Researching UX User Research Great Design Begins with Deep Empathy pdf pdf

  ASPECTS

OF UX

  RESEARCHING UX USER RESEARCH BY JAMES LANG & EMMA HOWELL i Researching UX: User Research by James Lang and Emma Howell Copyright © 2017 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

  Product Manager: Simon Mackie Technical Editor: Kate Towsey Series Editor: Joe Leech Cover Designer: Alex Walker English Editor: Katie Monk Illustrator: Natalia Balska Notice of Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

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ii Researching UX: User Research

  About James Lang

  James has worked in research for 20 years, for organizations including Google, British Airways, the BBC, eBay and the Alzheimer’s Society. He is currently Head of Research at cxpartners.

  About Emma Howell

  Emma Howell is a User Experience Consultant at cxpartners. She has been a research specialist for 10 years, beginning her career in academia before moving into UX. Emma loves designing products and services that are intuitive and enjoyable to use.

  About SitePoint

  SitePoint specializes in publishing fun, practical, and easy-to-understand content for web professionals. Visit to access our blogs, books, newsletters, articles, and community forums. You’ll find a stack of information on JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, mobile development, design, and more.

  James: To my mum and dad, Sally and Joseph, for giving me their curiosity, patience and kindness. Emma: For raising an analytical and inquisitive creature, my fabulous parents Pauline and Leigh. My gyaldem: twerking and tequila makes deadlines feel less painful. Laura-Lea: you’ve been amazingly encouraging and patient. Thank you. iii

  Table of Contents

  

  

  

  

  

  

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  Table of Contents ix

  

  

  

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  Table of Contents xi

  

  

  xii Researching UX: User Research

  

  Preface xiii Preface

  I was on stage at UX Manchester and I made a flippant comment about how all focus groups were a waste of time when it came to researching the user experience. When questions came at the end of my talk, a hand shot up. “I don’t agree with your comment about focus groups. They have their uses. All research methods have their strengths and weaknesses.” That hand belonged to James Lang. He came and found me afterwards and we debated the merits of user research methods. At the end of the conversation, I asked if he was looking for a job. Emma brings 10 years of formal research experience in psychology, cognition, medicine, biology and, of course, user experience. Emma and James are two of the best researchers I’ve ever worked with. I’ve learned so much from working with them on many UX research projects over the years.

  This book represents Emma and James’s many years of research experience. Their practical advice on how to run an insightful, successful research project is the key to making your digital products even better.

  ) Bristol, UK, October 2017. PS. I was right about focus groups – see Chapter 2.

  If You Feel Unsure, Then Read On

  You’re beginning a user research project. You want it to go well. You want it to be interesting, to learn something new and to generate ideas. Most importantly, you want your project to make a difference. This book will show you how to achieve all of that.

  This book is about the craft, the technique and the processes involved in running a design research project. Whether you’re in discovery or evaluation mode, whether your project is agile or waterfall, research is at the heart of user-centered design. Because it’s so central, we believe that research should be an activity that the whole team gets to participate in and feel ownership of. xiv Researching UX: User Research

  At the same time, design research can sometimes seem a daunting, confusing world unto itself. With its own codes and jargon, it can feel like the domain of specialists, forbidden to outsiders who haven’t been trained in the rules. If you’ve ever felt out of your depth on a research project, been unsure what to do next, or wondered whether you’re “doing it wrong”, then this book is for you.

  What We’ll Cover in this Book

  Over the next nine chapters, we’ll pass through the stages of a qualitative design research project. The primary focus is on the practicalities: our intention is to share a step-by-step guide so you know what do to at each point… especially if you’re stuck! Alongside that, though, we’ve provided a rationale, not least because being able to understand and justify your approach is pretty useful in itself.

