Opening up the BLACK BOX
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This document discusses how to make research accessible and actionable. It recommends sharing research documents early and often with the whole team, and having non-researchers participate in research activities like taking notes. To make research actionable, the document suggests scheduling debrief sessions with those who can benefit from the findings and including next steps in research deliverables. The overall message is to socialize research findings throughout the process and directly communicate insights to relevant teams.
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Opening up the BLACK BOX
- 1. Opening up the BLACK BOX Making research accessible and actionable
- 2. Hello!I’m Beth. a Researcher @ MailChimp
- 3. ACCESSIBLE? Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018 So how do we make research
- 4. DON’T leave socializing the findings out of your research plan Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 5. DO share documents early, and share often. Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 6. DO invite the whole team to play a part in research activities Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 7. ACCESSIBLE How can non- researchers participate? ● Taking notes ● Keeping time ● Greeting people as they enter the room ● Sharing findings live during a session ● Soliciting questions from team members ● Ask those attending to write their “Top 5” takeaways from each session Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 8. ACTIONABLE Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018 You did the research. Now to make it
- 9. DON’T just set your research findings free, and hope they find the right person Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 10. DO schedule a debrief session with those who can benefit from findings Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 11. Designers ● Usability problems ● Design feedback ● UX sentiment Content ● Copy feedback ● Information architecture ● Naming conventions PMs ● Feedback on existing or new features ● Product sentiment Devs & Engineers ● Bugs ● Latency problems QA & Support ● Usability problems ● Unexpected usage of the product Other researchers ● High-level insights around the product ● Data supporting known trends ● Data pointing to new trends Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 12. DO include “next steps” in your research deliverables Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018
- 13. Beth Godfrey IxDA Lightning Talk | 2018 Questions? Find me on LinkedIn! /bethgodfrey Or email me at ebefrey@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
- Hi! I’m Beth, and I’m currently a researcher at MailChimp. If you haven’t heard of us, we’re a marketing platform whose goal it is to help small business get the right content to the right people at the right time. I work with variety of disciplines on a daily basis, as well as my fellow researchers. I am embedded on a product team, which consists of developers, engineers, designers, a product manager, QA analysts, content folks, and more!
- First let’s talk about some do’s and don’t to making your research process more accessible to people who AREN’T researchers. Which, unsurprisingly, is most people you will work with throughout your career.
- This is a small thing that can make a huge impact. Too often, we get wrapped up into designing the research methodology, recruiting users, or starting work on wireframes. We forget to plan for what we will do with the research findings once we have them! All of that hard work is worth nothing, if we don’t get the right information to the right people. When you’re writing your research plan, go ahead and write down a plan for socializing your findings. This will help keep you accountable once things get busy, but also gives your team members a heads up of when and how to expect the learnings to be communicated.
- The easiest way to help non-researchers understand your process and get involved from the start is to share and re-share your research documents. Yes, that means even the ugly planning docs, not just the complete and polished presentation. Research plans, testing calendars, recruiting pulls, interviews/test notes, and even pictures of any affinity mapping you do - these can and should all be shared! Also, don’t be afraid to share the same findings across multiple platforms with different audiences. A single round of interviews can product findings in the form of a post-session affinity map (easy, but quick), verbatim notes in a Google doc (more difficult - needs cleanup), and a final presentation (most difficult - required time for synthesis). Giving broad findings early in the form of affinity maps (with the caveat that this information may change upon further synthesis) allows the whole team to be intrigued and excited for the full presentation, but satisfies their need for immediate information.
- This is sometimes a hard sell, for team members that are very busy and find it difficult to carve even an hour out of their day to attend a usability test. But the more you can get your team involved and present, the more the information gathered will be memorable. Stories are shareable and repeatable, and much more compelling when witnessed firsthand. There are also a wide range of ideation and alignment activities you can run with your entire team, like Hopes & Fears, affinity diagramming, Crazy 8s, bodystorming. These will get people engaged with the research findings in a way that’s fun, but still meaningful!
- If you do have folks from other disciplines attending research session, you can give them “jobs.” Here are some examples of tasks that will keep people engaged and actively listening, instead of zoning out or doing other work in the corner.
- It’s not enough to post your research docs in a team drive or wiki. It’s not even enough to send an email out to the entire team. When we do this, we face the free-rider problem on a large team. Everyone assumes that someone else is reading and taking action on findings, but this means that a bit of information that might be of benefit to them never gets noticed!
- What you can do is schedule debrief sessions with individuals or groups within your larger team to share findings that are particularly relevant to them. It can be a formal meeting, or even a quick coffee break where you chat about the biggest takeaways. This way, you can prime them for what to be looking for in the bigger findings presentation - and hopefully get them excited to learn more!
- The whole team can benefit from many of the research findings you gather. Ideally, you can gather the whole team together to discuss all of your findings, but often that’s not realistic. What’s most important is that the right information gets to the right people. This is by no means holistic, but it’s a good starting point for what types of findings should be shared with what roles.
- Delivering research should never finish with a dead end. Just like we would never abandon users on a page without a “call to action” or exit point, we never want research findings to not. However you present your findings, make sure there is a section or even a sentence for what your next steps will be. I like to go even more granular, and write a set of “next steps” for each finding! You can even combine this with the previous step of scheduling debriefs with various team members, and sit down with them to collectively define next steps. This helps create buy-in, and gives everyone the ability to take action within their own role.
- Please feel free to reach out to me via email, if you have any questions or just want to connect!