Putting the U in User Research
Jamie Crabb
UX practitioners come in all shapes and sizes, and from a wide variety of backgrounds. (This seems especially true at Yammer.) Compared to some of my coworkers, my path to becoming a User Researcher at Yammer has been very direct. I was lucky enough to intern here last summer, and I’ve returned after graduating from Georgia Tech — GO JACKETS. And because I’ve started working here directly following my education, I’ve had a chance to compare and (more so) contrast my experience at school with my day-to-day work as a full-time researcher.
The biggest difference so far has been the lack of the fifty page research report. In school, those reports were intensely labored on, each page fought over in group projects, and rightfully so: Those projects were the biggest contributing factor to your grade at the end of the semester. The entire research plan was documented and reflected on in this one monolithic thing to be proud of… and then never revisited.
So the scarcity of research deliverables at Yammer scared me at first. The idea that I wasn’t taking the time to draft and revise and present these things made me feel like a bad researcher; I felt like I was hiding the work I was doing. But in fact, the opposite was true.
At Yammer, the user researcher IS the research.
Plans and insights don’t live in a monolithic report, because no-one reads them. Huge reports can be, paradoxically, the opposite of transparency. When the researcher represents the research, it becomes their job to make sure that everyone is bought in. Transparency comes from being open and vocal at every stage of the process. Not only is this a way to get everyone bought in to your research, but it gives you a chance to better understand the goals of the other members of your team. This way, you’re never researching all the way down the rabbit hole, only to discover that those questions are no longer relevant: The worst way to present your research is a huge, jargon-filled report AFTER the research is complete.
When you shift your focus from deliverables to the research itself and on collaborating with other shareholders on the project, you are really focusing yourself back on the users. You have a better chance of actually improving their experience, rather than producing thirty pages on why their experience is lousy followed by ten pages on what could be done about it.
It doesn’t all stay in our heads though; to support our findings and to give them a home, we do make slide decks. But these decks are short and sweet, capturing high level insights and quotes only. These play an important role as we’re trying to get out our findings about Yammer to other Microsoft offices around the globe.
So to all you user researchers out there: you are the research. It lives in you. This doesn’t make you a bad researcher who doesn’t document their findings well. It makes your role more interactive and gives you the opportunity to really impact your company for the better. If that sounds daunting, start with getting your company bought into research and trusting the process. Once they trust in the research process and by extension you, watch as your product starts to really support the user.
Jamie Crabb is a User Researcher at Yammer. Her progression from intern to employee has been swift and ruthless, and soon she will be everyone’s boss.
