Engaging people in user research fosters empathy and drives innovation by deepening understanding of customer needs. The One Tesco initiative emphasizes the importance of team collaboration in user research, utilizing storytelling and visual aids to present insights effectively. By involving all team members in research activities and encouraging field exposure, the program aims to design services that better serve customers, particularly those with unmet needs.

1. Why is it important
to engage people
in user research?

2. Why is it important to engage
people in user research?
. Remarkable things can happen when empathy for others
plays a key role in problem-solving.
. When companies allow a deep emotional understanding
of people’s needs to inspire them they unlock the creative
capacity for innovation.
. However, how you gather and present that insight is
critical to how it is used.

3. “
I was
inspired by a
100 page
report.
”
Said no one ever.

4. On the other hand, if the
insight only lives in the
heads of the researcher,
then research becomes
little more than a self-
serving activity.
Insight
inside

5. At One Tesco we are guided by the principle that we are not just
here to
, we are here to design better services for the real humans that
use them.
“do some research”

6. In order to do that it is critical that
your entire team engages with user
research.
So how to do you move research from something the
researcher does, to being an activity the whole team owns:
1. Tell stories, be visual
2. Research as a team sport
3. Collaborate for the best results

7. UI/UX Leads
Communication
manager
UI/UX designers
Head of DesignStrategic Principal Programme
manager
Content strategist Service Design
manager
Analytics manager
Digital Design Language team
Developers Senior Service
Designer
Justin says:
“Tesco is good in urgent,
not so good in important.”
Service Design team
James says:
“It should always
feel that we are
fighting the system.
This shows that we
are doing things
differently.”
What is One Tesco?
A service-design led transformation programme aimed at
placing which places the customer at the heart of the design
process. Think of us a well working kitchen. Cooking the good
stuff.

8. What is One Tesco?
We are working to improve the shopping experience and retail
environment for our customers; by understanding their needs
and designing services around those needs rather than the
make-up of our business.
Right now we are in discovery - conducting deep ethnography
amongst our elderly shoppers to uncover unmet customer
needs.
And we hope to be testing service prototypes in-stores using
live lab techniques before Christmas.
Here’s what we’ve learnt so far about engaging people with
research:

9. Dada
mountain
1. Tell stories, be visual
During ethnographic research you very quickly end up
gathering vast mountains of data. The trick is what to do with
this.
A key principle for One Tesco is that the single most important
job you have as researcher is not doing the research, it’s getting
that research into the heads of your team.
So if you find yourself feeling swamped by assets and feel like
it’s sucking up all your time, just remind yourself that this is a
worthwhile investment.

10. Objectives
Statistics
Calendar
People we
met
People
Spider
web
Themes
Quotes
Concepts
Research wall

11. Research objectives
Research dashboard
Discovery
This week
Next week
Monday
Monday
Tuesday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Thursday
Friday
Friday
Customers
spoken with
Staff spoken
with
Days since
last visit
Number of team
members
People spider web
Name
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-6
-7
-8
-9
-10
What we’ve learned so far
Main insight
or theme
Supporting
customer quote
Supporting
observations
Shopper type
What to design
for them?
Main retailer
People we met
Name and age
Shopping
time
Shopping
time
Shopping
time
Tech
skill
Tech
skill
Tech
skill
Name and age Name and age
Research profile
(filled out)
Photos Photos Photos
Research profile
(filled out)
Research profile
(filled out)
Things we learned about each person
In-store
shops
Online
shops
Total
shops
Average shopping
time
Where we did our research
Inspired by the GDS article on research walls as vertical
campfires – places where teams can gather round, connect and
share insight – we decided to create a research wall.
Our research wall templates enabled us to update with A4 print
outs and post its – so we could use the same templates but
constantly cycle different assets.

12. Avoid the big reveal, update reguarely
In addition to this we also do regular research playbacks with
the team – telling the stories of the individuals we met.
Get a regular rhythm for these going. Invite people from other
bits of the business.
Try and avoid getting so sucked into research that you have no
time to present back.
A three hour presentation at the end of a two month research
sprint doesn’t help anybody.
Giving time for the ideas to percolate in the team means when
you enter the ideation phase everyone will be already primed
with ideas.

13. Visualizing things early helps
you to see patterns as they
emerge
We created a spider web to rank
our customers on important
factors such as health and
mobility and familiarity with
technology.
Quite quickly it helped us see who
our extreme customers were and
these were the people from which
we had the most interesting
findings.
It helped us to re-think our
recruitment plan for the next
phase of research.

14. The challenges:
• It takes [A LOT OF] time to create, upload and present assets
in this format.

15. What worked for us:
• Have a great system in place for uploading assets after each
interview, make sure everyone on your research team knows
and follow this, be prepared to adjust as you go.
• An organized system means that creating presentations
should be quick and easy – everything is labeled in the right
way and easily retrievable when you need it.
• Factor in sufficient time for the uploading of assets
• If you find that you are struggling then be prepared to adjust
the plan – remember sharing insights and making them easy for
your team to absorb is the single most important thing for you
to do

16. 2. Research as a team sport
But more importantly than just presenting back the ideas is
actually taking your team to the coal face.
To discover real but unexpressed and unmet customer needs.
You need to go where the people are
To embrace their world you have to be in their world
This is essential part of building empathy and there is no
substitute for it.
There is plenty of evidence that increasing “exposure hours” of
your team results in the design of better products.
However in order to make this work you need to invest in your
team.

17. What worked for us:
We ran training sessions with our team before we took them
out into the field – to reinforce how important it is to embrace
the world view of the customer, and how to ask open ended
questions.
We also provided them with field guides covering practicalities
like where to meet up, what to do with assets after the sessions.
We plan on using stickers to reward team members who had
been out on sessions.
We also used the research wall as a vehicle to show the rest of
the business how we were doing things differently.

18. The challenges
Motivating your team – everyone has a day job – it helps to
have a metric and for this to be enforced by the senior members
of your team.
For example – it should never be longer than two weeks since a
member of the team has been in-front of a customer – or 100%
of your team has spoken to customers this sprint.
Don’t assume that a stakeholder knows how to behave on
research

19. What worked:
• It was helpful to us to explain that interviews unfold like the
chapters of a book and interrupting an interview can disrupt the
interviewers flow
• We gave plenty of space to ask questions, and carefully signal
these
• Give clear advice on swapping numbers before the session
and arrange a place to meet up before the session for a pre-
brief
• Use the pre-brief to go over the participant profile,
paperwork, re-affirm the rules of the interview

20. How many times have you had to deal with a senior stakeholder
saying “but you’ve only spoken to seven users, how can you
make assumptions about the needs of all our customers?”
And sure, you can have that debate about the merits of small
data versus big data, how it helps us explain the why behind the
what.
But what about also facing into it.
In our experience the best results come when you collaborate
more widely within the research community.
3. Collaborate for the best results

21. Work with the big data
We have a dedicated data analyst to help us.
As we see themes emerging, he is then able to see how
representative our findings are.
He is also able to see what the cost implications are and what
the size of the opportunity are if we fix it.
This is invaluable when having conversations with senior
stakeholders who are – lets face it – interested in the bottom
line and trying to figure out where best to spend money in
order to get the biggest results.