From Seedlings to Sequoias — Nurturing UX Research
By: Caylie Panuccio
Tags: Ux Techniques, Ux Australia, Design Research, User Experience, UX Research

2. Feed the saplings

Make sure that the research conducted is of a high quality, and appropriate for the problem or gap its trying to address. Feeding the saplings has three sub-steps:

Coach your team

Coach each other

Use your resources

Coach your team

Run some practical coaching sessions for your team. These could be things like questioning and responding techniques, choosing an appropriate research method, usability metrics or how to synthesise data — whatever you’ve heard your team asking for.

You could run these yourself, get someone external in to do it, or even look at some articles/videos and discuss them as a team — a sort of book club.

Coach each other

Now that your team have the basics down, continue to make yourself available for them to ask questions, and bounce ideas off you.

Keep coaching each other by observing each other’s research sessions, checking your scripts, and providing feedback. Remember that crew you built? Use it!

We often engage in design critique. It is equally important to engage in UX research critique. Check your approaches, scripts, technique, and reporting with each other. By doing this, you foster a culture of peer review in your team. Secondly, you ensure any research outputs are of a high quality — two brains are better than one! Peer reviews also help us to recognise our own biases and thought patterns, and ensure we learn something new, or look at things from a new perspective.

Use your resources

By now, you may be thinking “This is all very well and good, but I don’t have a dedicated researcher in my team!” You may not have a tame UX researcher* on hand, and that’s OK. You can still build a strong culture of research…with The Internet™️.

Use your networks to find great people to chat to about their research practices. Use The Internet™️ to look up research methods, recommendations, articles, usability testing tips and tricks (find some at the end of this blog post!). There are plenty of digital and paper resources out there — use them. If you’re struggling with the best way to tackle a problem, it’s likely that someone else out there has tackled the same problem, and done the thinking for you.

Now, your research saplings are loving the attention you’re giving them, and are being fed with knowledge. They’re thriving.

3. Propagate the trees

Spreading the Word of Research.

Co-create from the get-go

Put your stakeholders to work

Workshop it

Co-create from the get-go

Get your stakeholders involved in your research project right from the start. I’m not talking about note-taking — think waaaay further back than that.

Co-create the research brief with them. That is, the research objectives (what you want to find out), potential questions to ask, the audience, and the method. This is useful for not-well-defined exploratory pieces (you can really dig out assumptions and deep-seated beliefs here) as well as faster-paced concept validation.

This part can sometimes worry dyed-in-the-wool researchers (what?! Letting stakeholders give you ideas?! But the leading!) — however, your stakeholders are much more likely to buy into the research findings if they’ve had some hand in shaping the objectives. And hey — hypotheses are there to be (dis)proven.

Secondly, it’s important to have people with different perspectives in the room. You’ll build a better product if you have people of different disciplines working with you and sharing their ideas. Research does not exist in a vacuum — it has to play nicely with technical feasibility and business viability, as does UX design.

You can pull out your stakeholders’ hypotheses and assumptions by using:

Or literally just paper and pens, you don’t need to be fancy.

Put your stakeholders to work

Continue to keep your stakeholders engaged by asking them to take notes for you. Stress the importance of note-taking as reducing synthesis time, thus getting your team to the results more quickly. You can email your team with a sign up list, or stick a physical sign up sheet somewhere near your desk (I once laminated mine for an easy wipe n’ reuse).

You’ll need about 15 minutes before each session to brief each stakeholder on the content of your interview guide, and how to take good notes.

After the session, ask for their thoughts and what they found interesting/surprising. Go through their notes and make suggestions on how they could improve (provided they have asked you for this feedback!)

It’s important to remind your note-takers that observing user research is a privilege — we’re not there to make friends with participants, or sell an idea — we’re there to learn.

Workshop it

Once the research sessions are complete, run a debrief and synthesis session with your note-taking stakeholders.

Use an hour — spend about 20 minutes discussing what sorts of things they observed in the session. Finding commonalities or surprises helps cement in their minds the things they saw, and also broadens their viewpoint from just one or two sessions, to a big picture of common themes.

In the next 20 minutes, give each stakeholder a set of notes (ones that they did not write), a Sharpie (every designer’s fave tool) and some sticky notes. Ask your stakeholders to write down one observation per sticky note, and stick them up as they go, reading each one aloud.

As more and more notes are put up, get a few helpers to start affinity mapping these — this gives your stakeholders some ownership over the eventual synthesised findings, and ensures what they observed from the session really sinks in.

Lastly, when your synthesis and reporting is complete, share the insights via a workshop with your broader team — quickly run through the findings, and print these off. Then, ask your workshop attendees to sketch up concepts or ideas based on the findings.

All you need is one person walking away saying how interesting the session was — the rest will follow. Some never will — but that’s their loss.