02 UXR Collaboration with Other Teams
Learning with Lee Anne
I graduated with an HCI degree and a minor in design in 2018. I (naively) believed that I was fully equipped to understand UX in business, outside of school, but it turns out — I wasn’t! (Surprise!) Luckily, we never stop learning due to our peers, mentors, and random articles on the internet like this one. Since this is a time where my vulnerabilities and struggles are leading me to better understand research, I thought I’d document my learning process of how UX Research works in my everyday world of business!
My mental model of research in college was that the work was done in silo. People come to us with a request, we go off and do the research, and then return to them with the insights and recommendations. Luckily, my original mental model was incorrect and research is actually extremely collaborative. I say luckily because if it were the former, the process would not be as effective in conveying the research findings. The following information is specifically about the collaboration between stakeholders and researchers for qualitative research projects.
Here were my questions about collaboration and what I’ve learned about it in UXR:
Who do we collaborate with and when?
Nearly the entire research project is best done in collaboration with the stakeholders. When designers, product owners, or anyone else who wants the research done gets a say in the questions and sees the interviews live, the overall research results are better understood and perceived.
What does collaboration look like during the study design phase?
For our research team, a research study typically begins with a research request form. The stakeholders fill it out and answer questions about the purpose of the research, their main research questions, hypothesis, timeline, etc. With this information, we as researchers are able to decide how to structure the study design in order to fit the needs of the research questions and timeline. This process in of itself is a collaboration because the stakeholders help the researchers understand the priority and timing of things, allowing the researchers to make the appropriate decisions for the study format.
Sometimes there are additional teams that researchers need to collaborate with in order to make certain types of research studies happen. For example, we had one research project that required creating an app we could send stimuli to that people could download on their phone for a diary study. This required the collaboration between a developer and the researchers in order to create this app and complete just one part of the project. Without the developer, this project would not have been feasible. Clearly, research cannot be done in silo!
What does collaboration look like during the question writing phase?
While researchers shape the questions in order to best frame it for participants, stakeholders also have a huge role in indicating what they want asked. In the research request form, they have their overarching research questions, but in addition to that, stakeholders often have more questions that the researcher may not have thought of simply because the stakeholder knows their project best and has additional knowledge about its details. For example, the overall research question may be to make sure a page on a website is easy to understand. Something that only the designer may know is that there are future plans to implement a new feature, so they may suggest adding a question that asks participants about their thoughts on this new feature. This is a question the researcher would not have come up with on their own.
At the same time, researchers also have a better understanding of what and how many questions should be asked in a scope of research. As a result, it’s their job to also keep the questions in line and ensure the additional questions the stakeholders have is appropriate for the research project.
Overall, it’s important for researchers and stakeholders to be on the same page about the interview guide in order to ensure that stakeholder questions are being addressed and to ensure that it’s still a cohesive and reasonable interview guide.
What does collaboration look like during the actual interviews?
The pilot (a very important part of interviews in general) is the best time to sort out all the kinks of an interview guide, timing, and technology. It’s best to have the stakeholders on the line during this pilot in order to allow them to see if the interview guide is working as anticipated. From this session, researchers and stakeholders can decide if there are areas they should be focusing on more or less. Interview guides are best tested with a real person since writing questions on paper doesn’t always indicate how an actual interview may go. Since the stakeholders and researchers collaborated on creating the interview guide, it only makes sense to test it together.
During the actual interview sessions, having stakeholders on the call is helpful for two reasons:
- They can ask the moderator to probe on certain topics during the interview.
- They hear the participant’s words and reactions live, which is much more impactful than seeing their words on a PowerPoint slide.
This is not the only way that stakeholders can collaborate during interviews. Before COVID-19 quarantine when we were able to conduct interviews in person, we had a great collawboration session with the industrial designers who were the stakeholders of the project. In an effort to explore people’s imaginations and bring them to life, part of our interview session included having one of the industrial designers come in and draw exactly what the participant was describing. This was not only a fun exercise for everyone, but it also helped the stakeholders really understand what people were looking for.
Research collaborations are not only essential, they can also be creative. Don’t be afraid to explore different ways to answer research questions, especially if it involves the stakeholders even more. The more involved they are in research projects, the better they understand the outcome of things. Experiencing the answers first hand is always more impactful than experiencing it through a PowerPoint slide.
