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How to get stakeholder buy in for ux research
- 1. Stakeholder Buy-in How toget stakeholder buy-in for UX research By Alicia Zhong
- 2. Hi Iâm Aliciaand Iâm a UX researcher.
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- 5. âI want thisfeature by Friday.â Have You Heard This Phrase Before?
- 6. What weâll betalking about today: â Who are the stakeholders? â Running my first research project â How to: Stakeholder interviews â Synthesizing and socializing research findings
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- 8. Introduction to different typesof stakeholders Who are the stakeholders?
- 9. Think: CEO, VP Level:company wide impact Executives Who are the stakeholders?
- 10. Think: Directors ofProduct and Engineering, Team Leads Level: across teams impact Senior Management Who are the stakeholders?
- 11. Level: Responsible fordefining and building the product Designers & Developers Who are the stakeholders?
- 12. Level: Responsible for communicatingto our customers and receiving feedback from them Marketing & Sales Teams Who are the stakeholders?
- 13. Who are thestakeholders?
- 14. Think: Product Managers/Owners Level:team/project wide impact PMs Who are the stakeholders?
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- 16. How to calculatethe ROI of UX Research:
- 17. Bad Napkin Math UnusedFeatures + Rebuilt Features x Weeks Spent Building x Number of Developers/Designers/PMâs Involved x Avg. Weekly Salary = $ Total Product Waste @therobhayes
- 18. Running my first researchproject
- 19. To show, ratherthan tell. Seeing is believing. Running My First Research Project
- 20. 1. Pick aproblem place thatâs suited for using evaluative methods â Usability testing is key to getting buy-in 1. Plan ahead, manage the timeline and communicate â Involve your team members to the research session 1. Make the research results available and visible for your team â Heavy-weight storytelling is not for everyone â Share direct results in âsnack sizeâ format Running My First Research Project
- 21. âI could seemissing the link if Iâm reading in weird light.â âYellow looks like spell check.â Example: Sharing Direct Quotes from Users
- 22. âThe blue standout more and it's the color I'm used to being used for links.â âI think blue is the best color for links, maybe Iâm used to it.â Example: Sharing Direct Quotes from Users
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- 24. Product Owner Developer Example: LightweightStorytelling Format
- 25. But something important isstill missing. Running My First Research Project
- 26. Running My FirstResearch Project
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- 28. How to: StakeholderInterviews Why? â Align the end goal â Remove communication barriers â Future proof your research
- 29. How? â 45 minto 1 hr in-person or remote interviews â With transcript available to review Who? â More than 5, ideally 8 - 12 Participants How to: Stakeholder Interviews
- 30. Research Questions How to: StakeholderInterviews
- 31. Q: Who arethe users? How many types of users do you think are using our product? How to: Stakeholder Interviews
- 32. Q: What areyour KPIs? Success Criteria? What does success look like? How to: Stakeholder Interviews
- 33. Q: Is thereanything I should have asked about? If you could change any part of this process, what would it be? How to: Stakeholder Interviews
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- 35. Nobody reads reports becausereports are not designed to stick. Synthesizing and Socializing Research Findings
- 36. Synthesizing and SocializingResearch Findings
- 37. Presentation Synthesizing and SocializingResearch Findings
- 38. Agree that ifwe improve mobile, we can reach more of our audience. âMobile is really important right now. Especially since it's overtaking desktop with the number of users using it.â 11/15 Presentation: Key Learnings
- 39. â Improve communicationbetween cross-functional teams â Make the process less reactive and more forward-thinking â Treat user research as a practice, not as a project To Inspire Actions: Presentation: Action Items
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- 41. Build a Stakeholder Grid Synthesizingand Socializing Research Findings
- 42. Build a StakeholderGrid @therobhayes
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- 44. âI want thisfeature by Friday.â Remember This Phrase?
- 45. UX Research isa team sport!
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Editor's Notes
- #3Â Today Iâm going to share with you stories on how I get stakeholders from my organization buy-in to my User Research. Btw, you will hear me use both term UX research and User research. Just for todayâs context, I meant the same thing.
- #4Â To give you some background, this is where I work:
- #5Â Postmedia is a news media company provide millions Canadians with daily news. Most well-known brands we have are National Post, Toronto Sun, Montreal Gazette, just to name a few. At here in London, we have our biggest community paper London Free Press. As we all know, Google is your new homepage. You no longer get news updates from news paper anymore. Because you can access news everywhere, on your facebook, twitter, any where. My company is going through a huge âprint-to-digitalâ transformation. We are transitioning our readers from ânewspaperâ to digital platforms. And improving our readersâ experience is our mission. And this is where I come in.
