5 things I learned that made me a better user researcher
If in March 2020 you told me that in two years I will be designing and running complex, multi-stream research programmes to support key product initiatives at my org, I’m not sure I would have believed it. Yet here I am, two years into my current user research role, and the first thing on my to-do list for today is to plan out an entirely new way of engaging our customers in user research. Incredible!
The last two years have been the most intense and exhilarating in terms of professional and personal growth I’ve ever had. I did a lot of things that scared me. And I learned a great deal about leading research projects in a product org that is growing and changing at a breakneck speed.
To mark my two years, here are 5 things I learned since joining Onfido that made me a better user researcher:
1. Prioritise based on risk
There are too few user researchers in any single company to answer all the burning questions. And if you ask enough people about what they need support with, you will soon learn that, actually, all the questions are burning. All the questions had to be answered yesterday, or better yet five sprints ago.
One way I’ve learned to prioritise research work is by engaging with the concept of risk.
This starts by stepping back and reframing those burning research questions as assumptions. Instead of going into a study with high-level research questions, challenge yourself and your team to articulate spoken and unspoken beliefs about user behaviour and product performance that you hold. Think “We expect people to do X when Y happens”, rather than “How will people behave when trying to do Z using our product?”
As a bonus, articulating assumptions upfront helps you be more vigilant about checking your findings for confirmation bias down the line.
Once you have your assumptions, consider the following questions for each of them:
- What existing data or evidence do we have to support or refute this assumption?
- How certain are we that this assumption is correct?
- How much of a risk it is to the product / the company / our customers if we are wrong?
Laura Klein details an excellent workshop for working through this type of prioritisation approach in her book Build Better Products but you don’t always need to workshop it out. Sometimes you just need to put a few minutes aside, take a step back from all the burning questions and think calmly about which of the fires actually need to be put out before their burn your whole product to the ground.
2. Invite everyone
If you got into user research, chances are you didn’t come to work in your product org because you wanted to embody the archetype of the solitary deep thinker in a tall ivory tower.
User research is better when it’s collaborative. It is also more impactful when it’s collaborative.
But it won’t be collaborative unless you, the researcher, make it so.
When I start a new project, I make a conscious effort to open up my work to anyone and everyone who wants in. Depending on the project, this can look like:
- Getting cross-functional input on research plans and discussion guides;
- Announcing upcoming user research sessions across multiple slack channels;
- Setting up systems for observer sign up if observer spaces are limited, or simply opening calendar invites to everyone who wants to join if they’re not;
- Leveraging invisible observer functionality to enable everyone who wants to observe to do so and encouraging them to ask follow-up questions during the interviews;
- Sharing high-level takeaways in the team Slack channel after each session, alongside a link to watch the session recording;
- Inviting observers to add to my own takeaways in Slack threads or live debriefs to generate a discussion and hear multiple perspectives;
- Sharing insight summaries with all relevant teams, not just the immediate project team;
- Carefully crafting the comms around the insights in such a way that they were memorable, actionable and easy to digest.
3. Be annoying
As researchers, we ask questions for a living. Sometimes that means that we’re the annoying person with all the questions — and that’s ok.
Be the annoying person who asks all the whys.
Be the annoying person who pushes for something to be done in a certain way because you know it will lead to better data, better insights, better research participant experience.
Be the annoying person with the follow-up question when the conversation seems to be coming to an end.
And, perhaps most importantly, be the annoying person who asks for an explanation of something others consider as obvious or basic, even if it feels stupid to ask.
Because no one else will.
Because bad product decisions are all too often made based on unspoken, unchallenged and unproven “shared understanding”.
And because there are truly no stupid questions.
4. Get to know your business
Product decisions are business decisions. And as much as we as user researchers may want product decisions to be made solely based on our deep knowledge of our users as people, this is not realistic.
People who make decisions in our organisations juggle UX priorities alongside product performance, team capacity and business targets. So to be an effective advocate in this context, you need to understand how UX insights you’re producing and design decisions you’re arguing for square with all these other priorities.
I was reminded of this yet again a couple of months with the collapse of my go-to food delivery service just a week before the holiday season. You can have the best UX, run the most incredible product with a great mission, meet real human needs… but if your bottom line is in shambles, you’re in trouble.
5. Trust your gut
Thinking back to March 2020, and even March 2021, I acutely remember the feeling of muddling through and the overwhelm I felt at having to grapple with uncertainty and complexity of the new products we were building and trying to balance delivering timely, impactful insights with setting up research processes across several new teams.
To a large extent, that’s where I find myself today as well, although with more knowledge and experience to draw on as I take on new challenges.
Looking over the last 24 months, I can pinpoint a number of decisions I made that would have benefitted from me simply trusting my gut.
It’s can be a very uncomfortable thing to do, trusting your gut. But research is both a skill and an art, and sometimes our gut knows best — be it which repository tool to procure, which method to use, which question to ask or when to hold the pause for a few seconds longer and just listen to the human on the other end of the line.
