research as a team sport
TRANSCRIPT
Why is it importantto engage peoplein user research?
Why is it important to engage people in user research?
. Remarkable things can happen when empathy for othersplays a key role in problem-solving.
. When companies allow a deep emotional understandingof people’s needs to inspire them they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.
. However, how you gather and present that insight iscritical to how it is used.
“I was
inspired by a100 page
report.”
Said no one ever.
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.
Insightinside
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”
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
UI/UX Leads
Communication manager
UI/UX designers
Head of DesignStrategic Principal Programmemanager
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.
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:
Dadamountain
1. Tell stories, be visualDuring 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.
ObjectivesStatisticsCalendar
People we met
People Spider web
ThemesQuotesConcepts
Research wall
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 insightor theme
Supporting customer quote
Supporting observations
Shopper type
What to design for them?
Main retailer
People we met
Name and age
Shoppingtime
Shoppingtime
Shoppingtime
Techskill
Techskill
Techskill
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-storeshops
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.
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.
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.
The challenges:
• It takes [A LOT OF] time to create, upload and present assets in this format.
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
2. Research as a team sportBut 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 worldThis 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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
