Planning user research for impact: the Project Builder
Use our Miro-based tool (public template link) to visualize your research project before it starts—work backwards and ensure you achieve the impact you’re expecting. This tool is a part of the Research Skills Framework and built on top of its craft skill patterns.
Impact on Projects
As researchers, we all want to do work that has a real impact on our team, in our organizations, in the world. We want to help our team see and understand real human behavior in more useful ways, and push our products and services into a more useful and healthy direction.
Our projects, and how we leverage their output, are the main avenue for this impact, and it’s through our experience in project work that we learn to “see” how an effort will unfold before it begins, to shape it in our minds. To recognize the downstream pressures, constraints, needs, and enablers that might make or break its success.
But researchers don’t need to learn every lesson the hard way: we created a tool that allows teams to “build out” and visualize a research project structure quickly and flexibly before the project ever begins.
Impact through Planning
What we put into our projects, and what we get out of them, is strongly determined by how well we understand the project environment, and how we plan our projects for that environment. The Project Builder is a Miro-based tool that focuses on that plan. It brings key questions about the environment upfront, and uses an opinionated model of the research process to shape and sequence the decisions we make in a project.
It’s a frame for drawing and re-drawing the arc of a project. You and your team will consider the selection and sequencing of potential activities by “physically” swapping pieces in and out, understanding upstream dependencies and downstream constraints for each move you will make in the project.
And it’s a shortcut to building shared alignment, understanding the kind of impact the project should have, and seeing a vision of how that project might unfold to get there.
Working with the Project Builder
The empty template looks like this:
We start by evaluating the larger environment around the project, answering a few key questions about each stage of the process. These don’t need to be written out or answered exhaustively, but it’s crucial that the team has a shared understanding of what we want to happen at each of these stages— enough to contextualize which decisions we should make (which skills we should employ) to make the project a success.
Then, start selecting from the bank of skill patterns. They can be dragged directly from the board below into your project’s frame:
Work backwards from the activities you want to see in the “Impact” stage of a project. Select skill patterns for each of the phases, ensuring the impacts and outcomes you want to see are supported and enabled by the decisions you make from the beginning. In each phase, put the pattern you want to complete first up top.
It is because the skills represent basic decisions that need to be made throughout the life of a project, that sequencing them ahead of time creates a new way to see our future work. They are written in Christopher Alexander pattern format, and they let us build a vision of the project at a healthy level of abstraction: we can think through how each of the decisions will impact one another and what it will mean for the success of the project. (You will have essentially started building a custom, project-specific pattern language but that’s a topic for another time.)
The output of this tool is a picture-made-of-words that you can bring to stakeholders and team members, talk them through the life of the project, and discuss what will be done with its outcome. At this level of fidelity, you don’t need sweat the details, but you can already catch problems, missed steps, or mismatches between outputs and expect outcomes.
Worked examples:
Here are two simple examples of the way you might select and sequence your patterns for (1) a basic usability test, versus (2) a larger-scale persona segmentation project. You can take a look at each of these scenarios directly in the project builder template.
The short discussions for each example highlight the type of decisions and considerations you may encounter when working in this fashion:
Ex. 1: Basic Usability Test
If we spend 10–20 minutes with our engineering, design, and product partners to sketch out a usability study, we might come up with something like this:
A note on skill selection: you can do great work entirely with foundational skills. The basics never go out of style, they just become less visible—and are equally, or even more important—as you work with higher order capabilities on top of them. Most of the foundational skills here will find there way into every research project, simple or complex.
In this usability study example, we pulled in one advanced pattern, Front-Line Collaboration, because it became clear that the support team has the best insight into the real world problems that users face. We’ll partner with our support team specialist to help identify and prioritize the most crucial live-product flows to test in this study as we develop tasks for the interview protocol.
In discussion with engineering, we decided on a project-specific pattern for (the one in grey, Test Accounts on Production.) We’ll want to record and analyze video, yet avoid capturing personally identifiable data, so for this we’ll create test accounts on the production environment that our users will work with. We know that we’re likely to find a number of simple bugs and defects, so we plan ahead for bug and defect tracking and work with engineering and product to make sure there’s a simple process for logging and prioritizing issues that come up from this study: a direct pathway to impact, that we can put in place ahead of time.
We can have this same level of short discussion around each of the skill patterns selected for this study.
Ex. 2: Persona Segmentation Project
If we were to spend 10–20 minutes planning a persona project with the team, we might come up with a first-pass example that looks like this:
Notice that we start by pairing our research question (learning about the behavioral segmentation of our customers) with the work that’s lined up in the product roadmap. We want to know there’s an opportunity to use the outcome of this work before we pitch a project that could take 6–12 weeks, depending on the rigor and resourcing.
There are also, in general, more intermediate patterns in use, as modeling behavioral archetypes requires more intensive work with the data (e.g., Data Wall) and more conceptual manipulation and shared sensemaking during synthesis.
We know that a persona developed and posted on the wall makes as much sound as one hand clapping, so we also need to develop a strategy for how we’ll solve for that persona’s needs, and run an ongoing campaign of User Needs Inception to build a strong awareness within the larger organization.
We’ve also decided to include another custom pattern for ‘Day in the Life’ documentary episodes, about 5 minutes each, that can be shown at the monthly all-hands meetings to highlight real users and their different behavioral drivers. By including this pattern in the initial planning stages, we already know that we will need to socialize this project with our executive team and find a way to get space on the all-hands meeting agenda, maybe even 1 or 2 months before we’re ready!
And so on: again, we can find similar upstream and downstream considerations for each skill pattern selected in the project. Here we highlight just a few examples in this project sketch.
Refrain: visualising impact up front
The power of this approach is that you can play with the shape of a project before you need to commit and sweat the details. You can physically draw and redraw the course of your work, and build shared understanding at a useful and malleable level of fidelity. As you think through the end-to-end shape of a project, you can make the important up-front decisions that enable downstream impact.
From this view you can also develop whatever standard project documentation you may require; now you’ll be able to do it with a full picture of the project’s flow in mind, a stronger sense of what impact you hope to see, and how you and your team will get there.
Give it a try! The tool is here https://miro.com/miroverse/category/research-and-design/research-project-builder-research-skills-framework in the Miroverse.
Background & further info:
This tool is built on the Research Skills Framework, and draws heavily on the patterns we’ve identified as core skills for user and design researchers.
- The Research Skills Framework was a project of the ReOps Community, led by Dave Hora and Tomomi Sasaki.
- The project builder is keyed off the six-step research process model developed in the Researcher’s Journey.
- Dave and Tomomi gave a workshop at the UXinsight Festival on this tool and other aspects of the Research Skills Framework to push yourself and your work to the next level. (16 September 2020.)
- Each of the skills is written as a pattern in the Christopher Alexander sense. Dave gave a talk at EuroIA about how patterns and projects work together. (23 September 2020.)
