Five tips to conduct great research with corporate users
At Tobias & Tobias, we advocate a human-centred approach — carrying out research with real users to inform and validate what we design. Given that our projects are often for global financial institutions, where users are small in number and have busy day jobs, it can often be challenging to get access.
From our experience, we have some practical tips that can help the process run smoothly.
1. Use internal advocates
Find stakeholders who can identify participants and make initial contact. Relationship managers and sales executives normally have these contacts and will know who might be willing to be involved. You’ll need to convince them about the value of research — having a supportive senior project sponsor can really help with this. It is also a good idea to provide an overview explaining the purpose, what it will involve and when it will take place. The stakeholders can easily share this overview with their clients. This early engagement can take a while, so it’s advisable to include some lead-time in the plan, perhaps before the project even kicks-off.
2. Be flexible with timings
Once you’ve got a shortlist of warmed up users, you should contact them to find out their availability within the research window. If they’re in a different time zone, give timings for their location and be willing to run sessions outside your normal working day. For some users, giving up a whole hour can feel like a huge ask, so you might need to run shorter sessions of 30–45 minutes to secure their involvement. After all, getting some time is better than none, and you can still cover a lot in 30 minutes.
3. Use remote sessions
Ideally, research would be carried out face to face. But with users in multiple locations and time zones, there isn’t always the time or budget to visit everyone in person, so be open to facilitate remote sessions. We often use WebEx as this includes voice conference, screen sharing and recording. Make sure you provide access details in advance, you have a quiet room to facilitate from and you get setup in good time before the session starts.
4. Prepare
You might only have a small number of users and limited time with each of them, so it is really important to use the time effectively by being well prepared.
First define the research objective. Ask yourself:
• What stage of the design process are you in?
• What is the research trying to find out?
• Is there a hypothesis to prove or disprove?
• Are there gaps in understanding?
Based on this, prepare a discussion guide to facilitate the sessions. The guide will typically include an introduction, ask for informed consent, tasks and questions to probe, then a wrap up to close the session, but it doesn’t have to be followed rigidly. There may need to be some variations in tasks and questions if the research is being carried out with different types of users.
You might also need to prepare stimulus to use in the session. In the early stages of a project, storyboards or sketches can be useful to illustrate concepts and get participants talking. As the design progresses, low or high fidelity prototypes can be used for user testing. Make sure your stimulus aligns with the tasks and questions in your discussion guide. It is a good idea to run a pilot session to check the flow and timings.
5. Send reminders and follow up
It is good practice to send a reminder email the day before or morning of a research session; this acts to confirm the session and reduces the risk of no shows. After the session, it is courteous to send a thank you for their time and involvement. The follow up shouldn’t end there though; participants like to hear how their input has contributed to change and improvements in the longer term. This is particularly important if you’d like them to be involved in more research at a later stage. These longer term updates may well be after the project concludes, so line up the stakeholders to keep this communication going.
Research with corporate users is a quite different to consumer research, but it is possible and worthwhile.