  The structure of the book follows the sequence of a research project:

  0-1. The research cycle Design

  covers the different methods for recruiting people to take part in your

  Preface xv

  shows how to bring the project to a successful conclusion, using deliverables and engagement techniques to maximise the impact of your work. Unless you’re completely new to research, you’re probably more familiar with some of these aspects of the process than others. You should be able to dip into the book as required, rather than reading from front to back, with a couple of exceptions:

  If you want to know how to run research sessions, it’s a good idea to look at Chapters 4, 6 and 7. If you’re interested in how to ensure your projects have maximum impact, the information you need is in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 9.

  The Gist of the Book

  As we’ve already mentioned, this book is more interested in the practicalities of research than the theory. That said, if you read on you’ll see several ideas surface xvi Researching UX: User Research Research is a team sport. We believe research projects are most effective when

  the whole team’s involved, not when one or two specialists are tasked with going away to ‘do research’ and come back with an answer. Working as a team - sharing the hypothesising, interviewing and analysis - brings the designers, developers, content owners and others much closer to the actual user experience, rather than having it fed back to them via a report or presentation. It’s a better, more rewarding experience for everyone, but more importantly it makes the research more likely to have an impact. You may not always be able to get the whole team involved throughout, but we’ll share the workarounds you can use to achieve nearly the same result.

  When you’re making decisions about your project, think about the end point and

work backwards. Whether it’s to generate new ideas, build empathy for users,

  understand a problem better, or inform decision-making, your project has an end goal. In most cases, this’ll be a combination of overt, stated objectives and more obscure aims that you’ll have to figure out from talking to stakeholders. Don’t lose sight of the end goal, because it should inform your decisions at every point. For example, if your end point is to build empathy with users among disengaged stakeholders, then that will inform your choice of methodology and sample, the types of data you collect, and the approach you use to analyse and report it. It’ll also determine the way you involve stakeholders throughout the project. We’ll show you why you need to stay aware of those choices and consciously direct your approach with the end goal in mind, rather than just hoping for the best.

  Successful research is about driving design decisions through engagement, not delivering documents. To be most effective, research projects are about enabling

  the people who make decisions about things to experience the lives of the people who use those things. If you can give stakeholders an in-person connection with their users, you'll enhance and enrich their work, and they'll thank you for it. You'll also help them make better decisions more easily, and therefore do better work, and they'll love you for that. Good and easy decisions don't often come from reading research reports, often because there's no human experience connected with the recommendations and they're therefore not followed. Also, it's easy to put a report away and ignore it, especially if it doesn't fit that person’s agenda. But when a stakeholder has seen users first-hand as they comment on or do something, recommendations are much more likely to be implemented. We’ll show you how to get stakeholders engaged, and keep them engaged, using

  Preface xvii

  deliverables as the final call to action.

  Do as much research as you need to, and then stop. You need to be able to justify

  the time you spend on research: there’s no point in large-scale research projects that deliver no outcome. Instead, we’d argue for sequences of bite-sized projects, taking a slightly different focus and methodology each time. Moving in this way, and accruing insight as you go, allows you to find out just what you need and no more, leaving your time and budget free to act on what you’ve found. Erika Hall calls this ‘just enough research’, and we think it’s a great way of balancing out the risk of ill-informed decisions against the cost of further projects. We’ll share some planning tools you can use to structure your project, and decide when enough’s enough.

  Analysis starts at the beginning. As you begin a research project, you’ll already have ideas, hunches and preconceptions about the subject you’re investigating.

  Instead of trying to ignore them, you should get them out in the open. Confusingly, research projects have a distinct ‘analysis stage’, but in practice analysis is something that you do throughout the project, by taking your initial impressions and then challenging and evolving them through talking to and observing users (a process that Roddy Glen calls ‘rolling hypotheses’). Ultimately, the purpose of research is to make better decisions. The process of engaging with users is purely to arrive at better informed, more substantiated, more inspired decisions. We’ll show you rigorous, practical tools you can use to turn your initial thoughts into findings and recommendations at the end of the project.

