Research for Business Development
How much research is enough to move forward?
Probably every single company in the world doing user research tackles the above question in their own way. Few teams can afford a full contextual inquiry within the product cycle, and the difficulty in translating research data into actionable insights is always a risk. After the Zensors team finished our initial survey of some 11 different verticals to identify business opportunities for Zensors and narrowed our focus to facilities management and industrial baking, we faced a similar problem with balancing speed and detail in our research strategy.
While putting all of our resources into research — throwing 5 bodies at just doing interviews — was one option for moving forward with the project, we knew that in order to succeed with making inroads into Zensor’s productization that we needed to not only have an idea of the system’s user experience within a few weeks, but also have design prototypes to back it up. We decided that we would need enough further research to get an idea of the user needs in our targeted verticals, and confidently say that our designs can accommodate for the majority of users in the space. To do this, we used a combination of tailored interviews with site visits.
Pure Research vs Applied Research vs Design Research
Before explaining our research process, let’s go over some definitions of different research types. As part of my (never-ending) interest in understanding the spectrum of UX research methods, I stumbled on a paper published on Weave, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal specializing in library UX, McMaster University librarian Susanna Galbraith. Although Galbraith’s article focuses on the use of research methods in libraries, her writing is incredibly relevant to our work.
Galbraith structures part of her argument by defining the difference between pure research, applied research, and design research according to Erika Hall’s 2013 book Just Enough Research. According to Galbraith, Hall defines the three categories as such:
Pure research is ‘carried out to create new human knowledge, whether to uncover new facts or fundamental principles’ (Hall, 2013, p. 12)
Applied research ‘borrows ideas and techniques from pure research to serve a specific real-world goal’ (p. 12)
Design research ‘is for gathering useful insights’ (Hall, 2013, p.13)
I’ll focus for the rest of this article on our process of applied research and our integration of design methods as part of our applied research.
Building Relationships Through Interviews
We’ve done a lot of interviews for capstone. Since they tend to be a great method for building rapport with participants, we’ve decided to continue using them. Our current phase of research takes advantage of the relationship building aspect of interviews; we’ve reached out to dozens of coworking spaces and a handful of baking-related companies to get our foot in the door and learn more about their businesses. We not only gain information on the participant and their business needs, but they also have the chance to learn about new technology that can help their business.
In more than one way, we’re adopting the traditional research interview for the purpose of not only learning more about people, but also to develop potential relationships that could be of mutual benefit to both parties.
Diving Deeper into Context
For some local coworking spaces in Pittsburgh, we’ve begun the process of visiting their sites to gain a contextual understanding of the locations they operate. Last month, our first onsite visit was with the BeautyShoppe, a coworking space located in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood. We had already learned about the company from speaking with one of the founders, but wanted to understand day-to-day operations. So we sat down to have a chat with the facilities manager, who helped answer our questions about data tracking and analytics at the BeautyShoppe.
We were particularly excited about employing a design research technique in combination with our interview. We divided our interview into two sections, approximately 15 minutes each, in which we asked different types of questions to our participant. In the middle of these two parts, we asked to see the space and have the facilities manager place post-it notes on items in the space she wanted to gain more data on. Afterwards, we followed up with the second half of the interview to get her mind off the post-its, and finally finished the interview by collecting the post-it notes, and asking the participant:
The camera looking at [this object] just sent you a notification. What is it telling you?
From this, we collected additional insight into the type of data and notifications the participant was imagining.
This blend of interview and participatory exercise is precisely the type of blended approach Galbraith noted as being critical to success with library UX. Despite our work being focused in a different domain, the higher level thinking about the methods are the same: use design methods as a specific application of design research.
Should we be worried about bias before developing personas?
Armed with a number of interesting insights about facilities management, we were now at a second crossroads: Do we continue to wait for research insights or do we forge ahead with persona writing and experience map creation? Are we afraid of sampling bias?
The answer to that last question is: probably not.
We don’t necessarily need to have enough data to avoid bias, or at least work around it. One of the first things we did was connect some of the takeaways from our onsite with phone interviews done with facilities managers from other coworking spaces. This helped eliminate some worry.
More importantly, we also feel there’s no reason we have to take a waterfall approach to research and design. We can continue doing onsite visits to other coworking spaces, regardless of the current version of our personas. Galbraith, whose paper is just one of several perspectives on UX research, also talks about the need to eliminate bias; she mentions that bias can be overcome by simply acknowledging the shortcomings of the current method. I think we definitely feel similarly about pushing forward with a small sample from coworking spaces.
In the end, we created drafts of three different personas and experience maps. These artifacts were helpful to our team for communicating our ideas about the interface and what needs ours users would have. It also proved to be a valuable step in working towards a working prototype, as we now had more data for wireframing an experience for Zensors. No doubt we’ll continue to flesh out our personas as we collect data, but for now, the entire team has an even stronger understanding of how Zensors can help solve the needs of coworking companies. That alone has made this step a worthwhile consolidation of both remote and onsite research methods.
