Thread by @RohanIrvine

Next speaker is @nicolarushton with lessons on how to bring the whole team into user research.

#dr19

Nicola begins by asking the audience have they experienced any of the following?

Nicola proposes that collaborative research can help the mitigate a lot of the issues we face as researchers.

It's not a silver bullet. But it can help.

Nicola's 4 step process for uber collaborative research.

They're simple because if we ask people to collaborate on research we must have

A low barrier to entry
Low time commitment
Max impact on team members

You want to enable the user centredness of the people around us.

We can't be there at every decision moment, so we need to empower our team members to make great decisions

Step 1: Learning Goals

Really clear specific questions that the group can go back to at the end of research and ask : did we learn this?

Take your riskiest assumptions (about the user/product/service) and translate them into learning goals for you team.

How to workshop your learning goals. With an example.

Think about the last project you were on, what were the assumptions that drove that project? Write down two.

The next part of the workshop is creating this 2x2 matrix.

Put your assumptions on this matrix.

Where do they sit?

Take the one that is furthest to the top right on your matrix.

Rephrase it as a question.

What you have now is 1 high priority research learning goal.

When you do this in a workshop and a lot of goals.

You now have a focus high priority list of learning goals ordered by top priority to your team

It gives you

Focus
Buy-in
Prioritised list
Cliffhanger: what are we going to find out?

Step 2: Having team members be note takers in user interviews

Framing: Say it's required, call them a scribe
Give a little education on what good notes look like
Only have 1 person from the team take the notes

Tips on note taking

Every person in the synthesis workshop will have participated in the research.

It's effective because:

If your stakeholder is a senior and it's not appropriate to ask them to take notes, make them you're co-moderator, but establish you'll be driving the interview and you'll throw over to them at the end of the session.

It's important in that case to have them in multiple sessions so they don't fall in love with the first problem they hear.

"It's really common for people with power to want to solve problems, we'll wait until we've heard it a couple times before we action it"

Step 3: Synthesising insights as a team

I'm not going to tell you how to do it because we all have our own styles and context. I recommend going gut first!

During the synthesis phase the researcher is the facilitator.

"But what happens if the ycome up with bad insights?"

Have some set guideline for what 'validated' means, like you must have evidence from a minimum of 3 participants

At the end of the workshop Nicola will go over every single insight and have a conversation about are they valid? Do we have enough evidence that this makes sense?

To close out the workshop, revisit your learning goals.

Do we understand this?
Do we have more to learn?
Is it still a priority?

It demonstrates how powerful and important research is.

Create action items from the insights.

Conversation actions
Tickets to be written
Engineering spikes
Usability changes

If you can manage to get startup manager types in the room it can really change their mindset about how important research is.

Step 4: Do reseach regularly

You need to consistently bring your team into this cadence. It's not just a one off.

Having a regular cadence of research creates the freedom for them to make mistakes, iterate and become comfortable with being creative with your research.

A common question Nicola hears from researchers is "what about losing accuracy in Research?"

We are still the facilitators who can guide the sessions.

Which would you prefer?

Which results in a better product shipping?

Most of us are in product teams, and if we can facilitate and enable our teams learning we're doing our job.

Researching organically changes the culture and dynamics in a team.

One exams Nicola experienced was engineers changing a software framework conversation to include "People will be using this product in their cars so we need X,Y,Z as well"

Nicolas has seen overall workplace satisfaction and team cohesion increase through this practice.

It can create meaningful work.

Maybe these techniques work in your team, maybe they don't, but having an inclusive collaborative attitude is a unique skill researchers bring to teams.

@threadreaderapp unroll please!