  Research is about consent. User-centered design is based on the belief that by

  understanding and delivering what users need, you can achieve better outcomes for your organisation. To do this, you need empathy and respect: going beyond a superficial understanding of people as consumers, or users, or customers, and engaging with them deeply as real, rounded people with needs, motivations, emotions and desires. Think of your research as a collaboration between your team, as designers, and the people who use your product or service. If you’re conscious of the reasons why they might (or might not) want to take part, the ways that the research experience might affect them, their preconceptions and concerns, then you’re not just being a good person, you’re being a good designer too. We’ll walk you through the steps you should take to engage with participants and their data with respect and care. xviii Researching UX: User Research

  Enough theory. It’s time to start your project.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped us to write this book. The editorial team at SitePoint, Joe Leech and Simon Mackie, expertly guided the project with a blend of encouragement and critique. Our technical editor, Kate Towsey, offered an inspiring alternative perspective and challenged our missteps.

  Particular thanks to the colleagues at cxpartners who read and responded to early drafts: Mark Skinner, James Chudley, Angelique Alexander, Mina Bach and Audun Clark. We were lucky to have input from other experts in the field too: Kristy Blazio at Usability One, Roddy Glen (formerly of Strategic Research Group), Barbara Langar (formerly of eBay, now at Insight Angels), Gemma Newell at the BBC, and David Whittle at Spotify. Finally, the people who laid the foundations: Romin Tafarodi, Alison Lyon and Pete Comley.

  Conventions Used

  You’ll notice that we’ve used certain typographic and layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

  Tips, Notes, and Warnings Hey, You! Tips provide helpful little pointers. Ahem, Excuse Me ...

  Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand. Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

  Preface xix Make Sure You Always ...

  ... pay attention to these important points.

  Watch Out! Warnings highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way. Supplementary Materials

  are SitePoint’s forums, for help on any tricky web problems.

  books@sitepoint.com is our email address, should you need to contact us to report a problem, or for any other reason.

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  Chapter

  1 Begin the Project

  Starting a research project can feel manic. There’s lots to organise: briefs to write, objectives to agree, and stakeholders to bring on board. It’s easy to feel like you’re being swept away on a sea of madness. But with a bit of organisation, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you get the setup right, the rest of the process will be less stressful and more productive. In this chapter, we’ll show you: How to start off a project effectively.

  What to expect at each stage of the project. How to ensure your project generates action at the end.

  Get Started

  To make sure you’re making a good start, it’s helpful to refer to the checklist below, and tick off the things you need. It’s also a good way to structure your activities.

  1-2. The research cycle: design phase You need… How to create it How to record it… Research objectives

  Kickoff workshop or written brief (overt objectives) Project canvas

  Stakeholder interviews (covert objectives)

  Hypotheses

  Desk research Discussion guide Stakeholder interviews

  Timelines and resources

  Post-it planning Project plan Roles & responsibilities RASCI

  Communication plan

  Stakeholder buy-in

  Stakeholder interviews Engagement plan swimlanes within project plan

  Risks

  Pre-mortem Risk register

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  1. Define Your Research

  You will probably already know there’s a need for research, but at this stage it might be quite vague. It’s your job to get clarity about the research objectives, otherwise your work will be unfocused, and less likely to achieve anything useful.

  With your colleagues, you need to define your objectives. These fall into two categories:

  

Business objectives are the end goal of the project. An example business

objective: increase conversion rate by 5%. Research objectives are the learning goals of the project. An example research objective: understand how customers buy shoes for their children.

  You should also expect some objectives to be more obvious than others: ‘overt objectives’ are the ones talked about openly, while ‘covert objectives’ are kept quiet (but are no less important). For your project to be considered a success, you’ll need to take into account both the overt and covert objectives.

  Your objectives are the single most important element in your project. As you proceed, you’ll continually return to them: to help choose the right methodology, to shape your questions, to check you’re on track, and to inform your analysis.

  2. Define Hypotheses When you define objectives, you’re laying out the questions you want to answer.

  When you define hypotheses, you’re making your best initial guess at what those answers will be. The rest of the project – asking users and conducting analysis – is the process of checking, challenging and refining your initial answers until you’ve reached solid conclusions.

