work or exploration in the field. Johannes describes this phase as one of the most fun parts of the job, where team members get to go to people’s studios and see how they work. Each person has such an unique and individual way of working and it’s valuable to help form new perspectives. This phase has the added benefit of bringing people together through building experiences in the field as a group. After this, the user researcher develops a strategy with the team, which leads to new iterations and prototyping. User researchers will stay on the team during this prototyping. This includes releasing the Alpha and Beta prototypes where the product gets released to a select group of people who are able to test it out and give initial feedback before it gets released. Though they don’t always have the opportunity to do so, the team likes to do a bit of research after the product gets released to understand how users interact with and understand the product. Ableton is particularly lucky with this post-release research as they always tend to get reactions even before they reach out to people. Because users are so invested in the product, they have a tendency to write posts on Facebook or reviews on Youtube and have no qualms complaining if they think something is wrong. “If the product doesn’t work, you hear about it pretty quick,” Johannes explains. Despite this, Johannes argues that sometimes it really is worth it to go back out into the field again after two or three months to see how products are being used. “It’s interesting to do first-time usability tests to test discoverability, but you also have to think about whether this is a realistic user behaviour, because it might take a few days to really get efficient with a complex software like Live. Users treat our products like a musical instrument. It’s something you have to invest time and practice into before you can get really creative. So it’s important to also look at that long-term experience.” They do this research through diary studies, or by giving the product to users and coming back to visit them over the span of a few weeks to see how their understanding and use of the product has developed. There has to be a balance between first-time tests and long-term tests, which is why it makes sense for teams stay in touch with users.
Building a Pool of Trusted Users
They gather their user base through a platform on their website where people can sign up to be a part of user testing. Through this platform the company has built up a user database of about 15,000 people. They can contact users through the database, see where they are and which products they use, and can target them for surveys or invitations to the usability testing labs. This is something they started building because they realized that they needed to test people other than their internal users. Although it’s valuable to have a group of internal users, these internal users still have a different level of expertise and also have quite strong opinions. To create a broader perspective, it’s also valuable to get opinions from people who aren’t experts as well.
The database has a smaller inner layer of users they call “Early Birds”, who are the users the company work closely with and have been able to build a strong trusting relationship with over time. These users are invited to the studio or are visited in their own studio spaces to show them new products and features for initial testing. Paper prototypes are discussed and developed with these users, and as soon as the team has made something that makes music and can be used, they can use it at home. It’s important for users to test in their own context, because the space and objects around people affect the way you feel about and how you use products. “You need to have everything around that makes you creative,” says Johannes. Testing in the lab is useful, but it’s not everything. It’s always controlled and a different situation than how people use products in their own space.
Creating a Diverse Perspective
Ableton are currently planning to build this inner group in the name of diversifying. At the moment, the group has a strong tendency towards male users, particularly white male electronic music producers. This is somewhat understandable as it’s where the company comes from, but they want to change that. The company wants to build a more inclusive community of music makers; embracing gender, cultural and age diversity. In user research that means trying to get new people in to have them do user tests and talk to them a bit more to see if it has an effect on the products and the features they build. The challenge for the user research team is that they always tend to talk to the same people who they are close to; many of them being the self-selected people that love to talk about and share technology. “Once you want to start talking to other people that maybe feel a bit more intimidated by Live or by this technical knowledge, they’re not naturally drawn to talking to you. So we said we had to make a more conscious effort to talk to these people,” Johannes tells me. A challenge they face is the need to build trusting relationships, “because you don’t want to have people that will just show unreleased features or products to their friends. You really need to trust them. It’s like working with someone, these users are going to be in this group for years.” This can be a struggle when reaching out to new users, because those new users are only new users for a short while. This means they have to come up with a system which allows them to regularly reach out to a new user base. “There’s constant learning going on and we kind of grow our collectivism. It’s not just the user research team that grows this big pool of knowledge but it’s more spread out, and that’s just part of the learning. Teams begin to see new perspectives with their own eyes, so there’s a lot of empathy for understanding the people they’re designing for and the problems they may have.”
Solving Problems & Creating New Challenges
I found it interesting that a lot of ideas come from developers. Many developers within the company are also musicians that have needs they want to solve. Yet it’s not always pure problem-solving, Johannes explains. “It’s a big part of the user research and UX design that we do, but sometimes it’s also about creating a new problem for people to feel challenged.” One special thing the team has noticed about Live are ‘breakthrough moments’, a process Johannes describes as the learning experience of going deeper, discovering more things and figuring new things out on your own. These include moments where users figure out a new way to create a sound or how to connect certain things on their own. “Live’s workflow is very free and open and it’s something we see that people get invested in. It becomes something that’s rewarding, being part of this discovery experience. It’s not something that just solves a problem and you’re done and satisfied. You want to spend a lot of time going into this.”
Differences in users is one of the biggest challenges that the feature teams and user researchers need to try to find solutions for. On the one side of the Live-user spectrum are output-focussed people. These people want to get a job done and make music for the next release they have lined up or who have a gig to play. On the other side of the spectrum are users who love to go deep into the exploration process. Making a design that fits both needs is a challenge for the Ableton teams who need to make the user interface approachable yet still ensure there is depth for people to explore. This balance is tricky and every design decision touches upon this challenge, Johannes tells me. “Usability means being efficient and effective in a certain context for users. But if these users love exploring, then usability is going to look very different to a beginner or someone who just wants to play a DJ gig, for example.”
Johannes tells me that he sometimes thinks of user research itself as a jam session. “You can kind of bring the band together — Everyone plays their instrument, but it’s about the group much more than the single person. When making music myself, I enjoy producing and working with other people, collaborating in the studio and making sure everything is working, and then they come in and we bounce ideas back and forth. It’s much more fun than working alone.”
Though it can definitely be difficult to get everyone collaborating on tasks such as research, Ableton has definitely convinced me that there are some viable tools and tactics to make it happen, and I’m interested to see how they continue to learn and develop these in the future.
