Thread by @RohanIrvine

Our next speaker is Lucy Denton, Design Lead at @hidovetail

— A Stakeholders Point of View on Engaging in Research

#dr2021

Dovetail is a startup building a tool for researchers and anyone conducting research in organisations.

Researchers struggle to engage stakeholders in the output of their work.

They're frusted when they present the findings and no-one is excited or takes action.

Priorities change and their research is no longer iportant or a priority.

The themes come up again and again but nothing seems to change.

Some researchers struggle to understand their impact

Lucy has been the stakeholder for research.

It had been hard for her to engage with the outputs and make meaningful decisions to them.

At Dovetail Lucy has started to experience the researchers experience with her own stakeholders.

When at Atlassian the research team was not embedded in her team, and was working across multiple teams and consolidating their needs into the study.

Lucy was unable to attend any of the sessions — she received the report, it was great, but she struggled to take the findings to improve her product.

The researcher wasn't part of the team — the researcher didn't have insight into the needs of the team and the gaps they had in the knowledge.

The research artefacts, removed from the context they were created, makes it difficult to make decisions about the data, which felt abstracted away from the research.

The report was overwhelming and hard to pull out insights. This lead to many workshops with the researcher to help explain the insights. It helped identify gaps in our knowledge, but it was a waste of time we didn't do it before the research.

Lucy is anti research report.

Often highlighting parts of a report and finding it difficult to pull out insights.

Lucy often asks researchers to pull out all the insights on a specific questions.

Researchers often group all of their stakeholders into one bucket.

It's important to understand perspectives & priorities of different stakeholder groups.

Lucy categories stakeholders in two buckets

Build partnerships with your decision makers and embed yourself in the team

Create an environment where you can have honest conversations with your stakeholders

Decision makers need to be involved in all parts of the research process.

How to include decision makers in your process.

Planning:

Work on the plan together

Recruitment

Execution

How you can engage with your stakeholders

Analysis

Reporting
Use the atomic research methodology to make granular insights.

Reporting cont.

Involving difficult stakeholders — the best way to win them over is to involve them in the process. Start with something small where it's easy to see the tangible outcome of research

Help close the loop.

Researchers should get involved in the design process.

Educate stakeholders

It's not always feasible for researcher to run all the research tasks in an organisation.

Researchers should focus on more strategic initiatives instead of usability testing and concept testing.

Researchers shouldn't be gatekeepers to speaking with customers

How researchers can better engage stakeholders in research

Thanks @lucinda_denton!

#dr2021

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