Creating a UX Research System: Making your work understood as a researcher
“My work as a User Researcher is underappreciated. They just don’t get what I do!”
Selling the value of User Research is sometimes an insurmountable challenge, especially when you’re a 1-person army. Far too often, we find ourselves persuading stakeholders and selling the value of our work more than actually carrying out our real responsibilities — being the voice of the user, advocating for them and ensuring that the product or service effectively solve for their needs and pain points.
Challenges with traditional User Research documentation (or a lack of)
Typically most teams document and present their research findings in documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Despite being good storytellers, researchers (and designers) often face numerous organizational challenges.
- Insights get lost in spreadsheets, documentation and presentations
- Research gets lost in translation and insights are not actionable
- User Research is viewed as a waste of budget
- People don’t get what Researchers do
- Everybody thinks they’re researchers
Presentations and design walkthroughs don’t effectively solve these shortcomings, no matter how good a storyteller you are. Insights still get lost in outdated documents that people no longer refer to after a few months or just weeks.
Being a fairly big team of Researchers and Designers, we encountered this situation quite often. We needed a better way to present stories, such that they remained a living body of knowledge — something that would easily surface relevant insights and recommendations on-demand, to represent the voice of the user, in its purest form, when it mattered.
How do you ensure that, if you’re investing in research, people are actually using the data? How do you create a composite picture of the user in a way that fosters empathy from stakeholders? How do you make your work as a Researcher appreciated?
Finding Inspiration
We took inspiration from WeWork’s Polaris system, Uber’s Kaleidoscope, teams that used Airtable and some of our clients. We learned about Atomic Research and loved the idea of “nuggets”. We also looked into Research tools but found them to be premature, inflexible or pricey. Dovetail came a close second but didn’t scale the way we needed it to, and building a new tool was excessive for our needs.
Long story short, Airtable did everything other specialized UX Research tools did, and did not. It was much more than just a glorified spreadsheet and we saw potential in creating our User Research System and decided to test it out.
“The best possible way to sell the value of User Research is by actually demonstrating its impact.”
Believing is seeing, seeing is believing.
A well-told story can be enough to convince even the most obstinate of stakeholders to take action, but arranging the plot points in a convincing way is a challenge when there’s so much data to make sense of.
We took the “seeing is believing” philosophy, where insights from User Research were presented as bite-sized, tangible, and accessible nuggets of information that the stakeholders could understand. These nuggets served as research vignettes — evocative accounts of user pain points and desires.
Research Principles
Building on top of the Atomic Research principles, our focus was on storytelling. We still needed to make research intuitive, compelling and consumable.
- Atomic: The system contains indivisible nuggets of insights tagged with personas, observation instances, recommendations and other metadata.
- Visible: All insights and recommendations must be something people can listen or see.
- Accessible: Research insights must to be cognitively accessible by everyone.
- Truthful: The system must be the voice of the user without skewing it.
- Iterative: The system must be a living body that evolves with the product and/or insights.
- Connected: Personas, Observations, Insights and Recommendations must remain connected with one another and preserve the integrity of the Research System.
Creating a User Research System using Airtable
Airtable was fairly flexible in what we needed to do. Though we were limited to their interface, the robustness of the tool enabled us to overcome numerous challenges. The key was in exploiting some of the power user features.
Bite-sized nuggets
One of the difficulties with research is there’s so much data to wade through. Our goal was surfacing the most evocative accounts of user pain points and desires. Airtable’s Kanban View was an effective way to do this.
Codes for thematic analysis
Observations from user testing were compiled, coded and grouped them thematically. Each insight was tagged to a business goal, design element, persona and a priority. Codes made it easy to browse and find related information.
Transcripts and audio snippets
Transcripts from interviews were added into individual rows in Airtable for searchability. Airtable provided a way to preview audio snippets although it would have been nice to have been able to preview videos as well, especially for usability tests. As a workaround, videos were hosted and the corresponding links were added to the database.
Autogenerated presentations
Stakeholders needed a way to see a summary of the research findings before diving into details. They also liked the idea of a printable document. Airtable’s Presentation Block was used to design a template that was auto-populated with the data from different tabs into a summarized view.
Data Visualization
Visualizations were used to tell powerful stories. It would have been nice to have been able to add the visualizations into the Presentation block.
