Thread by @RohanIrvine

We are into the last 2 presentations of the conference!

First up we have @redrollers & Lee Ryan

Research Epic; How we Designed Immersive, Honest and Ongoing Conversations Remotely

#DR2020

They start by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay their respect to elders past, present and emerging.

On the project that we'll hear today Natalie says she was kept up at night worrying about the recruitment process.

They were worried if people wanted to continue participating in a diary study style study in a B2B business.

They needed to include stakeholders from all of the business on locations all over the world.

They had 55 participants across the globe with over 160 conversations over 30 minutes over Zoom.

For some people who stayed engaged they had 8+ conversations over 6 months.

(This project was about onboarding to Trello)

How do we get as close to start as possible?

We deployed an intercept before someone had begun signing up for a trial.

Some wanted to sign up straight away and some wanted to sign up for the research in the future.

They were upfront about what they were asking, and whether they were available to be interviewed 'right now'

We had to be like water, ready to hand people to researchers who were online and ready to go.

Being ready as a researcher is also about how do we immerse ourselves in a domain and how to set become sensitive to the most valuable questions.

As luck would have it this project was ramping up around when EPIC conference was in town and Lee was able to ask these ethnographers how to help.

Lucy Suchman made a comment about workplace practice, about how assumptions are made about how tasks are performed.

Part of the challenge was creating a rhythm that works for the organisation and the participant.

So what did their research process look like in reality.

(Just to update this is about JIRA)

When people said 'usually I would Google this' the research team said 'great, let's do it together' to see how their customers learned.

I meant participants were being cute vulnerable.

How can we design a process that will orient ourselves and the stakeholders to do the right thing while keeping participants info private.

The wrote up some establishing Principles.

Writing this up flowed through to the conversation guides, and when we were asked 'can we go back and speak to that person's we could say 'no that goes against our principles'

People who wanted to view recordings had to sign observer participation forms before they could view.

They also setup a form to capture observer feedback while they were watching

What was the toolkit used to manage this type of project?

It's a great practice to review other researchers interviewing style to see how they create spaces.

Calendly made it easy to recruit across timezone.

Drive made it easy to create documentation about how to use the tools.

How do we make sure we are in control of the data?

Who has access and for how long? Dropbox allows this.

Zoom is familiar, accessible on all platforms, intimate and allowed the participant to share their video if they wanted to.

This project was participant lead.

Some had setup everything by day 3, some didn't start until they had seen all the videos.

After initially being worried that people would drop out they found people really wanted to continually share, because it was therapeutic!

There's a moment in time in a diary study where you have to say goodbye. We're still wondering how some our participants are doing.

With our collaborators we held sharing stories sessions where we connected with the customer and teams from disparate locations sharing what they were working on and how it connected to customers.

They had a lot of data, a lot of conversations we had with people in different countries. 100's of hours.

We embraces dovetail as a data repository

We would write in significant detail into dovetail that also included collaborator comments.

It became an ongoing data repository.

Have categories, time codes we were able to quickly pull up quotes when people were interested in a topic.

When doing b2b work you need to take care of your customer, their organisations and their team.

Protecting their privacy is important for you to get honest feedback.

Ensure the stories are told by the users.

If there's one tool that can be weaponised it's video. Make sure they're more than soundbites.

Lessons learned from the study

Thanks so much Lee and @redrollers!!!

@threadreaderapp unroll please!

Adding @Kumeugirl Lee to the thread!

Lee I'll add your handles to the write up :)