  We use two kinds of hypothesis in our research projects:

  Formal hypotheses are statements which can be tested against the data to

  determine if they’re supported or not. For example: “Regular shoe-store customers own more pairs of shoes than occasional shoe-store customers.” This kind of hypothesis is used in quantitative research, and if you’ve

  Begin the Project 4

  conducted experiments at university, you’ll probably be familiar with it.

  Rolling hypotheses are early-stage theories or explanations that evolve

  throughout the project. Think of them as hunches or assumptions, which you can evolve, add to or reject by observing and talking to users. Rolling hypotheses start off vague, and become more solid as you proceed. This kind of hypothesis is used in qualitative research, but is very similar to the process of learning more about any subject you previously knew little about. When you start a project, it’s helpful to get all of the team’s assumptions (hypotheses) out in the open, so you can incorporate them into your questioning.

  3. Timeline & Resources

  In most research projects, time is of the essence. Generally, you’ll be working towards a deadline, or in a fixed cycle of sprints, and you’ll need to shape your approach accordingly. Also, you’ll have finite resources to work with. Defining the right approach in terms of timelines and resources – and ensuring you’re able to stick to it – is one of the main skills of running research projects. You may be lucky enough to have a dedicated project manager, but if not, you’ll be in charge of putting together the plan, and reviewing progress each day to check you’re on track.

  4. Engage Stakeholders

  If you want your research to have an impact, you’ll need to make sure your colleagues are engaged in the process. To do that, you need to be communicating and collaborating throughout the project, not just at the end. The earlier you get started, the more stakeholders will care about your results, and want to own and act on them. Therefore, you need to plan. The trick to successful communication is to think of it as an ongoing sequence, rather than one-off messages. Think strategically and plan it as a campaign, running from the beginning of the project and on past the final documentation. We’ll show you how to do this later in the chapter.

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  5. Identify Risks

  All projects have risks: things that might go wrong. It’s important to face up to these possibilities and plan for them, rather than just hope for the best. Otherwise, you may find you get caught out, and the project runs over time or budget, or threatens to under-deliver.

  Risks emerge throughout the project, but nonetheless you should have a pretty clear idea at the beginning what might happen, based on the team’s collective past experience. If you deal with these possibilities openly, you can agree on an appropriate response (which might be to take no action at all!). Either way, tackling risks is a decision for the whole team, not one you should have to take on your own.

  Tools You Can Use

  Now that we’ve described the building blocks you need to get started, it’s time to look at the tools you can use to create them.

  Use Desk Research to Generate Hypotheses

  Desk research sounds dull, but it’s actually a great way to get your head into a subject right at the beginning. If you approach it creatively, you can use many different approaches – see below.

  Begin the Project 6 1-3. How to generate hypotheses

  Spend some time looking at the site and service that you are working on. Take a look at the top competitors as well. This can often give you insight into problems, directions you may want to head in or even things to avoid. Look on forums, review any analytics you can get hold of and chat to your colleagues for any insights they may have. This can all help set the direction of your research. Don’t feel like you need to take ages over desk research: you can achieve a lot by choosing two or three of the methods above and spending a couple of hours in total exploring them. As you go along, write your hypotheses on Post-It notes. There’s no right or wrong choice of method: just go for the ones that are easiest and quickest for you to use.

  Hold a Kickoff Workshop

  Whatever else happens, you should always hold a kickoff workshop for your research project. This can vary in length. For a sprint, it may only be half an hour; for a large-scale project with a new team, it could be a whole day. Kickoff workshops follow a standard agenda:

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  Introductions: If the team don’t know each other, it’s a good idea to go round

  the room so everyone can say their name, their role, and their relationship to the project.

  Provide background: The main sponsor (ie, normally the most senior person

  in the room) should provide an introduction covering the reasons why the project needs to happen, the business, and the context. Note that the main sponsor is the starting point for understanding the project, but it’s not the only point of view that matters: there will be other stakeholders and other perspectives that need to be taken into account.