- #6Â This happened to me at my first day at work. I asked âwhy?â and âwhere did the user say that they want this feature?â Then I spent more time to talk to my PM. He said because this is what his boss wanted. Itâs a revenue driver. In my first week, I was being pushed to develop a feature thatâs not being validated by any user research. Slowly I realized that because there are none user research being done properly at my company. User research is not something thatâs familiar to my stakeholders. So I knew, I need to get stakeholdersâ trust before I start building an user research practice.
- #7Â Today I will walk you through exactly the steps on How I identified who are the stakeholders? How I ran my first research project. And later on how I incorporate that findings to stakeholder interviews and learnt more about my stakeholders. Then how I synthesizing and socializing research findings with the rest of my teams. Essentially these are my stories of turnings around the table, growing from zero to one, how I made stakeholders the advocates for research at Postmedia.
- #8Â First, letâs talk about who are the stakeholders. A stakeholder in the UX world is a code name for the people that we work with. These are our clients, whether internal or external to our organization. These are the ones who need to believe in that UX research practice has value to the team, and that value can be carried on to our users. Stakeholders are the people we are trying to influence, because we all have a stake in product development. Just like how they have a stake in UX research.
- #9Â Here is an introduction to different types of stakeholders.
- #10Â Execs: CEO, VP who can allocate budgets to conduct UX research. Be a champion for UX research by promoting it company wide
- #11Â Managers: Directors of Product and Engineering, Team Leads. They donât get into the weeds of your daily activities, but they are involved in defining process and building teams. Very hands on in setting how a team works. So they define the process of where UX research fit in.
- #12Â Designers & Developers: Responsible for defining and building the product. Because of that, they are the consumers of research Your research has the most impact on their work. And they are the stakeholders that you work closely with. They need to be bought in, open to learning from customers. Because they are the people turning the research findings to building the right product.
- #13Â Marketing/Customer Success/Sales Teams Can be a channel to access your customers. They can even provide an extra layer of context for research. Marketing do very high level demographic research on who are the users, sales team engage with customers and listen to their complaints. Also could be major consumers of research, as it can be directly applied to their work Check-in. Are you still with me?
- #14Â Youâre probably overwhelmed by now: Too many stakeholders, and too little time. We are almost there. Iâm going to introduce you the most important stakeholder:
- #15Â PMs Also product owner, program manager, etc. They are the: Key Player. Responsible for the success of a feature from problem to solutions Hub in the wheel of the organization - productâs voice to other teams. Supposed to be the voice of the customers Accountable for the product metrics. They are very sensitive to the numbers like KPIs and ROIs. Therefore you need to align the language with what they speak.
- #16Â (to audience) How many people have trouble explaining what is research ROI to stakeholders? Put your hands up. Itâs really hard to nail down to the teeth of impact of user research. And these measurements are different from one company to another. What is research ROI? Often invisible at the beginning of the research project. Are these metrics hidden myth? which by the way is not true.
- #17Â Here is How to calculate the ROI of Research. Iâm quoting this from the founder of Foundation.pm- Rob Hayes once outlined as:
- #18Â How to calculate the ROI of Research: Unused Features + Rebuilt Features x Weeks Spent Building x Number of Developers/Designers/PMâs Involved x their Avg. Weekly Salary = $ Total Product Waste (5 Losing Money Emojis) The ROI of user research is to avoid building the unwanted or unused features. This helps our stakeholders realized that UX research is about knowing what users want and needs, and inspire the team to building it right.
- #19Â After a couple weeks of settling into my new role as information architect, I was eager to build the trust with my stakeholders. But then I realized, my team members are not familiar with user experience design, let along UX research. So one day I pulled my front-end developer aside, and I asked him straight up: âWhat do you think my job is? What do I do here every day?â And he thought that Iâm here to make sure all the acceptance criteria and user stories are well-written on the Jira ticket. Part of it is true. He is half right. That moment it became clear to me that I need to run my first research project and show it to my team.
- #20Â To show, rather than tell. Let the stakeholders experience the research from their own perspective. Here is how I started:
- #21Â I pick a problem place thatâs suited for using evaluative methods. Usability testing is key to getting buy-in The reason why I started with usability testing is because It is low budgets, no requirement of investing in the tools (yet). it generates straight forward outcome/ evidence to show. I wrote an one page research plan and shared it ahead of time to get feedback. Took in what PMs want to know and turn into research assumptions That you can manage your PMs expectations of your first usability testing. This will help you to make sure the research are reflecting tangible business goals. Make the research results available and visible for your team Heavy-weight storytelling is not for everyone. Share direct results in âsnack sizeâ format.The entire goal of usability testing is to come back with specific,actionable recommendations. Overall goal: Pick the key insights that will create the most impact for your product team. Here are some examples
- #22Â We want to know how do mobile users continue read from one news story to another. I didnât have any budget to begin with. So I used Google hangout combined with Youtube live. Itâs recording also live streaming so that my UX designer can observe what happens on users end. And users were saying âI could see missing the link if Iâm reading in weird light.â âYellow looks like spell check.â We quickly realized that the colour of hyperlink matters. So we did another round of testing. This time, we changed our design from yellow to blue.
