The data triangle system: why we need to always see the full picture
I can’t speak for most companies out there, but I am always glad to share what I have seen in my career so far and learned from my two decades of experience, other designers and design leaders in the industry over time. Concerning how many of us conduct research, how we use data, where we get it, how we store it and make it accessible, etc., it seems like we collectively are always looking at an incomplete picture.
Disclaimer: Before I dive into it, I would like to point out that this system is designed for B2B and/or B2B2C organizations, companies that sell their technology to their customers who in turn either implement it into their own products, or distribute vendors’ product(s) to their end-users either directly or white-labeled.
A recent InVision Design Maturity study engaged 2,200 organizations globally and found that the most successful companies out there are Level 5 Design Maturity companies. This means that, at these companies, critical business decisions are informed and/or driven by design teams that provide vital findings through constant studies, research and experimentation.
So how do we best inform business leaders to make decisions about which product(s) and/or feature(s) we should be concentrating our efforts on in the next quarter, half a year or even a year from now? And how much effort should they — and we — invest in innovation?
Based on my observations there is an endless amount of data and knowledge sitting around different corners of organizations.
UX teams constantly conduct studies, interviews, usability tests, and the like to validate or invalidate ideas, products and features. They dig deep to better understand the users and their behaviors, who are or would be using the product and/or feature. UX teams constantly talk to business, product and engineering partners to ensure that what they are working on aligns with business goals and engineering capabilities or even to have a better understanding of the limitations to see how they can push the boundaries higher.
We keep these findings somewhere… and actually, to my surprise, I found that a lot of it lives a rather solitary life in Excel Sheets and Word Docs in many organizations.
We also have marketing professionals who are constantly studying market behavior and analyzing how businesses acquire new prospects, new customers, new brand fans and product champions, and so forth. Marketing also keeps this data somewhere, typically again in some sort of storage application such as Box or DropBox or Google Drive. This content is intended to be “shared” so all can “collaborate” but really, who has the time or desire to dig through a million documents on these virtual hard-drives?
Actual customer data is often being dripped into UX and/or product departments through customer support, or through sales who spoke with a customer or prospect who disliked something and so they rushed to share this information hoping the company would add some function or feature, so they can close the deal and move onto the next one. Then, as a UXer, you would hear some of these anecdotes at a meeting about how we should add this or that feature to our products because a customer requested it, or someone’s friend tried the product and didn’t like something.
What is the end result of all this? Well, it becomes an interdepartmental battle. Sales wants to sell and so they push their requests for features and functions insisting that these improvements will help them sell. Engineering pushes back on some features because they are a ton of work they did not account for, or they cite insufficient lead time. Business leadership pushes their own ideas, too. Why? well because it’s their idea and they might have value and be actually awesome ideas since they’ve shown great instinct on some product matters before.
Finally, after all of this, we find product and design teams trying to make sense of all stakeholders’ inputs, the weight of their arguments, and we also have to somewhat manage everyones expectations and happiness levels.
At the end of the day, design teams have and use incomplete data. Why? because there is rarely an organized place where actual data from actual corners of the organization lives, where each person in the company can go and read what X customer asked on Y product, or what UX team Z found during usability tests of feature A, B or C, the when, the why, and who of that data collection. The same goes for other corners of the organization.
- Designers & UXers have their closet where they keep data
- Marketing has their closet where they keep their data
- Business has their closet where they keep their data
- Sales, as well, has their closet where they keep their data
And the list goes on…
The only time this data is cross-referenced by UX teams in any way is when UXers remember to ask about it or they suddenly realize they need to know something about a specific customer or business requirement that they heard about in a recent meeting. They then begin reaching out to other people and departments, asking for that data. People are busy and so from the moment designers realize they need X data to the time they actually have it, the process might take a week if not longer, which leads to frustration, productivity loss, and other process issues and delays.