Search
Search block in Airtable provided a way to search through all the data in the database, including transcripts and insights. The scope of the search was customizable and limited to the key tabs to improve the quality of results. Transcripts enabled searching through actual words or sentences participants spoke during interviews.
Advanced Filters
Filtering was key in analyzing specific segments of users and generating reports. This was a great way to preserve historical insights but viewing the information in a way that surfaced only the insights that required our attention. If a previous version of a product had usability issues that were already addressed, the filters non-destructively removed insights that were no longer relevant.
Matrices to visualize and prioritize insights
Matrices provided a way to visualize insights against business goals, something that Product Managers were interested in.
Usability Score
Depending on the project, SUS scores or alternative metrics were measured and maintained in the repository.
Putting it all together — The Anatomy of a User Research System
The following became the basic building blocks of our User Research System. Depending on the complexity of our projects, we adopted different levels of organization and maintenance to be realistic with our budget and timelines.
- Research Participants: List of all participants participating in Research sessions.
- Research Sessions: Brief description of every interview, survey, usability test or other research sessions conducted.
- Personas: Just right personas that aligned with business goals.
- Codes: Labels to tag, organize, analyze and find thematic information.
- Insights: A theme or interpretation of a set of observations.
- Observations: Factual occurrence of an event that was noted.
- Recommendations: Design inferences or recommendations derived from observations and insights.
- Visualizations: Visual representations of qualitative and quantitative data.
- Stories: A narration of observations, insights and recommendations.
- Usability Score: Quantitative measure of how well the product or system was performing — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/measuring-perceived-usability/
- Metadata: Information describing all other relevant artifacts.
- Human Interpretation: Perhaps the most important, knowing how to make sense of it all.
Caveats
While some Researchers would argue that it’s all about the User and what they say is the ultimate truth, a lot of times business needs may tend to override User needs and rightly so. Yes, the Research System is meant to be the source of truth and represent the voice of the user. However, it doesn’t standalone as the perfect solution to all your problems.
“Sometimes, the story is only as good as the storyteller.“
- Avoid over documentation: The User Research System is an iterative and evolutionary process. At Fresh Consulting, we use 3 levels of organization depending on the depth of findings we need to represent, the budget and the depth of User Research that we get into. The goal is not to do everything at once but just what is required for efficiency and effectiveness. Ditch the process when you need to.
- Don’t lose trust: Pay attention to your biases as you document insights from observations and present insights. If you’re unable to do good work, present stories and make your team better in your presence, you may lose the trust of your team members and your role might be in question and what you create may not help.
- Learn the tool’s nuances: Airtable still has a complex navigation when you get into linked tables and it’s easy to get lost within. Learning how the Primary Key, Lookups and Links work is critical in the organization.
- Avoid a data avalanche: When you have a large Research team, avoid introducing more problems in the process of creating a solution. Spend onboarding and educating researchers and maintaining the system.
- Don’t push it: In the article “Why UX Research Repositories Fail”, Sofia Quientero mentions — “Making research data more accessible to team members uninterested in research will only lead to frustration”. In that situation, you may have a more fundamental systemic issue to deal with.
- Represent your work: Your job after every round of research is not done and dusted, but it’s your responsibility to continue to propagate that throughout your team. You may not want to make people dig into the tool to find insights, but actually be the one to deliver the right information when needed so as to empower yourself along with the product team.
Delivering the impact
After a year of piloting and testing this out with several clients at Fresh Consulting, we’ve seen a lot of success and continue to learn and refine our processes. With training, we were able to get our whole Research and Design team onboard. The time spent in the additional organization has been negligible and saves effort downstream. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t and verified that there isn’t one-size-fits-all. We are strategic about how much we invest in documentation and storytelling through varied levels of organization.
Each time there is a conversation around a product decision, the team has been able to pull up insights in real-time and guide conversations. Stakeholders are more engaged in Research insights, curiously ask questions, and becoming more User-driven. Research does not get lost in translation or overlooked and our value as Researchers and Designers gets noticed. We continue to learn from our processes and iterate on our approach.
“Research-informed design is part art and part science, but also part storytelling.”
Your job as a Researcher is half done when you can get people to be curious.