  Agree objectives: Ask all of the participants in the workshop to write their

  objectives for the research on Post-It notes. These can then be de-duped and sorted in order of importance. It’s likely that your project won’t be able to cover all the objectives proposed, so this is a good opportunity for the group to agree on any that are specifically out of scope at this stage. If the same objective is suggested by several people, it’s likely to be an important one.

  

Generate hypotheses: Once again, ask the participants to propose their

  hypotheses, written on Post-It notes. A good way to do this is to read out each of the research objectives and ask people to provide their hypotheses, then stick the Post-It notes around the relevant objective. Sometimes it can be hard for participants to think in terms of hypotheses. If that’s the case, ask them to finish a sentence that starts with ‘I reckon…’ or ‘I believe…’. You can also ask them to say which of their hypotheses are supported by data, by sticking different coloured dots onto the Post-It notes – eg, a black dot for hypotheses that are strongly supported by existing data, an orange dot for those that are somewhat supported by existing data, and a blue dot for those that are pure guesswork at this stage.

  

Define resources: To complete the project, you’ll need to marshal your

  resources with the help of the rest of the team. Ask specifically about: Any sources of potential participants, such as mailing lists.

  Who will be available to help with the research, as observer or note-taker. You may want to create a RASCI to define roles (see next section). Any existing data sources or reports. Tip: you can refer back to the black and orange dots in the previous exercise to help nudge people to provide this. Something to test: a prototype, concept boards or existing product. Time and budget. avoid overlap or mistakes. There are two stages to do this: First, create a RASCI. This is a document which captures the people’s different relationships to the project.

  

R stands for Responsible. This is the person charged with leading the

project (probably you).

A stands for Accountable. This is the stakeholder who will ultimately

  (see expectations for the approach.

  approach, the team should consider the project risks. We do this using a ‘pre- mortem’ exercise: ask the team to project their thoughts forward to the end of

  Define communications approach: Agree the format, frequency and communications tools you’ll use to catch up and review work. Pre-mortem: Now you’ve got a good idea of the project objectives and

  stakeholders you should be speaking to, and arranging times to interview them.

  Arrange stakeholder interviews: Now is a good time to define the other

  ), but at this stage it can be useful to hear the team’s suggestions about the kinds of people you should be approaching to interview.

  Define the sample: Again, you will define this more solidly later (see

  Define the approach: You’ll probably want to define this in your own time

  be judged on the project, and has signed off the budget. This is likely to be the head of your department.

  They’re likely to be less engaged than those in the Consulted category. Next, write all the different jobs that will need to be done on Post-It notes. Create several columns – one for yourself, and others for each of the people in the Supporters category of the RASCI. Allocate the jobs under each of these columns until you’re confident that everything is covered. You may find that you add additional supporters as part of this process, if you’ve forgotten someone.

  

I stands for Informed. This is the broader audience for the research.

  important point of view on the project, or who will be affected by its outcomes.

  

C stands for Consulted. These are other stakeholders who will have an

  in getting the job done, for example by taking notes. You should have most, if not all of these people in the workshop with you.

  

S stands for Supporters. These are the other people who’ll support you

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  are the elements that went wrong? How could they have been avoided? This is a surprisingly fun activity, and extremely effective at identifying risks.

  Personal objectives: Finally, research projects are also a time for you and your

  team to learn and grow. Is there a new research technique that you want to try? Or a new piece of software that you and your team want to trial? Challenge yourself to include something new in your plans every time you run a research project.

  If you’ve got less time, another way to structure a kickoff workshop is to begin with an empty research canvas document (see below), and fill it in as a team. This works well when you know each other better, or when the project is a continuation of a previous study.