I’ve been thinking about this organizational problem for quite some time, I tried to find ways to solve this “incomplete picture situation” through different means. I considered that UXers should be part of almost every meeting in the company to observe and collect data from different departments that might be useful, but that’s not scalable. We can’t attend all meetings. I considered an option of departments sending the UX team their meeting notes so the team can pull some data from them, but this too is unscalable since now the UX team would become a human email filtering system.
Then I recalled something that Stephen Gates said in one of his podcasts. What he said was, “Design is a team sport” — and it really is! That led me to the idea that UX and/or Design teams should stop being the de-facto Collectors and Gate Keepers of Data in an organization, that the responsibility to do this is in fact a team sport!
So I began thinking about this problem with this team-sport metaphor in mind…
Thought encompasses an “aim-oriented flow of ideas and associations that can lead to a reality-oriented conclusion”. Wikipedia
What types of data UXers collect, what types of data Marketing and Business collects, what types of data Sales and other departments collect, and so forth. As I contemplated this, I also realized that apart from just collecting data, it must be available somewhere, to everyone, without anyone asking for it.
I assembled lists of studies, research and other information that different departments might collect, categorized where the data would be collected from and by whom, which led me to the creation of three main data pillars: Outside, Inside, and Customers.
This data is everything that UXers typically collect outside the office walls, such as User Interviews, User Research, Usability Studies, Usability Tests, Behavioral Analysis, Ethnographic Research, and so much more. This is the data that is being collected from actual end-users that would be the ones using the product(s) and feature(s) sometimes not even knowing who’s behind the technology. I don’t think I have to explain the importance of UXers, these and other activities that UXers do to make sure the product(s) usability and user happiness and delight.
This is where the internal knowhow, ideas and other information exists, which should be collected either by departments themselves or by UX teams. As an example, data collection from engineering is highly important, as engineers can provide valuable technical insight. Engineers understand if a new feature is even technologically feasible to develop, based on the required time frames, other constraints, etc. Business requirements data also resides here, and is highly important to ensure whatever we design and build is profitable, and has the potential to succeed from the business standpoint and meets the overall business goals of the product and how it aligns with company vision.
Support and QA also need to be involved and interviewed by UXers or provide raw information from their department. Their findings and concerns help us understand what technical issues customers and users are facing and which are high priority. Reading QA reports might provide valuable information on the viability of features. — but hearing from QA directly may provide better context than just reading a report, so do talk to them or provide them with an outlet to share their thoughts, feedback, recommendations, etc, in a free form rather then a Jira tickets and forms.
This data pillar is the biggest unknown when it comes to UX learning, typically lives in Salesforce, Slack Channels and Department specific emails, but this one is vital to future growth, customer happiness and satisfaction. Sales is the one department responsible for selling what we collectively may envision, design and build. Oftentimes we lack their voice in shaping the product’s future direction as much as other departments. Not only for the sake of closing one or two deals, but for the sake of constant growth and innovation, sales people love selling products that customers desire.
Here, we also provide a stage for Customer Success data because these heroes talk to existing customers all the time, as do Sales Engineers they deploy trials and preliminary deployments which always provide important data on deployment issues, pain points, etc. Why include Pre Sales? Because as they strive to move from pre-sale to sale, there is plenty to learn: the gaps, minor overlooked details that might be the drivers for arriving at a closed deal. The same goes for Post-Sales.
Of course we cannot ignore Customer Support who constantly collects complaints and dissatisfaction from the customers. And, one of the most important blocks of this pillar is Customers themselves. Creating a Customer Advisory Board where you regularly meet to communicate with customers to hear firsthand about their dissatisfactions, pain points, issues — as well as happy moments and satisfactions, alongside sharing and collaborating on future ideas, vision, development and have a first hand look into their reaction to what you are planning to build next or how you are envisioning the future innovations of the product.
Now all of this collection of data gold is worthless if it goes unused. It is imperative to have ONE centralized repository (Central Data Repository) where all this data from all 3 main pillars will be flowing into, where UX teams or other researchers in the organization can tap into, at any moment without asking anyone and waiting for weeks.
