📓 Meetup Notes: Research Collaboration by Design with Andréa Crofts

Part 2 of our meetup live-blog from Breaking Silos for Collaborative Research

Andréa presenting at Breaking Silos.

We’re live at the UX Research Toronto meetup on Breaking Silos for Collaborative Research, where we just heard from Sarah Stockdale on Growth and Research. Check that out here.

Next up is the amazing Andréa Crofts, a research-loving Product Design Manager at League and one of the chapter leads of Hexagon UX, another amazing Toronto meetup.

Her talk is called Research Collaboration by Design: Building influence for UX research across an organization as a non-researcher.

Meetup Preview: Andréa Crofts on research by design, and building a culture of research in a…

Shifting models of research

When Andréa started her team at League, she knew she wanted research to be a big part of their workflow. She wanted there to be a repository of user insights that everyone could add to and access.

In her previous experience at TWG, she conducted lean research as a designer to ensure their design process was human-centred. Then they built out their UXR team and had specialists on the team. She saw the value in them collaborating at every stage of the process.

At League, she went back to her roots with a team of UX generalists. She’d like to hire UX research specialists down the line—but for now she’s asking how she can leverage her UX generalists to infuse research into their process?

Intentionally designing a culture of research

Andréa knew that she had to influence people to see the value of research. She started by doing some research into what culture actually is. She found that culture is a number of factors, like incentives, processes, physical environment, organizational structure, tools, and roles and relationships.

She found that she needed to get to know parts of the organization and understanding their objectives and metrics, and showing them how research can help them push those needles.

Designing a collaborative research process

To do so, Andréa started looking at the organizational silos on her team, like product, marketing, engineering, sales, and customer service.

She wanted to understand who the stakeholders are, what they needed from research, and what data they’re already collecting.

And she found a lot of data among these teams —things like usertesting.com videos, analytics data, NPS feedback and more.

She wanted to bring all those insights into a central place so everyone could access them and learn from one another.

Andréa then started using a tool called Dovetail to do just that. She wanted to know how people wanted their content tagged and what they wanted to learn from it.

Around this time, Andréa was also thinking about design systems, as so many of us are! She took a look at Tomer Sharon’s nuggets system and concept of “atomic research” to inspire her.

In this system, each insight needs evidence, a study to back it up, who the demographic was, and any ideas that the insight brought about.

Once they got Dovetail working, questions remained—how do we maintain it? How do we train advocates across the company to use the tool and add insights? How might we create a physical space where people can experience our research?

Andréa gave a lunch and learn to help people learn about it, and made a video of it that people could look back on if they missed it. She also created cute stickers that say “I did user experience research at League” that people get when they participate. In her exact words: “we’re all adults, but we like a gold sticker now and then!” So true.

The other question that remained: how might we make sure that our insights make their way into the products? This is always the big question.

She had three tangible suggestions, from experiments she’s currently running:

1. Add user insights (with evidence) to JIRA tickets.
2. Include insights as a central element in requirements documents.
3. Place a strong focus on creating Engineering advocates and incentivizing them.

Andréa also talked about the importance of research triangulation. Sounds fancy, right? What she means by that is using qualitative research, analytics, and secondary research altogether to make really compelling arguments and pitch your work across all levels of the company.

Andréa shared her work with us mid-way through the experiment, and there’s plenty left to do and learn. Her next steps including continuing to integrate new feedback channels into Dovetail, socializing insights through Slack and sessions, and incentivize people at the company to make decisions based on user insights and get involved with research.

Key insights and takeaways

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Andréa shared this proverb to make the point that she had a lot of advocates and support along the way that helped her make all this happen.

She also shared the insight that research collaboration and culture are like gardening, not architecture. Every conversation you have, every claim you make, can be accompanied by an insight.

It adds a lot more richness to your overall goal to make this come up all the time. You have to sprinkle it around over time and grow your research culture organically, not build a behemoth.

You’re also always going to get lots of challenging feedback—like questioning the tool you use, the amount of work to contribute to this system, and the short-term impact of your work.

To this, she responds like a true researcher would: continuing to ask why, gather that feedback, iterate and respond—and showcase the value and the why, too.

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