  Talk to Your Stakeholders

  Stakeholder interviews provide a counterpart to the kickoff workshop. For all of our bigger research projects, we carry out stakeholder interviews. Stakeholders are the main people who’ll refer to your research to make decisions in the future. They be may responsible for a part of the organisation that your research relates to, or they may have an interest in the results. For example, if you were working on a piece of research for an online shoe retailer, your stakeholders could include the Head of Marketing, Copywriter, User Experience Designer, Lead Developer and Commercial Director. Stakeholder interviews serve four key purposes: 1. They help you define your research objectives and research hypotheses.

  2. They give you a chance to gain a better understanding of the organisation you’re working with, the dynamics of the business, who’s who, and the relationships between them. It’s your way to minimise the impact of any existing politics on your project!

  3. They’re a brilliant way of getting lots of people from many different areas of the business on board with your project. Having them onside can be invaluable and insightful.

  4. If you’re working for a client, often stakeholders will appreciate having someone outside of the organisation to chat to. It can end up being quite

  Begin the Project 10

  Who should you include? Obviously this will depend on the time available, and the willingness of participants. However, a good guide is the RASCI. If you completed one in your stakeholder workshop, include the people listed under the Accountable and Consulted categories. It’s a good idea to include a mix of the most senior people who have a relationship to your project, and those ‘on the ground’, who will be asked to implement any changes. It also pays to be mindful that stakeholders (especially senior ones) are often pushed for time, so can be difficult to pin down. You can increase the chances of them agreeing to chat to you if you keep the following in mind:

  You will need to convince them that meeting with you and giving up some of their day is worth their while. You can do this by briefly explaining your research and how you believe this will help. Try to explain the value of the project in their terms, rather than yours. You need to have done your homework and go into the interview with a good understanding of the business, the role of your research and how it can help them. You should treat the interview like a meeting, so we recommend sending over an agenda. This gives them a good idea of what to expect, and gives them time to prepare their thoughts. It also pays to show your enthusiasm!

  Create a Research Canvas

  A research canvas is a fantastic way to summarise your project on one page. Put this up on the wall of your project area and you’ll have a succinct view of your entire project. A research canvas summarises your objectives, approach and other key aspects of your plan in a table that’s easy to refer back to throughout the project (see example below).

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  1-4. An example research canvas

  Some headings may be more relevant than others, so feel free to play with the format and change the section titles until you find a version that’s right for you. Having a research canvas will help you to: Define the objectives of your project.

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  Make sure you ask all the questions you need at the beginning of the project. Have something to refer back to if you are considering changes to your approach mid-project.

  Help you to onboard new team members. Your research canvas should be visible. Ideally, it will be printed out and posted in your team’s working area, as the start of a research wall or project space (see

  Chapter 8). Project Plan Running a research project involves co-ordinating a lot of resources and people: participants, stakeholders, note-takers, research facilities and recruiters, among others. Without a project plan, it would be chaos. A project plan is essentially a timeline, showing what will happen when, and enabling you to make sure you’ve got enough to complete each activity before your deadlines. Once you’ve got a project plan, you can specify when you need particular resources in place – for example, when you need recruitment completed by. All research projects follow the same basic pattern:

  1-5. A more detailed look at the research cycle

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  Within that basic framework, though, there’s a lot of variation, depending on your target audience, your methodology, your recruitment method and the scale of your project. It’s a good idea to leave a little bit of wriggle room to allow for unexpected overruns.

  Make a Plan to Engage People

  We’ve mentioned already that you should plan your research projects for impact, not just to deliver a report. For this to happen, you’ll need to get buy-in and engagement from stakeholders. This is part of a deliberate process we call engagement planning.

  1. First, you should be clear about who you need to get buy-in from. If you’ve created a RASCI, this would be the people in your Accountable and Consulted categories. In some cases, the Informed category is important, too.

  2. Identify what each of these audiences are interested in. Do they have a business need that relates to your work? Does it have the potential to affect one of their KPIs? What are their overt and covert objectives? If you talk in their terms, they’re more likely to take an interest and act on your findings. You can do this in your kickoff workshop and stakeholder interviews.