Why is this so important? Time is the most valuable currency we have and can never get it back once lost. Having data available at any given moment to anyone will save time and reduce frustration when someone needs it for a study or research, analysis or to make a quick but informed decision on the product or feature for next sprint, or user-story, or simply during a meeting to answer a question.
More so, this is how we make sure we always have a complete picture because with Data Triangle System in place, when UX teams perform outside research, they can cross reference their findings with other insights that originated from the customers’ side and/or the business and engineering sides. This cross-referencing can happen in any way an organization decides to do it, but when data from multiple sources is combined it inevitably paints a fuller picture.
This type of cross-referencing and learning will reveal what to work on, what is important or not important, what both customers and end-users truly need, and what pain points you should be solving with consideration to all 3 needs: customer satisfaction, usability, and business goals.
The Data Triangle System is designed to work in the following way:
- Creating Central Data Repository — find a tool that allows you to collect data in a central place. Choose one that not only allows you to dump data into the tool, but rather find a suitable tool for your organization that can store the data by department, project, and individual data cards with some sort of tagging and search capabilities that will allow you to find it quickly and easily. Also keep in mind that third-party integrations are important with such third-party tools like Slack, Jira, Gmail, Salesforce, etc. will make data flow from all other pillars in the triangle simpler, easier and faster. — See list of tools at the end of the article.
- Make it simple so everyone can buy into it — to make it easier for the rest of the departments, create pages/projects for each participating department, collaborate with them and create templates for each department that will help them capture the information you want them to capture. Make sure the tool allows tagging of individual words or complete sentences, invest time with each of these departments and together create mutually-agreed-upon tags you think will be important to quickly pull data based on the tag (i.e. Pain Point, Feedback, Question, etc.)
- Make it personal — meet with each department head and together find and assign a data champion within the department who is responsible for data that will be generated and discovered within the department and will be part of the three pillars of the triangle. Data champions should collect data and contribute to the central data repository on a regular basis within their respective project/folder that is assigned to them, make sure to continue meeting with the champions on a monthly basis to make sure they are not getting lost or forget to contribute, be the reminder of the value their function adds to this process.
- Talk to Customers — create a Customers Advisory Board that will be part of the Customers pillar alongside the rest of the data flow from the sales and customer support teams, this will ensure that you not only rely on what sales team says they hear or get from customers but ultimately gives you direct channel of communication with the customers themselves and will provide you with raw and unfiltered insights.
- Be inclusive and share with others — all findings and cross-referenced findings that the UX department or other assigned Research function of the organization finds, should be regularly shared and communicated back to the other two pillars of the triangle, so they can see fruits of their hard work and be involved in the process of shaping the product(s) based on this collective effort. This will make both the inside and outside-facing departments, as well as customers, aware of what your organization is building, and most importantly WHY it is being built and HOW it will be impacting the next releases of the product or feature in a positive and valuable way.
Recommended tools for Central Data Repository:
DovetailApp is a great tool for the job, it has all the functions and features you might need for the job, tagging, searching, data charts, video transcribing functions, integration with dozens of third party tools, and a lot more… but this is a personal preference. I happen to know it well and use it. Therefore I highly recommend it! But here is a list of all the ones that I know of:
I’m sure there are a dozen more that I’m unaware of, so do your research and find the one that will work best for you, your organization and specific needs.
I’m sure that many organizations already employ some sort of similar type of data harvesting and analyzing, and maybe some slowly walking towards similar if not identical through process of making data and findings available and accessible to everyone in the organization, but if, for some reason your organization is not one of them, share it with your co-workers, it would only benefit you all.
Organizational transparency does not always has to mean that everyone knows what everyone does or works on and how the company finances are doing, it should also mean sharing knowledge, findings, data and vision.
For any questions on how to use the system, how to establish data repository and use it to its maximum potential, or other questions, please feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. I’ll be more then happy to share my knowledge, experience and answer your questions to the best of my abilities.
