A long-term client asked me how he might more deeply engage his design and project management stakeholders in the research process in order to create strong partnerships between his research and design teams while educating non-researchers on the research process.
His primary challenges were a lean research team working with multiple design stakeholders at once and a disconnect between the design and research processes that caused strain and led to research projects that didn’t fully address the designer’s overall needs to build a great product. Together, we asked, “How might we build empathy between research and design teams while collecting insights from actual users of the product?”
In order to understand the major pain points in the partnership between research and design teams, I conducted a workshop with both teams to identify process gaps as well as lingering research questions left unaddressed by previous projects conducted between the two teams.
From this workshop, we identified a key opportunity for designers to understand more about their competitor’s products by conducting a multi-phased research project in order to develop empathy for their actual users and allow more visibility into the research considerations and process. In order to achieve these goals, I led the research and design teams in developing a research plan consisting of:
- internal competitive evaluation of their product and their top competitor’s product
- user interviews with participants who used both products
- a collaborative workshop to build research insights and design recommendations together
Competitive evaluation: In order to ensure the designers fully understood the pain points on their product and a key competitor’s product, I conducted an unmoderated usability study with the designers as participants. Through this phase, the designers learned how to develop their own hypotheses and build empathy for users by experiencing the frustrations and delights of both platforms.
User interviews: To further develop the designer’s empathy, this time for their internal research partners, I led them through a “researcher bootcamp” to develop a research plan, learn the basics of conducting participant interviews, and moderate their own sessions with actual users.
Analysis workshop: Once all of their data was collected, I led the final “researcher bootcamp” workshop with the designers, fostering collaboration across design teams to identify high-level pain points of their own platform, consider design and feature offerings which were valued on their competitor platform, and begin the process of identifying next steps for their design planning meetings.
Reflection survey: After engaging the design team throughout the research process, my client wanted to learn more about what the designers had learned in their own words. We asked for feedback on the exercise in the form of a survey to get insight into what they learned about research, their users, and how they wanted to take their learnings and apply them moving forward with their research partners.
“Something that I’ve thought about a lot, especially since I’ve been working on a research plan for another project, was just figuring out the right way to answer and articulate the questions you have, then designing a scenario where a participant can answer that question for you. It was interesting to have done this while working on that [other project], and it made me think a lot more about the questions I was trying to answer.” - Designer
While we learned a lot about some core usability issues in the product that the designers were eager to address, their main takeaway from the exercise was empathy, both for their users and for their research partners.
Many of the designers who participated in the exercise wanted to engage their research partners earlier on in their process to leverage their existing knowledge of insights from other research projects to build design best practices. They wanted to work together to prioritize their research needs rather than continue having siloed teams whose only points of connection were project initiation and stakeholder report readouts, and develop practices to embed researchers in their design process to ensure they got the most value out of research.
I thoroughly enjoyed running the “researcher bootcamp” with these design teams, and would happily repeat the activities again if the opportunity arose! If done again, I would help designers choose research needs relevant to themselves for the project in order to maximize the impact of the research insights and emphasize the importance of including research in the design process.