  3. Identify the key messages you’ll need each audience to take out of the research. For your main project sponsor, it might be: “I understand how best to spend my budget to increase shoe sales.” For the people who’ll put the findings into action, it might be: “I understand what information shoe shoppers need in the checkout process.” 4. Identify the moments at which each audience needs to hear about the project. For senior stakeholders, and those who are less engaged, this might be a handful of times in the process: perhaps an interview at the beginning, an update midway through, and a debrief at the end. For others, you might have a weekly catchup session. Bear in mind when you want decisions to be made: sometimes this will be at the end, but if it’s a fast-moving project, you will want to feed information through earlier.

  5. Identify the communication methods that will work best for each audience at each stage. Bear in mind how interested, engaged, and motivated each audience is to hear about the details. For some, it may be best to offer a resource they can dip into, like a project blog or pizza session. For others, they

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  Others may be happiest to wait for the full version, in a final debrief session. Best of all, though, is to encourage your audience to attend the research sessions. If you can get them to show up for the first two interviews, they may stay around for the rest, too.

  We find it easiest to visualise this as an additional set of swimlanes on your project plan. Once you’ve created your plan, it’s a good idea to sense-check it with your colleagues to ensure it works for them, too. As well as ensuring you’ve got the right approach, this also helps to set expectations and build anticipation.

  1-6. Engagement planning

  If you follow this approach, you’ll find you engage your audience and bring them with you on the journey through the project. Ultimately, it’ll mean your results are acted on, which is the whole point of doing research!

  What to Watch Out For

  When you’re planning engagement, there are a few pitfalls to watch out for:

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  Be ruthless. Keep focused on the audiences that matter – ie, the ones you need to act or make decisions. Aim for efficiencies by looking for communication methods that will work for multiple audiences. Don’t hold a feedback session that’s not required. In particular, avoid the temptation to save everything up for a ‘big reveal’ at the end. If you can, engage your audience sooner. Move quickly, if you can. Fast findings (even if they’re not perfect) are usually better than polished findings that arrive too late. If you want to get your audience involved, showing them is better than telling them. Involving them in the process is best of all. To get maximum impact, you should expect to spend as much time communicating the research as you do conducting it. That sounds like a lot of extra work, but in fact you can be efficient by involving your team in activities like note-taking and analysis. Not only will you achieve greater buy-in, you’ve reduced the need for extra debrief sessions or documentation. Make sure you know how and when senior stakeholders want to be kept informed. If you’re not careful, you can over-communicate with them, or use the wrong channel, and run the risk of them tuning out. Instead, ask them early on how they’d like to be kept informed: a summary email, three-slide deck or project blog are good methods to suggest.

  Tactics for Engagement

  To help you make your plan, it’s worth thinking about some of the methods you can use to engage your audience. This isn’t a complete list – use it as a starting point to add your own ideas to:

  Stakeholder interviews (see above) Project space (see ) Show & tell (see Topline findings (see Project blog / website (see

4. Decide How You Will Communicate With Your Team

  Encouraging good communication within the team is key to the smooth running of your research project, and happy colleagues.

  Begin the Project 16

  We use a number of different communication patterns on our projects: Regular stand up meetings. These could be daily or a couple of times per week, and shouldn’t last more than around 15 minutes.

  More in-depth milestone meetings to review documents, make more complex decisions or get signoff from stakeholders. These might last up to an hour, and will be scheduled well in advance as part of the project plan, to ensure everyone can attend.

  Shared documents that the whole team can access. These include the project

  canvas, project plan, and others we’ve mentioned already, but also the recruitment brief, discussion guide, analysis plan and deliverables. To make them accessible, we use software such as Google Docs and Dropbox.

  Collaboration tools can be incredibly helpful, especially if you’re working with a distributed team. We love Trello, Evernote, Slack and Google Hangouts.

