User research for decision making
A simple guide to getting research out of presentations and into conversations.
Teams across the industry are having a hard time making research have an impact outside the presentation. As Caitria O’Neill says “You could perform world class research, but it won’t make a difference if your colleagues never absorb it.” There’s even a phrase called Schrodinger’s Research, which is a great take on deficiencies in user research sharing. So, how do you get all that wonderful hard work into the heads and mouths of your colleagues?
In the second it takes you to read this sentence, your senses are perceivng 11 million different pieces of information per second. How many can the human mind pay attention to? About seven at a time on a great day. That’s…not a whole lot.
And yet, your job is to help a room full of very busy people make decisions about the future of the tribe. How are you supposed to succeed at sharing critical information that can help guide decisions? You have to use the oldest and most human of all skills, tell a great story.
There’s a field of study that asks questions about why the human mind is the way it is. It’s called evolutionary psychology. Neuroscientists believe the reason we devote so much brain power to stories is that they allow us to simulate intense experiences without having to live through them. Imagine if everyone who ever saw a lion had to take their chances before learning…not so many humans left.
We built tribes to help us learn from others’ mistakes, and to listen to their stories, to watch and learn, so we could process less. Stories are nature’s design for how we share critical information and understand warnings without having to have those experiences ourselves. Your design team is here to help the tribe navigate tricky situations, so tell a good story, and you’ll be doing as nature intended.
So, how does that help us understand the role of research in product development? We hear about the moment of glory when Airbnb found out photos were the thing that would move their business forward. Airbnb may be a household name, but there are lots of other examples. We’ve celebrated new voices and methods changing the way research happens. But all is not well in research land. Erika Hall and Mike Monteiro are working hard to help design teams clarify their work. Jared Spool built a school to teach people how to do proper research.
1. Learn the Right Things…at the Right Time
Research for decision-making starts a very long time before the final “presentation” whatever that looks like in your organization. Just like UI design starts way before the tools you use. Having a full understanding of the market, the business you’re in, and what the perceived needs are is fundamental to good research.
The goal of good research isn’t just to learn or validate things. Research done well is about learning the right things at the right time. Having answers to questions you can’t act on isn’t just bad form, it’s demotivating. So, while it might be nice to know if your customers would love a feature that’s in your moonshot plans, you would be better served spending that time making sure you have everything you need to make your next move.
To get to research that serves decision making, you have to align your research plan to the business goals. If the business is trying to make a big bet, or take a brave new step, make sure your research is there to help.
Here are a few example questions I like to use when making sure we learn the right things:
- What is the most important thing we need to know to make progress right now?
- What strategic obstacles are on the horizon over the next 3–6 months? 12 months?
- What would change about what we need to learn if we were trying to solve the problem at 100x scale?
The reason I like that last one is, it takes the hurdles that the team might have artificially set up in their minds, and pushes the current concerns further out. Leadership in design, product or engineering involves helping teams find perspective. The day-to-day keeps us moving, but how will we know if we’re going in the right direction?
2. Learn the Things Right
User research on its own isn’t a virtue. Poor research is worse than no research. Avoid biases. One of the questions I ask my team when doing research is “what is the cost of a false-positive?” In other words, what could we risk by over-commiting to the answer we want to hear? Then we talk about how to mitigate those risks.
Insights are powerful stuff, but to get them, you have to do the work of synthesis to get them. Here’s a great guide to getting started by Marion BAYLÉ.
Insights are relevant information that align to decisions. Don’t be precious about the work you’ve done, there is a lot of noise in the data you’ve collected. Your job at this point is to help the organization learn the things right. I like to ask, ‘what are the signals?’
The way I think of signals is points of information that help us make decisions. If we’re trying to optimize an existing workflow, then a signal may or may not be the button color. If we’re building from scratch, a signal might be the overall sentiment about how the new feature does or does not help users be more efficient, effective, or happy.
3. Tell a Good story
To tell a good story, keep it short, direct and focused.
It’s entirely on you, as a designer or PM to make it obvious that the work you’ve done helps achieve the goal you set out to reach. As Mike Monteiro says:
“ You have been brought in to add your expertise to…to help [accomplish a] goal. What they didn’t hire you to do is make them happy, or be their friend. Your decisions should revolve around achieving that goal, not pleasing the client.”
You’re in the room to convince others that good work has been done. But that’s not what you need to hear. What you need to hear is a decision. “Forget buy in, go for UBAD” janice fraser says. Don’t get distracted in praise for your work, or critiques of it either. External validation is the high-fructose corn syrup of motivators, it burns hot and fast and never lasts and leaves you craving more. If you’ve done your job, time will tell. Your identity is not your work, and it shouldn’t drive your self-worth.
So you want to get people talking about your research. Assuming that’s not already happening, here are a few things to weave research into your organization’s backbone.
The Simple Guide to Making Research Work
I teach teams to shape presentations on just 3 things as a way to create the broadest possible alignment. When sharing results, you can always add detail as long as everyone is on the same page. So start broad and work your way deeper.
- What is the problem we’re solving? Why?
- What are the things we’re doing to solve it?
- How will we know we’re right?
There are all sorts of details that can emerge from this simple recipe. I.e. What is the cost/benefit of each of these things? What is our recommendation to the business? But all of those boil back down to these simple questions.
To get people talking about your research, you have to make it quotable. I ask myself and my team, “what three things MUST the audience walk away with at the end of this session?” I have noticed that leaving people with a problem, something to think about, leaves a gap for the conversation to happen, and it makes room for your audience to buy in to solutions you might have ready.
I usually put together three short sentences that are extremely quotable. If we learned that users aren’t getting everything they need out of a feature, instead of saying “they liked it,” or “they didn’t like it” I’ll try to point to the problem we as a business want or need to solve next to be successful.
An example:
- We set out to learn whether users who [user situation] would benefit from [this idea we had]
- We’ve learned there’s an incomplete journey for [user type], and we think our next step is to explore [this piece of that journey].
- We’ll know we’re succesful when we see [user outcome you’re trying to validate or test]
Then we structure research around that core takeaway, and drive the whole presentation from that simple framework. The team takes time to align on the story and understand it. We interrogate the results through the lenses of our experience, design, PM and engineering. As a team, you poke holes in the narrative. All the other storytelling you do should support that narrative. Unite the team around the story. If you can help drive clarity around what you set out to learn, what decisions are impacted or needed as a result, and what you think success could look like, you’ll see a step-change in how your research is received.
In Conculsion: Commit to the Problem
Decision making in business is all about making bets; you’re under pressure to find the right decisions with not enough information. Making sure you’re all-in on understanding the problem is the most effective way to shape your research for decision making.
What we’re talking about when we’re talking about research for decision making is really evidence-based design. Ask your stakeholders what you need from them up front, and share what you’ve done for them when you come back. Not to make them happy, but to demonstrate you understood the problem.
It doesn’t matter what project you’re on, what questions you ask or how you find the answers to them as long as you’re ethical. There is no one right way to present the details, but you’ll get a lot further along if everyone agrees on the problem. When it comes to sharing research, enjoy the conversation! It never ends.
