Pop-up research is a team sport
I’ve found pop-up (or guerrilla) research to be one of the most powerful tools a UX designer can have. At Wellcome I’ve been experimenting with different ways to do pop-up research — some included getting my whole product team involved (from developers to product manager and agile coach).
Using this method has meant there is a lower barrier for the team to meet our users. Involving everybody has helped them understand and empathise with people using our product.
I learnt a lot from this process. Here’s how we did it.
The power of pop-up research
This method is generally low-cost, quick to carry out and doesn’t require recruiting participants before hand. In contrast to traditional lab testing — instead of bringing the users to you, you go to them. You venture into the ‘wild’ catching people ‘in the moment’.
While I was working on Wellcome’s intranet product, the ‘wilderness’ wasn’t very far — all our users are under the same roof. Using pop-up methods as well as formal research techniques meant that we were able to reach pockets of people who don’t naturally volunteer for research sessions.
Pop-up research has been around for a while and Foolproof has written a very good summary.
Choose the right moment
One of the strengths of pop-up testing is catching participants ‘in the moment’.
At Wellcome there are many staff events. Guest speakers and colleagues are invited to talk about topics relevant to our work. We wanted to reach people who attend these events that don’t need registration. There was no easy way to know who they were, so we decided to go to the source and catch people as they were leaving an event.
The goal was to find out the general mindset of people going to events, how they chose a particular event and how they planned their attendance. We wanted to use contextual interviews to find out.
Preparation is key
To get the most out of pop-up research you have to prepare — the research questions, how you capture data, how you analyse the data and how the insights will be shared.
As the UX designer on the team, I worked closely with our user researcher. We started by looking through findings and insights from previous research to inform our questions and script.
This was the first time the whole product team was getting involved in research, so I wanted to make it easy for them and help them feel confident while talking to the users.
I attended the User Experience Lisbon (UXLX) conference last year and I was lucky enough to get into Cyd Harrell’s workshop about conducting research on the fly. She introduced me to the scoresheet as a way to collect notes and data to make analysis quicker. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to use for our own research.
To create the scoresheet we laid our questions in a document and added in parameters for the data to create something like this:
We were careful to note down our assumptions as we were adding the parameters for the scoresheet. We looked back at these after the research sessions to compare.
Sending the team out on a mission
Armed with a scoresheet and script, we paired up — one person as the interviewer, the other as the note taker. Before storming into events happening around Wellcome, we made sure everybody was clear on the research goals, knew how to approach people and how to take notes.
After talking to as many people after an event as we could, we got together as a team again to debrief and share:
- 1–2 things that surprised us from each interview
- a basic overview of our scoresheets
Using this method, the user researcher and I were able to gather the findings and quickly identify themes. These fed directly into the first ideation of the new journey later that week.
What did I learn?
By involving the team in some of the formative research stages, we were able to come to a consensus quickly, better understand the people using our product and inspire the team to work on solutions.
Some things to look out for when working with your team to conduct research:
- Give thorough guidance — make sure the note takers write what they hear and are aware of their own biases.
- Make sure everyone is comfortable — be aware of different confidence levels and try to pair more experienced team members with less experienced ones.
- Respect people’s time — while it’s great to involve the team in some research, they are essentially doing you a favour, above and beyond their role. Weigh up what positive impact this could have on their work — for example, gaining detailed knowledge of user behaviour would be particularly good for a project kick off.
Using pop-up research as a way to get my team involved with user research has been extremely valuable. The results can be seen in the decisions we’ve made as a team and individually — it has helped us create a stronger product. I would like to thank my team for being so open and generous with their time because without them I wouldn’t have been able to try out new ways of doing research!