  For some research projects, you may be building a prototype with your project team. Make sure you pick software with a decent sharing feature so that it’s easy for you to share feedback with your colleagues. When you decide on your approach, it’s worth bearing in mind a few factors:

  Who are the key people you’ll need to contact. What are their communication preferences? What software are you able to use? For example, your organisation may have rules that prohibit certain products or limit their effectiveness. It’s better to have a flawed tool or meeting setup that’s accessible to everyone, than to have multiple different setups for different people. In the latter scenario, confusion reigns. We’ve experienced projects where the team have attempted to use a mix of Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, email and conference calls, with the result that messages got lost and key people were excluded from the conversation.

  Work Through Risks to the Project

  A risk register is a list of the potential pitfalls that might affect your project, and your team’s planned response to them. Normally, you’d produce this in two bursts: firstly as a team, and then adding in detail yourself later.

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  The first column describes the risk – eg, “Prototype isn’t ready in time for testing.” The second column rates the probability of this problem occurring, normally on a scale of one to five, where one means very unlikely and five means very likely. The third column rates the impact of the problem if it does occur, again on a scale of one to five where one means minimal impact and five means major impact on the business. The fourth column is the importance of the risk. You generate this by multiplying the probability and impact columns, to generate a score from 1 to

  25. The fifth column is response. This is what you plan to do to address the risk. You may choose a plan to mitigate it (such as “Assign additional developers to the prototype team”), or ignore it if the importance score is low.

  Risk registers work best in a spreadsheet format. Once you’ve completed your table, it’s a good idea to sort it by the fourth column, so the most important risks are at the top.

  Begin the Project 18 1-7. A risk register

  Summary A good research project takes planning, preparation and a considered approach.

  Clearly define your objectives using workshops, briefs, desk research and stakeholder interviews. Involve your colleagues in generating hypotheses. Include your stakeholders as soon as possible. Be strategic about engaging

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  them through the project. Figure out the best ways to keep in touch with your team. Minimise the chances of things going wrong during your project by running a pre-mortem and discussing what you think could fail.

  Choose an Approach 20 Chapter

  2 Choose an Approach

  Once you’ve conducted your kickoff session, stakeholder interviews and desk research, you’re ready to design your research methodology.

  2-1. The research cycle: design phase

  Designing a research project is easy, if you’ve grasped a few core principles. In

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  to apply them, so you can work out: Which research methods to use How to use different methods together How many participants to include in your research

  In addition to choosing the right approach, there’s another big benefit to understanding how to design a research project. When you have to justify the need for research, or when your stakeholders are challenging your findings, you’ll be able to argue your case with confidence.

  The Core Concepts

  This next section is going to get a bit theoretical. Don’t worry: we’ll show you how to apply it later in the chapter. For now, though, you need the basic building blocks of research design. In this section, we’re going to run through 10 concepts. Some may already be familiar to you, others less so. They are:

  What is data? Qualitative vs. quantitative Discovery vs. validation Insight vs. evidence vs. ideas Validity and representativeness Scaling your investment Multi-method approaches In-the-moment research Ethics Research as a team sport.

  What is Data?

  The research process involves collecting, organising and making sense of data, so it’s a good idea to be clear what we mean by the word ‘data’. Actually, data is just another word for observations, and observations come in many forms, such as:

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  Seeing someone behave in a certain way Or do something we’re interested in (such as click on a particular button) Hearing someone make a particular comment about your product Noting that 3,186 people have visited your Contact Us page today

  But how do you know what’s useful data, and what’s just irrelevant detail? That’s what we’ll be covering in the first few chapters, where we’ll talk about how to engage the right people, and how to ask the right questions in the right way. And how do you know what to do with data when you’ve got it? We’ll be covering that in the final two chapters about analysis and sharing your findings. In particular, we’ll be showing you how to transform raw data into usable insight, evidence and ideas.

  Qualitative vs. Quantitative

  When it comes to data analysis, the approaches we use can be classified as qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative questions are concerned with impressions, explanations and feelings, and they tend to begin with why, how or what. Such as:

  “Why don't teenagers use the new skate park?" “How do novice cooks bake a cake?” “What's the first thing visitors do when they arrive on the homepage?"