- #23Â With proposed new style, we get some positive feedback. Users are saying that blue stand out and they are more used to it. I downloaded video recordings and cut to the highlight reel using iMovie to show my stakeholders. And my PMs are like: oh is that how people think? I never would have thought about it. We work on desktop everyday, itâs easy to think how mobile users. So I show them and they are very interested and wanted to know more. I gained credibility, and later on I suggested other, different methodologies for different projects.
- #24Â User Moments! I posted this on slack channel
- #25Â Moments later, two of my stakeholders commented on the project. On Slack, itâs where conversations happen. It provides the greatest exposure time for the team
- #26Â Now I made my first move. The feedbacks from usability study were great! But something important is still missing. Iâm still not solving the problem with âdoes user want this feature?â Usability studies are a great introduction to user research practice. They are often used when the product is at the end of the ideation phase. Therefore the insights at this level do not solve the problems. And I want to make sure that the stakeholders are looking to solve the right problem to begin with. And an important insight came into the light. With the blessing from my users, my stakeholders were inspired to learn more about how mobile users consume news. Redesigning the mobile experience is a massive project that will be touch by many hands. So I suggested that we start with knowing who we are working with.
- #27Â As a famous detective once said: do your research!
- #29Â Align the end goal Are all SH are on the same page regards to the outcome of this project? Is the current process efficient? Do they have the same expectation after the project is finished? Remove communication barriers To gain a better understanding of, âHow you do what you do?â Identify ways that can make building products better/easier Future proof your research Set up SH management Generate action items and prompt discussions
- #30Â How? 45 min to 1 hr in-person or remote interviews With transcript available for stakeholders to review Who? More than 5, ideally 8 - 12 Participants
- #32Â Objective of this question is to future proof your research. Most of the stakeholder donât know their users. They always want, or could know more of their users.
- #33Â Objective of this question is to align the goal/ outcome of the project. This is tangible and the most effective numbers, especially for PMs to look at.
- #34Â A question thatâs designed to lead more stakeholders show up to your presentation. (joking) Communication between teams are tricky. Now you have the chance to ask the questions that other stakeholders want to know. Remove communication barrier. Expect the unexpected. It gives you more insights on the whatâs not working on the processes.
- #35Â In order to really reap the benefits of stakeholder interviews, youâll need to document your interviews and socialize what youâve learned. This can happen a number of ways. Some researchers, for example, use what they learn during stakeholder interviews to hold a kickoff meeting around a more well-defined problem. Other researchers use what they learn to run workshops or to inform their existing research or product design.
- #36Â The goal is to avoid reports at all time. I tried and failed hard.
- #38Â Presentation Share your Research methods, Key learnings, common themes Action Items (Optional) Tangible takeaways
- #39Â 11 out of 15 Agree that if we improve mobile, we can reach more of our audience. âMobile is really important right now. Especially since it's overtaking desktop with the number of users using it.â
- #40Â Why itâs important to present the research findings. If you share the results, it will lead to: Improve communication between teams Make the process less reactive and more forward-thinking Treat user research as a practice, not as a project
- #41Â At Postmedia, I used a tangible takeaways. With the design aid from my partner Julie, we printed out the paper thatâs familiar to our stakeholders.
- #43Â Stakeholders Role, position, and name Needs: Functional goals and emotional goals Functional goals are tangible KPIs that the stakeholders need to keep track with. Emotional goals are their personal goals within the organization, may or may not be different from their functional goals. Position Level of experience Attitude towards Research Assets Level of influence: How does this stakeholder aid / influence others?" Resources available: What type of resource can this stakeholder provide with? Desired involvement: How much does this stakeholder want to be involved with UX research? Assumptions List out assumptions or hypothesis you have about your stakeholders These questions should form the basis
- #44Â How many people here have heard of or used Airtable before? On Airtable. This will be a living document, so make sure to update it continuously Most of this will live in your head Updating the sheet is more of a reminder to actually consider these points about your stakeholders
- #45Â Next time your PM comes to you and say: I want this feature by Friday. YOU WILL KNOW WHAT TO DO!
- #48Â Thank you, you guys has been an amazing audience. Thank you for your time here today. And thank you Ladies that UX. Just a year ago...