How to build research from the ground up, research ethics, and more
Below are some takeaways from Strive UXR (Toronto), a conference that brings together researchers, designers and product people for listening, learning, and conversation around UX research.
💭 Research methods and ethics for natural language interaction
Abby Bajuniemi is a Research and Experience Design consultant at Gomoll Research + Design Inc with a PhD in applied linguistics, specializing in language learning and sociolinguistics. Here’s a few key takeaways from her talk around bias + UX Research.
- As ethics and privacy are a hot issue in tech, UX researchers see themselves as the “front-line” workers for collecting data. Some topics included only collecting what is needed, informed consent, protecting participants who give up their data and collecting the minimum amount necessary.
- To build the context for gathering data so the output is more natural — consider having a community member make the introduction or bringing up a high emotion topic (as part of a screener) and triangulating multiple sources of data to understand the full context.
- There’s a huge mismatch between what people say vs. what they do. Remember power differentials (between researcher and participant) and alternation of behavior due to observation.
- Consider ways tech can be used for harm to avoid those cases, described as abusability testing — add questions in your moderator guides like: Do you think people who designed this technology thought about the needs of people like you? How do you think this tech could be misused?
💪 How to survive and thrive during a three month diary study
Alison Post and Rubén Perez-Huidobro are Senior User Experience Researchers from the Marketing Technology team at Shopify. Here’s some tools they recommended and tips for longer studies.
Tools and tips for diary study/contextual inquiry/usability study:
- Planning: GForms, AirTable
- Recruitment: Calendly, Gsheets
- Screener: Lookback, Hangouts, Skype
- Preparation: AirTable
- Field Research: Rev, Lookback
- Journal Entries: GForms, Dovetail, Zapier
- Analysis/Documentation: Miro, Gslides, Airtable, Gdocs
- Building good rapport/a trusting relationship and advocating for your brand are benefits of doing in person studies in addition to getting better results.
- For longer studies (spanning several months), adding in check-ins in the middle or end of study give you the opportunity to dig deeper into clusters of patterns and show that you’re engaged with the participants and listening.
🌱 Building up research at Slack
Christina Janzer is the Director of Research & Analytics at Slack, responsible for leading all global research. Michael Massimi is a Staff Researcher at Slack working on the Messaging team. Rhey shared how they built up the research team at Slack and how they created a unified roadmap with stakeholders and partners.
1. Start with internal research first.
Research your stakeholders/company — rather than just working with the usual suspects (Eng/PM), learn about your team culture, business, etc.
2. Don’t be limited by what you hear
- UX researchers need to translate questions and needs from partners (everyone has had different positive/negative/non-existent experience with UX research)
- Your insights and perspective are more important to the business than providing research on demand
3. Plan for strategic research
Look ahead and anticipate longer term needs.
4. Work broadly
This increases your scope and impact; opportunity to include a diverse audience (Sales/Customer Support). Difference groups may have the same questions but different motivations
5. Take time to properly roadmap
Resist the urge to start executing right away. You can’t roadmap alone. Don’t overcommit.
Tip: Remember the difference between a request and research question.
🗺️ Setting up a research roadmap
1. Gather team and understand questions with your stakeholders
Look for similar themes, then separate into those that are super broad/super specific, needs specialized recruits, require scale, etc.
2. Map questions to methods
This next step is how to approach the questions/questions that you have tagged by theme. Connect them to methods that can generate the data you need, starting with obvious methods first and ways to get more bang for your buck (ways one method can cover multiple questions).
3. Order methods based on impact of results
What is best done sooner? This is about prioritization. Build, merge, complement, remove and parallelize questions.
4. Add owners and timelines
Think about owners, vendors, recruiting participants, funding, scoping, timelines, dependencies and share-outs. Assign owners to each area.
5. Stakeholder roadshow and sign off
Consider how you might handle emergent projects, the budget (and what might get cut), and if you absolutely need sign off to begin execution.
6. Get rolling! 🎉
💡 Conclusion + key takeaways
Our goal is not to perfectly implement a framework.
Our goal is not to ask the perfect number of questions.
Our goal is to listen, and observe, and understand.
Working with broad set of stakeholders generates a more diverse perspective to tackle research problems. From my experience, customer support/sales hears a lot of very direct feedback from users and are great partners to include.
Also, great to note how the Slack research team is considered a legitimate organization and not just service/consultancy role, and they consider their own research needs as well as supporting partner research requests.
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