5 ways to use Flip for research
Remote research often feels challenging and impersonal. Flip makes asynchronous research simple and fun.
First, what is Flip? It’s a free asynchronous discussion platform that allows you to capture and share short videos or audio anywhere anytime. I first used Flip (formerly Flipgrid) in 2019 during an international research trip to Toronto. My entire team was excited to learn from our customers, but only a few could travel to join our research sessions. Flip allowed me to capture magical moments from the research and share them with all my teammates both during and after the trip to foster asynchronous discussion. I enjoyed my experience using Flip so much that in November 2020 I joined their research team.
Flip has changed the way I conduct research and made me a better researcher. It makes it easy for me to explore new topics and share my research findings with my team. It also helps my team quickly conduct remote research projects, share community stories, and engage with stakeholders in unique ways. Want to learn how you can use Flip to up level your research? In this article, I will share 5 ways that Flip can improve your remote research practices.
1. Gather questions from stakeholders
Asking the right questions is the best way to have impact as a researcher. It’s important to give everyone the opportunity to ask their questions so that you can scope the research effectively and impact future product making decisions. However, it’s hard to find a time that works for everyone to share their research questions.
Flip allows you to asynchronously capture your team’s questions for any research project and understand the why behind their question. On team Flip, we want to make it easy for anyone to ask us research questions anytime, so we created a Flip Topic for our team to share their questions for our amazing global community of educators, learners, and families of all ages. This allows us to hear directly from people across our team and decide which research topics to explore next.
2. Screen participants
Finding the right people for a particular research project can be challenging and time consuming, especially for longitudinal studies. In order to complete a study within your budget and timeline, screening participants is essential. However, few tools exist to expedite and simplify this process.
Flip allows you to quickly meet the people who are interested in participating in your research via video before inviting them to join your project. We ask potential participants to record a short video introducing themselves and answering a question that is related to the project via Flip during our screening process. This helps us learn about their personality, background, and level of interest in the study. It also helps us conduct inclusive research that is reflective of Flip’s diverse community.
3. Collect ethnographic research data
Gathering contextual information is difficult without the ability to interact with research participants in-person. The shift to remote research has made in-person home, office, and classroom visits impossible. However, this in the moment observational data often provides our most valuable insights.
Flip allows your community to share their experiences with you anywhere anytime. When we ask research participants to record a video, we empower them to be the authors and producers of sharing their context and experiences. We can ask them to share little moments from their day, show us something interesting, or even take us on a virtual tour. Flip allows each research participant to decide what they want to share and what they prefer to keep private. They can also watch their video and re-record it before submitting it to make sure they feel comfortable with the information they are sharing with us. It gives them the flexibility to tell their story in their own way by adding filters, emojis, GIFs, stickers, boards, backgrounds, and more effects to their video, allowing research participants to showcase their personality and us to collect more meaningful data.
4. Empower team members to explore research data
Getting stakeholders involved in your projects increases your research’s impact but can be difficult. Everyone is so busy. It’s also overwhelming for engineers, designers, PMs, etc. to have to learn how to use another tool or know what to look for in the data.
Flip allows everyone to hear directly from your community (users) and engage with your research team at every stage of the product development process. We use Flip Groups and Topics to keep track of the videos from our projects. This also allows us to invite team members to watch videos about topics they are interested in without needing to wait until a project is complete or teaching them how to use a complex tool. This empowers our stakeholders to share their learnings via comments and makes our research analysis and sensemaking process more collaborative.
We also use Flip to facilitate more inclusive team brainstorming sessions. We start by defining the problem we want to solve for our community. Next, we share a research summary or highlight reel to provide context on the problem and instructions for participating in the asynchronous ideation session through Flip Topics. Then, we ask each team member to draw a potential solution and record a video sharing their drawing and telling us about their idea. Finally, we ask people to comment on others’ videos to vote for, build on, or improve the ideas before we decide which ones to focus on. This asynchronous brainstorming process everyone to participate regardless of their time zone or schedule.
5. Share insights with our team
Your team’s calendar is always fully booked. No one wants to join another meeting. However, everyone is curious to learn about your research.
Flip allows you to asynchronously share your in-progress learnings and present findings to your team. Mixtapes allow us to create and share playlists of videos from our research with our team through Microsoft Teams posts or chats. The videos in these playlists can be watched in less than 5 mins and provide either a quick answer to a question from our team or highlight the unique stories of our global community of educators, learners, and families.
Shorts allow us to record research findings and training videos so that our team members can watch them whenever is convenient. They allow us to share examples of how research works at Flip and highlights from some of our past projects. This process makes research more inclusive and accessible.
Flip provides so many ways for our incredible multi-disciplinary team to connect with our community and improve our research processes. I hope that by sharing some of the many ways we use Flip to improve our remote research processes, it has inspired you to give it a try.
